“This is definitely a closing movie because I collected everything”: Béla Tarr on his final film, The Turin Horse

Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse played in competition in Berlin last year – to great anticipation, given that the Hungarian auteur had announced that it would be his last film. He had also suggested that when viewers saw it, they would understand why. Indeed, the film does present itself quite assertively as a ‘final statement’ – but you’ll have to see it to understand why.

Put simply, The Turin Horse – which Tarr says is “mostly about death and human beings and daily life” – is a typically austere, highly ritualised story about a carter (János Derzsi), his daughter (Erika Bók) and their horse, which suddenly refuses to cooperate with them. One’s immediate response is to invoke Beckett, but you could also see the film as an equine rewrite of Herman Melville’s story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, whose central character responds to all requests with the words, “I would prefer not to.”

The film – Tarr’s latest collaboration with his wife, editor and co-director Agnes Hranitzky, and his co-writer, the novelist László Krasznahorkai – is prefaced by an anecdote about the horse whose whipping on a street in Turin in 1889 reputedly triggered the mental breakdown and subsequent silence of the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Tarr may have announced his own silence as a director, but we can expect to hear a lot more of him. He intends to be active as a producer, with features in the pipeline by Hungarian directors Agnes Kocsis, János Szász and Péter Gothár. He is also setting up a new film school in Split in Croatia and – as recently elected chair of the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association – was involved in the Hungarian Film Week held in February this year.

Tarr is an outspoken opponent of the Hungarian government’s new film funding system, which he regards as part of its “political war against intellectuals”. In February, Tarr described his response: “We have two ways. One way is sitting at home, crying and screaming… Or we can try to do something. My mentality is always to try to do something. If I do not accept the world, I have to change the world.” Quite apart from anything else, this belies suspicions that The Turin Horse – bleak as it may be – in any way proposes a defeatist worldview.

The following interview took place in Berlin in 2011, just before The Turin Horse won the Jury Grand Prix. 

Jonathan Romney: Was the Nietzsche story the origin of The Turin Horse? 

Béla Tarr: I’ll tell you the truth. In 1985, László [Krasznahorkai] gave a reading in a theatre in Hungary. At the end he read the text which is now the prologue of this movie, and the last question of course is, “What happened to the horse?” We were sitting and thinking how we could do something with this question – because everyone knows the Nietzsche story, and everyone’s listening to it for Nietzsche, but nobody listens for the horse. I was always curious: what could happen to the horse? 

We assume that the carter’s horse in the film is the same horse that Nietzsche met – but it struck me that perhaps it isn’t. Is the Nietzsche story just a parable to begin the film? 

No, it’s not a parable. This is a horse who has history, who has background, who is definitely somebody. In Hungarian if you say torinói with a small ‘t’, it just means ‘from somewhere’ [‘from Turin’]. But if you write it with a big ‘T’, it looks like a name [‘The Turin Horse’]. She has a name. ‘She’ – because we have a female horse.

 The horse doesn’t look well – it looks half asleep. 

We found her in a market in a small village in the Hungarian lowland. I said immediately, “This is the horse we need.” You could see this horse we need. You could see this horse was humiliated. She’s not that old, just around seven. She was a very sad horse. But I have to tell you, all horses are sad who are around people. The owner wanted to make her work, and she refused. And it happened like with Nietzsche, in real life – I stopped him immediately. I was screaming at him, and then he sold us this horse, and she’s our horse now. Now she’s OK – we found a nice place for her. 

The film isn’t really about the horse, but the people. 

Of course. Of course, it’s not a story – can you imagine someone going to a Hollywood studio with this story? Anyway, Agnes and I bought our house – a really wrecked, ugly former inn – we bought it and we rebuilt it. And in the courtyard there was a place for horses. And we thought about how we could shoot something there – maybe these people lived in this house, and maybe the horse was there, and maybe the guy had a daughter. And that was the basic idea. We wrote a short synopsis together with László – and then we put it aside because we made Sátántangó [1994].

Later, when we had to interrupt the shooting of The Man from London [A Londoni férfi, 2007] because of [producer] Humbert Balsan’s death, I was sitting at home and I couldn’t do anything and I was terribly depressed. László said, “This will be good work therapy. Come and do a script about your obsession.” So we had a lot of discussion about the father and the daughter, and who would be the neighbour, and who would come to the house. We had a fight about it. He got up and said, “Shut your mouth” – and left. And two days later he sent me this text, which was perfect. It was the whole film – 60 pages. It’s a real literary work: it’s not a script, it just looks like a short novel. 

I got the impression that the film is not really about the horse but about Nietzsche’s silence. It’s almost a silent film. 

Not only Nietzsche’s silence – the silence of everybody. These people have a daily life. I wanted to show how it’s difficult to be – how being is so hard, and so simple. 

The locations look very similar to the landscapes of Sátántangó. Was it shot in the same part of Hungary? 

