“A film that is both one of [Tarr’s] best and also perhaps the most acutely concentrated expression of his aesthetic… Nietzsche would have loved it, and wept.” –Scott Foundas, Film Society of Lincoln Center

Minneapolis, MN, February 27, 2012— The Turin Horse, the latest film from Béla Tarr (Werckmeister Harmonies, Sátántangó, and the subject of a 2007 Walker Regis Dialogue and Retrospective) is also his last, claims the master filmmaker himself. The film will have its area premiere and theatrical run at the Walker Art Center from March 22–25, 2012. Tickets are $8 ($6 Walker members and students). Screenings on March 22, 23, and 24 are at 7 pm, and on March 25 at 2 pm.

The title stems from an apocryphal story about the cause of Friedrich Nietzsche’s madness: While vacationing in Turin in 1889, the German philosopher saw from afar a man mercilessly whipping his horse, and ran across a square in desperation to fling his arms around the animal. Afterward, he broke down and spent the last ten years of his life in silence.

The Turin Horse, conceived and written with Tarr’s frequent collaborator, László Krasznahorkai, imagines the life of the horse and its owner after that encounter. Employing the epic shots, grimly beautiful black-and-white cinematography, gracefully orchestrated camerawork, and moody, subtle sound design for which he has become renowned, Tarr has created an overwhelmingly relentless evocation of what he calls the “heaviness of human existence” as it winds down, day by day. The film has played the Berlin Film Festival (Silver Bear Award), the New York Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, and the Telluride Film Festival.
2011, 35mm, 146 minutes.

About Béla Tarr

Béla Tarr was born in 1955 and grew up in Budapest, Hungary. He began making amateur documentaries at age 16 and shot his 1977 feature debut, Family Nest, at age 22, made with non-professional actors in a stark, realist style. His work made a dramatic shift with a 1982 video adaptation of Macbeth, which is comprised of only two shots–one of five minutes and another of 67. In subsequent films, Tarr developed a durational aesthetic revolving around extended shot lengths, most famously in 1994’s Sátántangó, a film heavily influential in both the film and art worlds, and which no less of an authority than Susan Sontag called “…enthralling for every minute of its seven hours.” Across the entire body of his work, Tarr has established himself as one of the defining filmmakers and greatest innovators in contemporary cinema. Tarr was the subject of a Walker Regis Dialogue in 2007.

The Premieres series is made possible by generous support from Elizabeth Redleaf.