![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This 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.
Acknowledgments
This research was conducted at the University of Edinburgh. It has been revised for publication during a Visiting Scholar residency at Pompeu Fabra University. My sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and to Libby Saxton, Robert Sinnerbrink, Marion Schmid, Daniel Yacavone, John Caruana, and Mark Cauchi for their insightful comments on various versions of this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Institutions
University of Edinburgh and Pompeu Fabra University.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 84; Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, 165.
2. Tarr has in recent years produced a moving image installation work, Missing People (2019), and made public a video annotation, “Muhamed” (2017).
3. I employ the active form of the neologism “nihilation” (“nihilating”) to more closely align with Nietzsche’s use of the word “Ver-Nichtsung”, which translates as destruction and signifies annihilation or “making into nothing”. Since the premise of a cinematic work is necessarily hypothetical, I refer to Nietzsche’s notion of nihilism by “judgement” (“an-nihil-ation”, doing away with beliefs and ideas) in distinction from the more literal nihilism “by the hand” (“annihilation” as killing, “mak[ing…] perish”) (Nietzsche Citation2003, 225, incl. ftn.).
4. Lutz Koepnick clarifies that “[t]he language of classical film analysis distinguishes between the long take and the sequence shot. The first describes a prolonged and unedited capturing of profilmic events; the latter involves a camera that moves through various planes of action, follows the trajectories of different actors, and might perform a series of panning or tracking maneuvers with the aim of integrating, within the space of one extended single take, the narrative events usually comprised in an entire filmic sequence. Not every long take is a sequence shot” (Koepnick Citation2017, 39).
5. For a comprehensive history on “Slow Cinema”, including its indebtedness to Tarr’s cinema, see De Luca and Jorge Citation2016, 1–2.
6. Commentators have acknowledged the existential import of slow films either implicitly–by pointing to the characters’ states of “alienation” (Jaffe Citation2014, 152), “boredom” or “ennui” (Lim Citation2014, 24, 41)–or else in remarks that, while helpfully alluding to the films’ place within an existential discourse, remain undeveloped. For instance, Flanagan signals the endurance evoked by the sequence shots in Tarr’s and Kelemen’s cinemas (Flanagan Citation2012, 113); Jaffe states that “[c]haracters in Tarr’s films often refer to the pervasiveness of emptiness and death in the universe” (156); and Grønstad intriguingly proposes an “exploration of the optics of slow” as an ethical medium “uniquely equipped to capture temporal presence as spatial form” (Grønstad Citation2016, 275, 282). How the latter envisions a perspective that draws on Jean-Luc Nancy’s (Heidegger-informed) notion of cinematic presence while retaining a materialist focus has not (yet) been clarified.
7. Malick wrote an undergraduate thesis on the concept of “horizon” in Husserl and Heidegger (Citation1966), had planned a doctoral project on the notion of “world” in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and produced a translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons (1969) (Critchley Citation2009, 16–17; Sinnerbrink Citation2006, Citation2019, 28 and 1–2).
8. A significant contribution is Shawn Loht’s Phenomenology of Film (2017), which offers insight into the application of Heidegger’s phenomenology to film viewership by attending, alongside Malick, to the cinemas of Haneke and Gordon. I take issue with Loht’s proposition, however, where it appears to conflate Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology with realism. “As I have described it”, Loht states, “film-viewing’s character of realism is originative in a Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world” (Loht Citation2017, 48).
9. Elaborating on Richardson, Sheehan explains that Heidegger I is focused on Dasein (the being that is “there” in the world, the human being) and Heidegger II on Sein (Being as “the meaningful” that requires the human being to uphold it), and each is in need of the other. The distinction constitutes for Heidegger “the ontological difference” (Sheehan Citation2014, 82–83, 91).
10. I refer to the French text separately, since the English version has several additions to, as well as subtractions from, the original.
11. When Sibertin-Blanc and Rollet describe the devastated (because absent-minded) bodies of the characters in Tarr’s trilogy, they are evoking a loss of humanity that signals, yet falls short of developing, an existential reading.
12. Ayfre graciously explains that “if later on [in 1957], he [Bazin] accepted the term ‘phenomenological’ that I had proposed [in ‘Néo-réalisme et Phénoménologie’, 1952] to qualify the newness of this realism by way of a helpful adjective, it is only because he considered it to sum up what had been longtime since the essence of his thought” (Ayfre Citation1969, 156; Citation1964, 214, my additions). In 1948, for example, Bazin writes that Visconti’s non-dramatic resources are “a concern with things themselves, as in life”, implicitly citing Husserl’s famous phenomenological expression (Bazin Citation2005b, 41).
