How it this distinguishable from all of the 90-minute pieces of trash that hit the multiplex each week that feel like they last four hours?

Because in Tarr's films, especially this one, if you're paying sufficient attention you feel the time deeply, in every particle of your being. Whereas a simply awful piece of trash wastes your time in the most boring, useless and superficial fashion. Of course, sometimes I actually perversely enjoy sitting through trash, like, say Act of Valor. Because in a way, a film that demands so little of you is a good place to dream, to let your thoughts wander and to get new ideas and perspectives on your work and life. With a serious and masterful work like Tarr's, though, there is no escape.

It's a superficially strange comparison I suppose but that aspect of the film reminded me of John Carpenter's Dark Star. That idea that a director would intentionally 'bore' you and wear you down in order for you to better empathise with his characters.

Obviously the beauty of Tarr's shots keeps you interested if you're of that sort of a mind but even so.

I wasn't bored for a second. Seriously.

That all sounds a bit specious to me, but I get your point. It felt very long, but you liked it despite that.

Inversely for me, The Turin Horse feels sufficiently less than 2.5 hours, and I'd attribute that to Tarr's achievement of managing to engage me with 'pure', observational cinema that trumped the bleakness of the proceedings.

Oh, neither was I - as I suggested, Tarr's visuals are more enough to keep me interested even if I'm not otherwise engaged (which I was). It just reminded me of the Carpenter film a little in terms of its methods.. Where even those moments where Something is Happening have such a deadpan matter-of-factness that they don't break with the overall tone and pace at all.

To be honest, when I saw Dark Star (in my teens, so a good while ago and since I'm going off memory maybe I'm ascribing more intent to it than I should be) I think I was more entertained just by the notion that a director was actively trying to bore me than I have been watching many superficially 'entertaining' films. I guess it's basically just a much greater degree of having the form fit the subject than you generally see in film.

I think The Turin Horse shares that although I don't think Tarr's trying to 'bore' the audience with this film exactly and I probably shouldn't have implied that.. Poor choice of words. But I do think he's trying to manipulate the audience in quite a similar sort of way to encourage a higher degree of empathy. And it seems he's been very successful with it if the screening I attended was anything to go; even the people who hated the film (most of them) seemed very affected by it.

Of what I have seen, this is the best film in all of cinema since Tarr's own Werckmeister Harmonies. The film instantly reminds me of a saying, but I forget who said it (someone important, natch). A wise person once said that when fire or animals or extreme weather are on screen, our natural, human, instinctual reaction is to be unsettled. This is our survival instinct, and Tarr plays it like a fiddle.

There is nary a frame without such elements. And if the element isn't framed up, it is mixed underneath the most masterful, meticulously-crafted sound design in all of cinema. Indeed, Tarr is playing on our basest fears when aiming for something grander and more philosophical. Or maybe he's just aiming to take down all of the useless philosophizing, as nihilists are wont to do. Nonetheless, his compositions, combining routine, elementals, and humanity, can only make the viewer fear something much more epic in scope than simple flames - Tarr sets his sights at no less than complete entropic dissolution. Nothingness.

Yet this is a story of two humans. Which makes the way that the father treats the daughter all the more heart-breaking. He sees her as yet another beast to serve him. And when she grooms him and he grunts and shakes, Tarr's use of irony is well-played. While life's necessities slip away, Tarr never lets these people have a relationship, defined by actually "relating". They prefer to stare out the window.

Even the daughter (Erika Bok, who I am pleased to see grow as a fine presence in Tarr's films), must resort to reading the ramblings of some discarded holy book. On Day 3, or was it Day 4, or it doesn't matter, Tarr and Kelemen frame the daughter as a smaller object in the background with the father distanced and separated in the foreground. I just wanted to break the silence -- or was the dirge playing? -- and shout, "FUCKING TALK TO EACH OTHER; THE WORLD IS ENDING!"

If it sounds as if I'm passionate about the film, I am. And to speak of the dirge... I would have killed to be in a room with Mihaly Vig and Bela Tarr when they were discussing what the anthem (ha!) for this film would be. Ignorant to their methods, I can only imagine Vig presenting Tarr with 40 masterworks of composition, only for Tarr to discard 39 of them. What I would give to listen to some of the musical pages in Vig's paper shredder.

Doubling back to the characters, it's tragic how they cannot talk or interact or love. Sustaining life is hard, but is that all there is? For these characters, yes. They simply can't connect. Their mannerisms define their character, from the way they interact with their fellow beast to the way they eat their potatoes. Which is why I would contest the comparison to Jeanne Dielman, a work I find more appealing as an artifact of political protest than as an actual film. I'll cop to it: I got bored watching Akerman's piece. I was riveted throughout Tarr's.

Yes, Tarr films the repetitions, but he does so as he did in Satantango, each from a new perspective, illuminating (or darkening) our observations. Each detail features insight to how these people live and (don't) relate. In Satantango, it was the literal same event from a different vantage point. In Turin Horse, the action is the same, but on a different day, from a different point of view, and it makes a world of difference. Repetitions in this film are not about wearing down a viewer in the mundanity to prove a point. Horse's repetitions are writ large on the stage of human existence. Tarr isn't so much as repeating as he is rhyming.

