Saturday 4 August 2012

The Turin Horse [A Torinói ló]


Seeks to show the menial, banal repetitive nature of human existence by being menial, banal and repetitive. Clever.
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11 comments:

  1. McK05/08/2012, 11:40

    Relive the magic

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  2. Ed06/08/2012, 13:30

    What drama! What tension!

    Looks like another overrated auteur. I never cease to be amazed by the endless praise heaped on the films of Yasujiro Ozu, which are similarly banal. Hours of footage of families eating rice and drinking tea where the occasional furrowed brow or glimmer of light in an eye is supposed to convey a world of repressed emotion. Sion Sono (a far better film maker) has it right:

    "I don't like Yasujiro Ozu. In the context of Japanese cinema, I hate Ozu. Everyone likes him... his position as a God of Japanese movies is unassailable, but to me he is the Anti-God, the Anti-Christ. Following Ozu, so many Japanese films are about families. I'm interested in the family unit myself - Noriko's Dinner is about families; Love Exposure too - but the contemporary family is never so peaceful or so close - they're broken. Every day parents kill children, children kill parents - we hear it in the news - but many Japanese movies are still made in the tradition established by Ozu: the peaceful family, the quiet family. It's not real.".

    People are generally afraid to say these things for fear of being mocked by so-called cineastes. Emporer's new clothes again.

    From that snippet, it looks like The Turin Horse might even be on the same level as The Quince Tree Sun in terms of stylized vacuity.

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  3. James07/08/2012, 13:48

    You'll love where Ozu finished in this then, Ted.
    http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/50-greatest-films-all-time/

    I saw Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies. I thought that was pretty good. Slow, and pretentious, but with some semblance of story told in very loooooong shots. I chose not to go to The Turin Horse because I got the gist that it was going to be long and slow and nothing much would happen. While I can see the point of this and it is being exactly what it's trying to be so it can't really be called bad for being boring, I do have to question whether it can justify it's ticket price. People go to the movies to escape the mundane plod of life, to be transported into another word. To then see a film that did nothing but tell me my life sucks whilst boring me would likely have made me very angry. I don't expect to pay money so see someting that is supposed to be more dull than my life.
    Staying in to watch the athletics was definitely the wise move.

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  4. Ali07/08/2012, 15:41

    Yes The Turin Horse was banal, tedious, harrowing and something of an ordeal to get through, yet I cannot not deny the effect it had on me watching it (akin to a weird form of torture mostly), and more profoundly the effect it had after the film was over (unbridled joy at the relative chaos of our modern world.)

    "People go to the movies to escape the mundane plod of life, to be transported into another word."

    And this the Turin Horse did. It allowed you to escape the mundane plod of your life by transporting you to a world even more mundane than the one you regularly inhabit.

    But it also transported you twice. Once into it's world of utter hopelessness, and then again when it returned you to your own normal world, which it transformed for you whilst you weren't even aware it was doing so! And could it have done this with cuts and edits? Nope.

    Like it or not, The Turin Horse was ART, not entertainment, and ART is another reason people go to the cinema. Some lessons are only learnt through pain, and that's what this film was. Pain. But as a way to learn a lesson, it's very hard to deny that it worked.

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  5. McK07/08/2012, 22:00

    I don't go to movies to escape the mundane plod of life or to be transported to another world. That's retarded.

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  6. McK07/08/2012, 22:30

    That's a bit harsh,sorry. I mean to say I don't watch movies to remove myself from life, I watch them to enrich my life. The discussion this film provokes is fantastic, Noise and I were still discussing the incredible levels of mundanity the next day. For a film that does fuck all it has a weird way of staying with you because of the sheer level of doing fuck all.

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  7. Ed08/08/2012, 10:08

    @James: that looks like a typical film buff's list to me - as I suppose it would be being compiled by academics - not questioning the received wisdom that Ozu and Fellini produced sublime ART (to steal Ali's capitalization).

    Vertigo is obviously great, but probably not the greatest film of all time. 2001 is ace. Tokyo Story is boring as hell and I also found 8 1/2 pretty dull. I haven't seen a lot of the others, but Apocalypse Now at 14 is better than everything I have seen above it.

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    Replies
    1. James08/08/2012, 13:12

      What narked me most was nothing from the 70's or after in the top 10. Highlights the problem with most critics. They're too bloody old.

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    2. Ed08/08/2012, 13:48

      I don't know what La Jetee is doing in any top 50 list either - pretentious art house snooze fest.

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    3. James09/08/2012, 00:13

      I remember seeing it around the time 12 Monkeys came out. I remember preferring 12 Monkeys.

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  8. James08/08/2012, 10:10

    As I said, you can't call this bad for being boring; that's the point.

    How to get across what I mean?... Remember the Coens Burn After Reading. That pissed a lot of people off because it's end is basically a middle finger to the audience. In a quick dialogue scene everything was swept under the carpet leading the film to have been kinda pointless, as if what happened didn't really matter to anyone. This is not the only time the Coens did that (Lebowski) but BAR had a smugness to it that rankles people. It feels like the joke is on the audience and they are laughing at you, hence people being pissed off.

    Turin Horse seems to have that same pointlessness (albeit stylistically completely differently). You find out life is mundane mandanely. Shock! I can't imagine anyone intelligent enough to go see a Bela Tarr movie comes out going "fuck, I didn't realise how repetitive, mundane and pointless life is". It's that same kind of fuck you that the end of BAR is, except instead of a loony farce with idiots that proves pointless it's 2 people doing the same thing over and over that proves pointless.

    Once again I must stress, this seems to be the point of the film so I'm not suggesting it is a bad one, just that I would be pissed off if I'd watched it.

    The Dead enriched your life?

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