13. The realist focus of Bazin’s film theory appears incompatible with Heidegger’s thought, where he asserts that “in realism there is a lack of ontological understanding” (Heidegger Citation1962, 251, § 43). While it is not possible to draw a correspondence between Heidegger’s philosophy and Bazin’s eclectic cinematic Real, the latter is–certainly on phenomenological grounds–conversant with the former. I further trace the potential of this relationship in “Cinema and Heidegger: the Call to Being in Ozu, Antonioni, Tarr” (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2020, publication in preparation).
14. Being and Time states that the existential dimension that upholds human life is not accidental or transitory, rather, it comes before everything else; “it is not pieced together, but is primordially and constantly a Whole”. For these reasons, in his quest for the meaning of being, Heidegger defines this dimension as “essential” and “fundamental”. In doing so, he is not however claiming that it is possible to epistemologically or anthropologically know and articulate what a human being is–“one may even question whether ‘having’ the whole entity is attainable at all” (Heidegger Citation1962, 38, 65, 238, 276, 59). Instead, Heidegger invites us to perceive our humanity with an immediacy that, when applied to the moving image, helps us appreciate its power to interpellate and affect us in ways that surpass diegetic telling.
15. In the interest of foregrounding the role of cinematography in the construction of the sequence shot, I will complement my (more general) use of “camera”–the entire film apparatus–with specific references to the camera’s lens, as the optics that frames and configures the field of vision registered by the camera’s body. Whether fixed or moving, the position of the camera is always relative to the framing provided by the lens. The lens delimits and focuses, the camera captures.
16. On this question, Morgan challenges Mitry (225), Vertov (225), Bordwell (229), Sobchack (229–233) and Danto (230).
17. While I reference Being and Time from the 1962 Macquarrie and Robinson translation, I choose the more recent rendering of Nähe as nearness (Näherung as near), favoured by for example Andrew J. Mitchell (Heidegger Citation2012), over the former’s “closeness” and “close”.
18. By being ‘with’ I refer to the human’s mindful co-habitation with other human beings in the shared world. My definition overlaps with Heidegger’s notion of “Being-with” [Mitsein], which I understand as the open site where multitudes of beings attune to each others’ existing as they venture into their deeper selves (Heidegger Citation1962, 149, 157, 162, 205). A conscientious use of Heidegger’s term exceeds the scope of this article.
19. “I keep thinking of Ozu and how he got to a point where he didn’t move the camera at all; maybe that’s the real film art” (Tarr in Geoff Citation2007, 20).
20. The steadicam is not always used to anthropocentric effect. Its ethereal quality is often employed to simulate flight, altered states of mind and otherworldly presence. See, for example, Alejandro Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).
21. Metaphysics must here be understood as the enquiry into the ground of being that for Heidegger implies, in the first instance, the human being’s questioning of its essence out of and beyond itself. In “What is Metaphysics?” (1929), Heidegger asserts that, in distinction from Ancient metaphysics and the Christian tradition, the relation between being and the nothing is constitutive: “From the nothing all beings as beings come to be”, and so, “Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein” (Heidegger Citation1993, 108–109). Heidegger later rethinks the latter stance as he discards any possibility of grasping “the whole” and formulates the disclosure of being as historical dwelling and metaphysics as “onto-theology”.
22. John Caputo reminds us that the death of God that is announced here refers, not to the God of Abraham, but to the dying off of classical metaphysics and its accompanying theology. “One important thing we mean by the death of God is the death of the absolute center, of inhabiting an absolute point of view” (Caputo Citation2007, 117).
23. Nietzsche’s bold enquiry into art, for instance, falls short of “overcom[ing]” the tradition of “aesthetics” (Heidegger Citation1991a, 131).
24. Discussion on the productive connection between Nietzsche’s philosophy and Deleuze’s “time-image” is beyond the remit of this article.
25. Heidegger cautions that “the world picture is Christianized in as much as the cause of the world is posited as infinite, unconditional, absolute”, which in turn transforms “Christian doctrine into a world view” (Heidegger Citation1977, 116–117).
26. In Abiding Grace, Mark C. Taylor posits that Heidegger’s spiral sketch presents Time as the “originary givenness” that makes us free, the movement of which he productively labels a “chiasmic reversal” (Taylor Citation2018, 182, 191).