No, Sátántangó was shot on the plain, the lowland. Here there are some hills and a small valley. I found just the valley with this lonely tree and I thought, “I need a house here.” We built the house – it’s real stone and wood. Everything is real, including the oven. But it’s not that strong, because we knew we only needed it for one year. Afterwards, everything started collapsing. 

The film is very far from a tendency of rural cinema to be romantic or sentimental. 

That’s very far from me. In this case I could show you these people love each other, but this love is quite dry and simple – no emotions, nothing expressed, everything is hiding. He needs her, he needs the horse, and they need each other. Kundera talks about “the unbearable lightness of being” – I wanted to talk about the heaviness of being. 

Tell me about working with the actors. You’re asking them to do something very particular – it’s about repetition, routine. It’s almost mechanical. 

They’re not acting. I told them, “Just do – you have to cut the wood, you have to wash clothes, you have to go for water. That’s all.” They just worked. We had to prepare the actors, just to be very well trained with the horse. But fortunately János [Derzsi] grew up in the countryside and he’s a peasant, and she [Erika Bók] can learn everything very quickly – she’s used to physical work. They just had to learn to do everything very automatically – harnessing the horse, preparing the carriage… That’s what they had to train for. 

Erika Bók, who plays the daughter, played the little girl nearly 20 years ago in Sátántangó. It’s uncanny when we see her in The Turin Horse looking out of a window, like a ghost. Did you want viewers to catch echoes of her in the earlier film? 

If you watch this movie, you can see I collected all of my manias. Like the girl looking out of the window. This is definitely a closing movie because I collected everything. I packed – it’s done. 

It feels as if you’re taking all your cinema and boiling it down, purifying it. It’s a minimal version of your cinema, distilled. 

Like a good spirit, you have to boil it and in the end, you have the real essence. This is the essence. This is the essence of my life and my films, and that’s all. 

It’s a great film for sound. There seems to be music in the wind – a repeated three-note refrain. Is that just sound design, or composer Mihály Vig working with the sound of the wind? 

We created it together. Mihály chose some wind, together with the sound engineer, and they prepared something, and finally I decided what I wanted to hear. It was a very important thing – sometimes we hear the noises, sometimes we just hear the music without the noises, sometimes the music disappears and comes back in. It’s always moving and changing.

The wind [on screen] is created artificially, of course – we did it with very old wind machines, 60 years old, very primitive and ugly and heavy. It was very important to feel that it’s real – then when you see it, you feel it’s not real and then you have a feeling again, maybe it is real. We’re always playing with it. What is happening is always the same, the same monotony and repetition are always coming back – but always in a different way. 

The imagery reminded me of the photography of August Sander. Did you use period photos for reference? 

We did when we built the house – we looked at houses in Turin, the Alps, Hungary and we combined them. We looked at photos for the costumes, the gypsies’ clothes. And we looked at some French, German, Italian pictures for the props. But in the end, Agnes chose all the props – she went to the flea market in the country, near the Romanian border, and she bought everything in one day. 

How did you work this time with DP Fred Kelemen? 

It’s quite easy, because Fred knows me well. He was my student when he started film school. We’ve known each other for more than 20 years. He knows me, he knows my manias, he knows how strict I am, he knows I’m a perfectionist and terribly autocratic. 

How much Nietzsche is there really in the film? 

When we did it, we didn’t speak about Nietzsche. Of course I have nearly all Nietzsche’s work. I know his theory, and that the main issue is, “God is dead.” There we agree. A French journalist said to me, “This film looks like a Bible.” I said, “Yes, but without God.” 

Are you an admirer of Beckett too? 

Maybe a little, yes. 

This film seems darker than his work. Beckett always offers some hope, but this seems to offer none. 

Yesterday somebody told me, OK, maybe everything is hopeless, but he got a lot of hope from the movie – he became stronger after he saw it. I want to get this reaction. You know what I want? You have to resist. You have to resist, against me. If you do, I’m glad. 

Does that idea hold any political resonance? 

No, I don’t want to speak about the political – I never did. It’s not a political question – our problem is much deeper than the political situation. The political situation is just rubbish, shitty things, daily stuff. 

Are you serious that this will be your last film? 

After this movie, why do you ask me? 

You could always start making comedies, like Miklós Jancsó [the veteran Hungarian director who is a favourite of Tarr’s].

Jancsó waited ten years before he started making comedies. Maybe in ten years – but I’m 100 per cent sure. Now I will do my teaching – I’m teaching a Kafka workshop in Berlin. 

Do you enjoy teaching? 

You know what disturbs me about teaching? I’m always forcing the students, “Please, be more radical and more revolutionary than me” – and they’re not! They are fresh, they are young, they have to be more radical than me – that’s my problem. They want to integrate, they don’t want to change society. I want to change society – fuck!