Eternity: The Turin Horse

Timelessness, paradise, afterlife, past lives, reaching for forever. Join us for the first screening in thinking about Eternity.

I am excited to begin this new series with a movie that I have been meaning to watch for a long time. Ever since a fateful Saturday screening of Sátántangó with studiomate Connor, Tarr’s The Turin Horse has been at the top of my watchlist. So, I was honestly relieved when they suggested it be our next screening at Working Room. So, passing it off to Connor to introduce the film:

Bela Tarr’s final narrative feature, The Turin Horse (2011), co-directed by Agnes Hranitzky, is best enjoyed with some context. The film is fundamentally connected to Nietszche’s concept of eternal recurrence: The idea that life repeats eternally; each choice and detail of this life has happened and will happen again, forever. While I enjoyed the film the first time I saw it, I was able to develop a much richer appreciation with this context in subsequent watches. The film is undoubtedly inhospitable, bleak, and depressing. However, I find hope in the idea that I have some agency in my relationship to eternity.

The Turin Horse is accompanied by a powerfully evocative single piece of score by Vig Mihaly that repeats several times throughout the film. (I like to put on the 1 hour loop version on Youtube.)

“The greatest weight. — What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? . . . Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.341, Walter Kaufmann transl.

We’ll be showing The Turin Horse next Monday, December 16th. Doors will open at 7:00 PM and the movie will begin promptly at 7:30 (note: the 30 minute earlier start time). It is very helpful for people to RSVP here. It isn’t required, so feel free to join last minute, but if you know you’re coming, let us know : - )

Feel free to bring a snack or treat to share.

<3 Liza