The Long Take as Argument: Editing in Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011)

“Don’t be too sophisticated. Just listen to your heart and trust your eyes.”

I guess you could say I trusted my eyes when I rolled them after reading that comment from Bela Tarr. That was his answer when asked about the allusion to Nietzsche in his film The Turin Horse (TTH) (2011).

I mean, seriously? Don’t be too sophisticated about your 2.5-hour, black-and-white avant-garde film that opens with an explicit allusion to Nietzsche? No, we don’t want to risk overthinking that one.

But, as I thought about it further, I wondered if there might be something to Tarr’s idea of letting the film speak on its own terms. I began to wonder: what would it mean to approach the film in the way he describes? What could such an approach tell us about TTH, film, or the cosmic collapse we apparently are all facing?

The Turin Horse

What is TTH about? As with any rich parable, the film requires either no explanation or extensive explanation.

It opens with an allusion to the (likely apocryphal) account of Nietzsche breaking down and weeping when he saw a recalcitrant horse being beaten. As the story goes, this event heralded the start of the nervous breakdown that led Nietzsche to convalesce in his mother’s home for the last ten years of his life.

So, if we take the story at face value, we know what happened to Nietzsche, but we don’t know what happened to the horse. The film explores that premise.

We follow the horse to the home of an older man and his adult daughter. The film then tracks the Beckettian father-daughter duo through six days of endless routine, repetition, and silence in their one-room cabin. A storm rages outside. A visitor shows up looking for booze. The two occasionally attempt to leave, only to have their attempts thwarted by the disobedient horse or the brute fact that there is simply nowhere to go.

As the film progresses, things gradually decline: the horse refuses to leave and eventually stops eating, the well goes dry, and the electricity fades (which geographer Franklin Ginn interestingly interprets as a comment on the Anthropocene). As the storm continues to rage, the two characters progressively decline until the daughter ceases eating in a way that parallels that of the horse. As the film closes, the end is clearly near.

What is it all About?

Commentators have seemed a little unsure about what to make of TTH. Some focus on the theme of mortality (though Tarr has said that wasn’t his intention, which may or may not mean anything), others on ecological collapse, and some even on extracting a gritty, Zizekian optimism from the film’s bleak vision.

It’s an elusive film, and I’m inclined to think each of the commentators is picking up on something. Tarr has given us quite a bit of help in thinking through what to make of the film. In one interview, he said:

The Turin Horse is about the heaviness of human existence. How it’s difficult to live your daily life, and the monotony of life. We didn’t want to talk about mortality or any such general thing. We just wanted to see how difficult and terrible it is when every day you have to go to the well and bring the water, in summer, in winter… All the time.

In another, later interview, he said of his work more generally:

At the beginning of my career, I had a lot of social anger. I just wanted to tell you how fucked up the society is. This was the beginning. Afterwards, I began to understand that the problems were not only social; they are deeper. I thought they were only ontological. It’s so, so complicated, and when I understood more and more… I could understand that the problems were not only ontological. They were cosmic. The whole fucked up world is over.

So, it looks like Tarr’s work is setting out a few layers of collapse: social, ontological, and cosmic (I’m admittedly not 100% clear on the distinction between the last two, but in the spirit of Tarr’s remarks, let’s not dwell on that). I guess the tedium and heaviness of human existence would fall in the “ontological” category (for Tarr) while the forces personified in TTH’s storm would operate at the “cosmic” level he specifies.

It’s interesting to note that some of these considerations (e.g., getting the water from the well) would seem to speak to ineluctable, universal features of human experience, while others would seem to be more historically or socially contingent — even if that contingency is raining down upon us from some cosmic height.

Needless to say, the explanation we have here is a little fuzzy, but I’m inclined to think that fuzziness nicely operates on two levels. The first is that the layered series of failures Tarr sets out reflects the way that humans are facing a confluence of factors contributing to a broad form of collapse that isn’t amenable to simple explanation. I suppose it’s not a simple matter when the “whole fucked up world is over.”

The second reason this fuzziness is valuable is that it speaks to a certain lived experience. Part of what I take Tarr to be saying is that regardless of the details of these successive layers of failure and the complexities of how they interact, one simply has the sense that things aren’t right. We lived in the midst of an intuitive, lived feeling of collapse (or as Leonard Cohen said, “Everybody knows the boat is leaking; everybody knows the captain lied. Everybody’s got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died”).

I suspect this second consideration is at least part of why Tarr discourages the viewer from overinterpreting the Nietzsche reference: the film communicates a type of nebulous existential anxiety and discomfort because at least some dimension of human experience entails nebulous existential anxiety and discomfort. There’s no sense in being overly literal in trying to sort out the terms of the experience or put it on a Nietzschean register, or a Marxist register of social critique, or whatever else.