I could continue. Or maybe I couldn't. Either way, our lexicon needs to be improved. There needs to be a word for masterpieces that put even masterpieces to shame. That's what I'd call The Turin Horse. Tarr cements his status as the world's greatest living filmmaker, if no longer its greatest working filmmaker.

I've found Tarr's repetitions/variations in The Turin Horse to be quite re-watchable. If you live in Southern California and haven't seen this film yet or want to see it again, today (Wednesday, March 7) and tomorrow (Thursday, March 8) are the last two days of it's week-long Los Angeles theatrical run. It's playing from a 35mm print at Laemmle's Music Hall in Beverly Hills and via a 2k DCP out in Pasadena. As Tarr intended for the film to be projected from film and there's something magical about the fine grain of black and white film, I recommend cancelling whatever other plans you have and getting over to Beverly Hills tonight or tomorrow night.

My first Tarr may as well be his last film, and I can work backwards.
After hearing the horror stories of some people's reactions I had some caffeine and hyped myself up for an endurance test, which is probably why it ended up not feeling like 2 1/2 hours to me at all . I actually felt pangs of Au Hasard Balthazar here and there, in the empathy toward the horse and the parallel lives/situations its owners were going through. I was also haunted by the almost musical gales (low...low...low...hiiiigh...low...) that seemed to compliment the dirge. I'm not familiar enough with Nietzsche to know if the visitor's monologue had anything to do with Nietzsche's philosophy; since it happened after Ohlsdorfer whipped the horse it felt like some kind of last gasp of Nietzsche's rational thinking before he went mad along with the lives of Ohlsdorfer and his daughter. Speaking of which I wasn't entirely sure she was his daughter except for the cast credits in IMDB, I wondered during the film if maybe she might not have been a wife or servant he "bought" (not sure if that still existed in the time period the film took place in).
Will probably need to digest this over the weekend, just spewing out some misc. thoughts.

I wanted to see it again on the big screen this weekend, but it has already been removed to make room for another run of The Descendents.

US Blu-Ray in July

i just wish his other films would get HD treatment.

Man, I hope Strand picks up the other titles and does just that. Facets is no longer a DVD distributor, so the rights should be available, right?

Any possibility Criterion could?

If Criterion buy them off them (unlikely, as these surely are among Facets' biggest titles), or if Facets let the DVDs go oop like they did Close-Up maybe a deal could be struck. Who knows?

I don't know how widespread this is, but remember that it was recently revealed that Facets never had the rights to the Czech new wave films they distributed that Criterion will now soon be releasing.

I wish there was the equivalent for the UK. I must have waited about a year to see this film, but still no luck. At least there is a sign of life on the DVD front.

UK cinema release from Artificial Eye on 1 June. It's just been passed by the BBFC.

Too late for me. I'd rather wait a month and get the US Blu than watch it a month earlier amongst a (probably) restless cinema audience. I've enjoyed Tarr's films much more on DVD than I did in the cinema.

Based on my own experience, I'd say you're far more likely to get a restless audience at a high-profile festival screening - but not at somewhere like the Renoir, where it's all but certain to open (based on precedent). In early summer, and one of the worst weeks for cinema admissions in the annual calendar, it's hard to imagine too many people making the trek to see it unless they really want to. And I'm certainly not missing the chance to see it on the big screen.

(I nearly wrote "in 35mm", but that's not necessarily a given, sadly).

Any idea why it's taken so long? The Man From London never went through this delay, and if I remember correctly the DVD followed shortly after the film's release in the UK.

Actually, it did - world premiere at Cannes in May 2007, finally opened at the Renoir in December 2008. So the present gap between premiere and opening is three months less!

As to why it's taken so long, I suspect it's because Artificial Eye knows perfectly well that it's a prestige release that's unlikely to make much in the way of serious money, so they're waiting for an appropriate dead spot in the calendar. My own experience of cinema management is 15-20 years out of date, but I remember mid-December and late May/early June being the two worst times of the year commercially - so it's traditionally a good time to play films that you don't expect to do particularly well.

35mm print playing in Chicago at the Siskel from May 4 to May 10.

Also, 1 June is the beginning of the Diamond Jubilee four-day holiday weekend, so I'd imagine anyone going to see the film wherever it plays in London will have to be particularly dedicated, as public transport is likely to be crowded. (ETA: Though having said that, Prometheus also opens that weekend.)

I've yet to find out which films are going to be dumped, sorry released as counterprogramming, by their distributors, during Olympic fortnight.

Playing the Eastman House in Rochester May 5 & 6.

The final confirmed bonus features for THE TURIN HORSE:

* “Hotel Magnezit” (1978, 10 minutes), a short film by Bela Tarr
* Audio Commentary by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
* Press Conference with Bela Tarr, co-director Ágnes Hranitzky; actors Mihály Kormos, Erika Bók, and János Derzsi; director of photography Fred Kelemen; composer Mihály Vig; and co-producer Gábor Téni from the 2011 Berlin Film Festival (45 minutes)
* Theatrical Trailer
* BLU-RAY EXCLUSIVE: Regis Dialogue with Bela Tarr at the Walker Arts Center (2007, 81 minutes)
* Booklet featuring an essay by film critic J. Hoberman

On Blu-ray & DVD July 17, 2012.