Metaphysics of the sequence shot: the gathering and nihilating of being in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the philosophical implications of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) by attending to the thematic and aesthetic configuration of its sequence shots. The film’s durational images, I suggest, perform a gathering and nihilating of presence whereby the existence of the subject is repeatedly affirmed and questioned. I read this dynamic, over and above figurative and diegetic parameters, as metaphysical. In line with its Nietzschean framing and de-creational structure, and in distinction from the hermetic living that characterises Damnation (1988), Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), I posit the film’s catastrophic vision of the end of the world as revelatory. Placing stylistic analysis in dialogue with film theory and the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, I argue that Tarr’s strategies of attention (on the subject) and reversal (of the action and cinematography) puncture narrative chronology, exposing the spatiality and temporality that structure our existence. For this, I align with Heidegger’s thinking on metaphysics and the relation between art and truth. I establish the grounds for a compatibility between Heidegger’s philosophy and the worthiness of cinema by appealing to the ontological purpose it attributes to certain works of art and technology. The presencing and absencing of The Turin Horse’s in turn phenomenal and abyssal sequence shots, I conclude, produces a renewal of ground that illuminates questions of human fragility, freedom and emancipation, attuning us to the responsibilities of our being in a shared world.

Keywords

• Béla Tarr
• the sequence shot
• temporality
• spatiality
• metaphysics
• André Bazin, Friedrich Nietzsche