Why bother with the irritating literalism of soporific footnotes to Beyond Good and Evil, when everybody has no choice but to breathe the air of knowing that the world is fucked up and, besides, over anyway. At least that’s what I hear Tarr saying.

What Does it Mean to Treat a Film as a Theoretical Text?

Moving forward, one way to look at Tarr’s remarks would be to see them as a way to preserve the integrity of the film as a theoretical text.

What do I mean by that? There’s been a debate going back to at least Eisenstein’s claim that he could produce a film version of Marx’s Capital as to whether film is capable of making a conceptual argument. Indeed, Deleuze commentedthat it was possibly only with Godard that film became properly philosophical, suggesting that:

Godard transforms cinema by introducing thought into it. He doesn’t have thoughts on cinema, he doesn’t put more or less valid thought into cinema; he starts cinema thinking, and for the first time, if I’m not mistaken. Theoretically, Godard would be capable of filming Kant’s Critique or Spinoza’s Ethics, and it wouldn’t be abstract cinema or a cinematographic application (141).

Interesting idea, right? Of course, not everyone has had so sanguine a view of film’s conceptual potential (e.g., Kracauer, Mitry), but I’m inclined to think that (however indirectly) a film, like any artwork, is perfectly capable of putting forward a theoretically interesting perspective, but I’d rather not have a horse in the arid race of that debate.

Regardless of the medium’s potential, I understand the filmmaker’s desire to have their work taken seriously as its own theoretical text. What would that mean? Well, on a basic level, it would treat the film as a primary source that advances its own claims. This approach would run counter to one that treats film merely as a vehicle for communicating raw material that can then be theorized (such as a thought experiment), a dramatization of theoretical perspectives, or — God forbid — a bland pedagogical accounting of “what the philosophers thought” (though we all love a good documentary).

Instead, an approach that treats a film as a primary source would see it as utilizing film’s unique blend of sound, image, and text as a way of putting forward at least an interesting perspective if not what our more literal friends might accept as an argument.

To return now to TTH, what I’m trying to suggest is that it’s possible that in his dismissal of “sophistication,” what Tarr might have been getting at was his resistance to turning TTH into just another commentary on (or — worse — a dramatization of) the Nietzschean perspective. Rather, he requests that the film be taken seriously as its own theoretical intervention.

The Long Take

It’s worth pausing to look a little more closely at the mechanics of how this might be achieved. How might The Turin Horse make use of film’s unique traits to insert thought into cinema (to borrow Deleuze’s phrase from above)?

As with anything in film, the editing process would be foundational here. Editing is how the film artist organizes the cinematic experience. Without editing, one would simply have a videoed account of what happened to end up in front of the camera (which arguably would still represent a form of editing insofar as the scope of the frame would dictate the scope of the viewer’s experience).

Given its obviousness, part of me is almost embarrassed to focus on TTH’s editing technique: the entirety of the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime only includes 30 cuts (the average number of cuts in a typical ninety-minute Hollywood film is over 1100).

So, our reflections have brought us to Tarr’s famous long take. The long take is great for letting us watch things unfold, but in this case, we have the long take with nothing unfolding. The camera in TTH dwells at length on the characters as they stare longingly out the window and watch the storm outside. It focuses for long periods on the horse’s sad face (apparently Tarr went to great lengths to choose a suitably sad-looking horse). We get several extended shots of the characters lying silently in bed.

There are a few ways to come at this. Perhaps one of the more obvious approaches would be to see the long takes as simulating the experience of the characters — which, in turn, would of course underscore Tarr’s point about the tedium of human existence. Fair enough.

However, what interested me about the long take was how it both brought me deeper into the film and took me out of it. For me, the long take didn’t just generate a feeling of boredom and frustration: it edged me out of the film’s world and led me to reflect on myself. In this way, it left me to feel a disturbingly empty form of human experience by slowly withdrawing any source of distraction.

In this regard, the long take didn’t just generate boredom in a way that mirrored that which the characters were obviously experiencing — rather, the film itself was a type of machine for engineering a rendering of human experience evacuated of content other than desire for something more.

One way to think about this filmic mechanism is as a vehicle for setting forward a type of argument for Tarr’s rendering of cosmic collapse. The film engineers an experience where I am torn out of the film and thrown back on myself in a way that argues for the type of tedium and collapse that Tarr’s film sets forward.

Depending on your approach, the long take then becomes an argument for either the existence of the type of cosmic collapse that Tarr gestures toward or for the lived sense of human experience as characterized by that sense of collapse (or both).

Conclusion

There’s a certain irony to the path we’ve taken: we’ve ended up overthinking Tarr’s request that we not overthink his film.

But it seems to have been a productive trip following out the complexity so often housed in simplicity as we made sense of TTH, film’s potential for theorizing, the tedium of human existence, and the possibility of cosmic collapse.

But, then again, we don’t want to risk being too sophisticated about it.