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.The Man from London exemplifies one of the possibilities of the formula: its being grafted onto an intrigue arrived from elsewhere.The Turin Horse exemplifies the inverse case: the formula reduced to its minimal element, the film after which there is no reason to make any others.What Simenon’s novel offers Béla Tarr is an exemplary case of temptation: from the heights of his nocturnal post in the signal box, Maloin, the worker, is witness to the smuggling of a suitcase thrown from the boat, then to the fight between the two accomplices, and to the suitcase’s plunge into the waters of the port.In fishing it out, he gets caught in the gears of a mechanism that, despite himself, will make him the murderer of the thief.From this story, Béla Tarr has essentially retained one situation: that of the solitary man in his tower of glass, the man whose work, every night for twenty-five years, has consisted in watching the passengers disembark from the ferry, and in pulling the levers that release the train’s rails: a man fashioned by routine, isolated by his work, humiliated by his condition, and for whom the spectacle entering through the window offers the pure temptation of change.He also carefully isolated the character from the picturesque little world of fishermen, traders, and bar regulars surrounding Simenon’s hero.He condensed the cafés and hotels where the action unfolds into a single café-hotel-restaurant, in which he has installed his accordion, his pool table, and some members of his usual troupe of drinkers and jokesters.He reduced the story to some essential relationships and figures: there is the familial foyer, where the wife and daughter sum up a condition of humiliation for Maloin.There is the thief, Brown, transformed into a shadow seen in a circle traced by the light of a street lamp beneath Maloin’s windows, into a mythological figure upon the dinghy borrowed to search for the lost suitcase, into the silent audience of the English inspector, who offers him impunity in exchange for the return of the suitcase, and into the invisible inhabitant of Maloin’s shack, where his murder will be elided not only in the image, but also in the sound.Finally, there is the man of persuasive speech, Inspector Morrison, the single figure in whom all the police work and the initiatives of the family of the theft’s victims in the novel are condensed: the figure of order who knows how to turn all disorder to his advantage, utilizing the rhetoric of an Irimias who would have grown old in the service of the captain in Satantango, and of Mrs.Eszter’s intrigues.In the universe thus delimited, the filmmaker reduced Maloin to several fundamental attitudes: the gaze fixed upon the object of temptation, or upon a variety of threats; the meticulous work of the hands that dry the bills upon the stove; the routine of drinks and chess matches with the owner of the bistro; the paroxysmal fury of the voice that howls his humiliation in the domestic scenes, or in the butcher’s shop where he goes to remove his daughter, Henriette, who he cannot stand to see washing the floor down on her knees; the challenge leveled at poverty in the boutique where he shows Henriette that he can buy her a fox and make her into someone who can look at herself with pride in the mirror: laughable participation in that world of the “victors,” which the previous incarnation of Henriette, Estike, would strive to reach with nothing but a dead cat under her arm.The cycle of unrest caused by the suitcase culminates with Maloin, downcast and breathless, leaving the cabin where the undesired murder has taken place without us having seen anything but the door’s slats, without us having heard anything beyond the sound of the waves.After which the suitcase will reappear, seeming to drag Maloin in its wake, in the room of the restaurant where Morrison is orchestrating his ridiculous plan for finding the man who is already dead.In leaving the cabin, Maloin will have abandoned the fight against his destiny, just as the rioters had in turning away from the overly prone victim.Simenon’s character then went toward the redemptive prison.Béla Tarr’s character is given no such opportunity.The perverse order incarnated in Morrison is satisfied with having recovered the money, the only thing that matters to him, and offers Maloin the bag of Judas, the envelope containing several bills imprinted with the queen’s effigy.The story borrowed from Simenon ends like one of Krasznahorkai’s novels: with a return to the point of departure.But Béla Tarr’s film ends differently: with a miniscule tracking shot slowly rising mere centimeters up the unshakeable face of Brown’s widow.This latter had not once loosened her lips during the deal proposed earlier by Morrison, as obstinate in her silence as the four notes (ti-do-re-mi) the accordion sent spinning around her, and now sees neither his black shadow, ministering words of comfort to her, nor the white envelope that he places in her bag.The film fades to white with the final figure of she who will have only said two words throughout the entire film, and those to refuse a coffee: “No, thanks.” Pure symbol of dignity maintained, at the price of remaining foreign to all deals, foreign to the logic of stories, which is always a logic of deals and of lies.Thus, The Man from London shows how the Tarr-system can graft itself onto this or that of the innumerable fictions recounting stories of temporarily interrupted repetition and of promises made in the service of deception.The Turin Horse takes the opposite approach: no longer to graft situations onto any story; to identify situation and story according to the most elementary schema: the succession of several days in the lives of a number of people, reduced to the smallest multiple – two individuals – who themselves represent the greatest multiplicity that this number affords – two sexes and two generations – but also two exemplary graphic lines: the straight line of the man with the emaciated profile, the pointy, gray beard, and the long body, whose stiffness is accentuated by an immobile right arm, glued to his side; the curve of the daughter, whose face is almost continuously hidden by the long, lank hair that covers it in the house, and by the cape whipping in the wind outside.A mundane time, which no promise interrupts, confronted by a lone possibility: the risk of no longer being able even to repeat.No longer any cafés, in which expectations intersect and deals are proposed.Only a lost house in a wind-swept countryside.No longer any illusions, deals, or lies: a simple question of survival, the only possibility of carrying on the next day being that of eating a meal consisting of a single boiled potato with one’s hands.This state of affairs depends upon a third character: the horse.Ever since Damnation the animal inhabits Béla Tarr’s universe as the figure in which the human experiences its limit: dogs drinking from puddles, which Karrer barked with in the end; cows liquidated by the community, horses escaped from abattoirs, and a cat martyred by Estike in Satantango; the monstrous whale of Werckmeister Harmonies; all the way up to the fox wrapped around Henriette’s neck.No puddle, here, where a dog might drink, no cat to give milk to as a treat to oneself, no circus passing through, only a visionary who announces the disappearance of everything noble, and a group of gypsies attracted by the well water.Besides these, all that remains is the horse, in whom several roles are condensed: it is the tool for work, the means of survival for old Ohlsdorfer and his daughter [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]