THE TURIN HORSE (2011) – Bela Tarr

The Turin Horse: A Meditation on Impermanence

A father, his daughter, and a dying horse. The wind howls endlessly outside. The world appears to be ending, not with a cataclysm, but with the quiet disintegration of everyday life.

Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011) is not a story. It is a ritual. A stripping away. Shot in just 30 long takes, it follows two characters repeating the same mundane acts—fetching water, dressing, eating a boiled potato. And then, one by one, even these actions become impossible.

There is no music here, only Mihály Vig's droning dirge that loops like a funereal chant. The cinematography, in ghostly black and white, pulls us into a world that is neither past nor future. Time feels suspended, as though we are watching the final days of matter itself.

Inspired by an anecdote about Nietzsche weeping over a beaten horse in Turin, Tarr offers no direct reference to the philosopher. But his film feels like a final note to Western civilisation. Will, meaning, morality—all dissolve in the storm.

And yet, there is beauty. In the way wind bends a tree. In the quiet patience of the daughter. In the refusal of the horse to move. There is something deeply sacred in this refusal, as if the Universe itself is drawing its breath inward.

TCS Lost Gallery Offering #11 presents The Turin Horse not as a film to be "understood" but as a lived experience. It is cinema that dares to do nothing. To simply endure. And in that endurance, to awaken something ancient in us: the Silent Witness that watches even the end of all things.

We offer it not for entertainment, but for contemplation.

Let this be its gallery.