Not yet thirty, the Hungarian director Béla Tarr was already making a name for himself both at home and abroad. During the late 1970s and early 1980s his early features earned prizes at film festivals west of the Iron Curtain; in Hungary, however, he remained a marginal figure as the regime did not take kindly to his films’ openly dissenting spirit. This rendered it increasingly difficult for him to make films in his native country and following the independently funded Damnation, he moved to West Berlin, only returning after the dissolution of the Eastern bloc. Upon his return, Tarr got to work on a project that had been gestating for a decade: the 432-minute Satantango, which was released in 1994 and became a cult sensation among cinephiles. The resulting recognition, together with the enthusiastic endorsement of his work by prominent peers such as Susan Sontag and Gus van Sant, turned the forever uncompromising,...
- 3/10/2016
- by Michael Guarneri
- MUBI
"Béla Tarr is the cinema's greatest crafter of total environments and in The Turin Horse, working in his most restricted physical setting since 1984's Almanac of Fall, he dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus," begins Andrew Schenker in Slant. "Excluding one of the director's now-famous virtuoso, film-opening tracking shots, the film is entirely confined to the dilapidated rural spread where a farmer lives with his daughter and the horse he depends on for his livelihood, but in Tarr's hands, the unpromising setting teems with textures and, if not exactly vitality, then an almost tangible sense of presence…. In this most Beckettian of films, the characters endlessly enact the same quotidian tasks over the course of six days, unable to leave their property both because of a windstorm that rages the entire time and because of the horse's stubborn Bartleby-like refusal to not only pull the man's wagon,...
- 10/9/2011
- MUBI
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