Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Turin Horse
2011 · Béla Tarr · The Turin Horse on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the opening shot follow the horse without a single cut. (camera)
The camera circles and tracks alongside the cart through the wind in one unbroken take that sets the film's entire pace before a word is spoken.
Payoff: That one shot tells you how much patience this film is going to ask of you.
Listen to how loud and constant the wind stays. (sound)
Tarr records the wind directly and lets it howl through the entire mix rather than smoothing it into ordinary background atmosphere.
Payoff: The wind stops being weather in the story and becomes pressure you feel while watching.
Watch the father eat his potato with his one hand. (staging)
The same meal, the same dressing routine, the same walk to the well recur each day, shot the same way but never quite identically.
Payoff: Small variations in an exact repetition are how you feel time actually passing here.
Notice the range of grays inside the small farmhouse. (light)
Kelemen works within a tiny, natural lit space and pulls an enormous range of gray and deep black out of it.
Payoff: The image itself carries as much weight as anything the characters say or do.
Notice the film never places this farmhouse on a map. (setting)
There is no establishing shot, no nearby town, no context, just one bare hill, a dead tree, and a single road.
Payoff: The setting could be almost anywhere, which is exactly the point. In the reading: any-space-whatever (espace quelconque). The reading calls a place like this an any-space-whatever, space drained of coordinates until it stops functioning as a story's setting.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the same chores repeat. Each repetition is slightly less than the one before it.