I'll Have More Of The Same Please: Duration, Persistance and The Turin Horse

After leaving the cinema having watched Bela Tarr's new, and supposedly final, film The Turin Horse, one feels windswept and empty, a sick feeling gnawing at the bottom of your belly, your hair full of dead leaves and soil, bedraggled and thrown against your face.  Throughout the film a steadicam drags after the young peasant woman and her father that are the films protagonists, as they battle the howling wind that screams around their dwelling like a banshee.  Virtually every scene is made up of just one of these persistent takes, the world an uncultivated terrain in murky black and white, the same downbeat melancholy score for strings reoccurring through the film.  Tarr's utterly unwavering, rigorous modus operandi, although a hard praxis to come up against for the viewer, is so complete in it's approach and so stunning in it's execution (the black and white imagery depicts the harshest of living conditions, coming across like the visual equivalent of some funeral dirge made from the very dirt, sweat and rock of everyday existence) that it can't help but captivate you, hold you in a vice-like grip.

Like his seven hour Satantango (1994) (written about here), The Turin Horse is barren of luxury.  Every activity the characters carry out arises from the basic tug of survival: getting dressed, lighting fires, getting water, making food.  The only respite seems to come when the half-literate girl begins to read, in faltering words, from a bible, the holy idealism contained within like some bleak joke on these two figures whose life offers no hope of change, no interval from hardship, possibly no love, and, by the end, no light.  Family film, date movie?  These boxes remain firmly un-ticked.

This is one of the most single-minded films I have ever seen.  It's perseverance in forcing the audience to undergo this earnest monotony achieves an absolute purity.  Someone once said the me about Lui Jiayin's Oxhide (2005) that one of the extraordinary things about it was that he could remember almost every single shot throughout it's duration (if you haven't seen Oxhide, read more about it here). In The Turin Horse I am fairly confident that I can recall every single event.  Things do happen in this film, it's just they happen slooooow.  And because of their spacing, when an event occurs, it hits home like a battering ram on a teacup.

There are certain films that serve you with such an unflagging certainty in their repetition of technique, that slowly bruise you from the inside with their purposefully similar mise-en-scene, that you can do little but give in - wide eye in reception.  In Vanda's Room (2000) by Pedro Costa is another such film. For three hours you sit and watch, eyes and eyes firmly OPEN, as the Portuguese slum of Fontainhas is slowly demolished around its impoverished inhabitants, who shoot up, laugh, cough, chat, argue and vomit their way through the film's duration in shadowy, beautifully composed interiors filled with life.  There are many more, the previously mentioned Oxhide being another, films that take us by the hand and then don't let us go until they say so; and they may be arduous and difficult, but they are films that have hewn themselves into granite, monoliths of duration and persistance and they deserve to be watched and remembered.

Snowtown (2011)

Australian director, Justin Kurzel’s debut feature dramatises the grisly Snowtown or Bodies in Barrels murders that occurred in South Australia between 1992 and 1999. Victim’s remains were found in barrels of acid in a disused bank building in the small community of Snowtown, 147km from Adelaide. Of the 4 people arrested in connection with the murders, the authorities found John Bunting to be the ringleader and handed him multiple life sentences.

The story is told from the point of view of teenager, Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) as he is sucked into the bigoted and violent world of John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) and ultimately into murder. Snowtown shares similarities with Winter’s Bone (2010) showing us a bleak landscape and existence where the setting is vital enough to the mood of the story that it becomes a character in itself. The location, the run-down Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North, is grim and grey, its people jobless chain-smokers whose hopes and dreams are as beaten and empty as the streets and front yards surrounding them.

Jamie shares a bungalow with his mother and younger brothers. The family are poor in every way. They look malnourished and dirty and have a look of glazed resignation to their fate in such a hopeless place. Jamie’s mother, Elizabeth, enters one unsuitable and misjudged relationship after another and when her latest boyfriend takes indecent photos of the boys, the charismatic John Bunting comes to the family’s aid, hounding the ex-boyfriend from the neighbourhood doing everything from revving his motorbike outside the man’s house at 3am to throwing hacked and bloody kangaroo body parts on his front porch.

John and the brothers

We meet John properly in a scene at the breakfast table. Food and the idea of gathering around the table for communal meals figure a lot in this film. Snowtown, along with the ‘family meal’ scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), contorts the idea of the typical family dinner into something perverse and twisted as a broken family unit take part in a ritual intended to show togetherness.

John is charismatic and even funny. He assumes the role of father figure to the boys almost immediately and holds court at the breakfast table offering a fry-up to Jamie and showing a jolly enthusiasm that is infectious. However, behind John’s dark eyes there is a sense of menace that is truly disturbing. John easily holds the attention of those he talks to but the underlying threat of violence he carries is what keeps his audiences on their toes.

Without a father figure, Jamie is captivated by John and is attracted to and finally de-sensitized by his anti-gay and paedophile hating views. John and his cohorts, including a now brainwashed Jamie, embark on a series of brutal murders targeting gay men, those they suspect, even on hearsay, to be paedophiles, the handicapped and drug addicts.

John spreading his hate to the impressionable JamieSnowtown is a grim and upsetting film and can be hard to watch. One particularly harrowing scene involves someone being tortured and strangled in the family bathtub in what is the most shocking moment in the film. While the scene is not as graphic as it appears, it feels like it goes on for a long time and was reminiscent of other infamous sustained scenes like the underpass scene in Irreversible (2002).

Unlike more violent films intended to shock and titillate, Snowtown’s power comes from suggestion and the story it tells. Actual scenes of graphic violence are rare but like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it is the bleak world of the uneducated and hopeless that makes events so disturbing. The sunny, beach-based Australia of soap operas is turned on its head here.

There is realism within Snowtown that makes it extremely effective. Like early Scorsese films (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver) it feels like we are getting an authentic documentation of the place, its people and the events that have blighted it. Given the film dramatises real events, the decision to keep the aesthetic and acting style so natural and stripped-down feels totally right.

Every character and actor in Snowtown shares a similar haunted expression. They have the look of people with no choice but to smoke themselves into oblivion and find new ways to be angry. Aside from John Bunting, it feels like the locals who attend the vigilante community meetings and then harass and attack paedophiles do it more out of simple boredom than from any kind of real hate or agenda.

Snowtown is dark and troubling but brilliantly made and acted and is ultimately captivating. Daniel Henshall as John Bunting is terrifying and his performance alone makes the film worth seeing.