This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com I was reviewing The Turin Horse, a Béla Tarr film.
For me to review The Turin Horse in a way that suits the style of my writing I think I ought to primarily work on identifying the mechanical principles that produce the crushing dread, rather than describing in my own voice the feelings it instils. Maybe the monotony feels so much more visceral that other kinds of boredom because Tarr tempers the squirm inducing pointlessness of the indoor scenes with outdoor scenes that are overwhelmingly kinetic? The wind savages the grain of the film such that everything seems in flux, but the objects of the shot exert Sisyphean effort only to remain stationary.
(Outdoors, the film is like trying to run in a dream. Indoors, the film is like when you first wake up and have to struggle impotently to form a fist.)
Of course Tarr's style ought to be easily read in terms of its nuts and bolts, considering how formally distinct it is, but he has a knack of blasting away that sort of thinking in me with the catastrophe of his imagery. Fucking hell, the sky goes out, doesn't it?
I can't love this film until I can come to terms with its lack of love for me. Until then I will occasionally think about it and how beautiful it is, and wonder if it's my failing or it's that it seems to me to be irreconcilable with reality in some important way.