We never actually saw the horse die, did we? Every review and synopsis states that the horse dies, but if we never saw it die, why does everyone say the horse dies?
Loved the movie, but a bit confused on this important point.
It is implied (heavily) that the horse is to die in-time. The final moment where we see the horse is when both the man and the daughter enter the stable for the last time. They both stare at the horse as the horse stands completely still looking very weary after refusing to eat and drink for a few days. At this point the man finally takes the harness/strap off of the horse. This act of removing the harness/strap shows that the man has realized that the horse is going to die shortly. The man does this to let the horse die as itself and naked and free from all of those straps and harnasses that bound the horse beforehand.
A river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees.
Doesn't the horse have to get whipped in front of Nietzsche first?
shareDoesn't the horse have to get whipped in front of Nietzsche first?
Doesn't the horse have to get whipped in front of Nietzsche first?
I thought it would be building to the event that made Nietzsche go insane. Sounds kind of anticlimactic.
shareThe anecdote about Nietsche is a "good story", but is virtually certainly untrue. Nietzsche's "madness" was due to syphillis, and didn't come on all at once.
I'm confident Bela Tarr could have made an allegorical movie out of that incident if he'd wanted to, despite it's being fact-challenged. But why give the critics such an obvious handle to bash your movie with?
In an interview at Berlinale (Berlin International Flilm Festival), Bela Tarr says the horse finally dies on the not-shown 7th day (the film ends at the 6th day).
(Of course the horse's death is so heavily intimated before then -see the second post in this thread for example- that it hardly matters exactly when it actually happens.)
So u all think the horse in the movie galloped from Turin, Italy to Hungary?
There's no way...
Well I'm not too sure because it's been a while since I watched it now, but isn't the location of the movie rather ambiguous (rather than definitely being Hungary)? The location is obviously "rural". And the people speak Hungarian ...but that could be simply because that's where the movie was made. Beyond just these few things, I don't remember anything all that definitive about the location. Do I remember right?
(Or maybe it's "movie magic". Or maybe we're supposed to interpret the horse more philosophically than literally. Or ...)
I assumed it to be Hungary because of the language, but it's not unheard of for a writer to use their native tongue even with a story in a different setting, so it could be somewhere else.
shareI do not think that there is any physical link between the two horses, i.e. that they are one and the same. The horse in Turin was beaten by a cab driver and presumably was employed as a cab horse. The horse in the movie looks like a down trodden rural cart horse and it is pulling a rustic cart, not an urban cab. The driver does not seem to be a cab driver - in fact his disability would make it a very difficult profession for him in the narrow streets of Turin. I think he is what he is - a rural farmer/homesteader somewhere in Hungary. The connection between the horses might only exist at some existential level that I cannot fathom - perhaps the connection is the profound effect that the whipping of the horse in Turin has on Nietzsche and the playing out of the Nietzschian worldview by another horse. Leaving the Turin horse aside and looking at the Hungarian rustic horse as a separate entity, the horse and the humans live out an existence which is pared back to the minimum - get up, work, eat, sleep, and eventually die. When all the "noise" of colour, activity, events, happenings, spectacles, celebrations, incidents, triumphs & disasters, are removed, then the mundane routine and the inevitability of death are all that is left - this "essence" of existence is a statement of what life really is - an absurdity. The impression that I got is that the horse realised this before the humans. What happened to the horse in Turin? Given the absurdity of existence, does it really matter?
share[deleted]