As the Academy Awards draw near, it seems appropriate to write about
three films light years removed from the Hollywood film industry that
are united by the theme of cruelty to animals and that wear their art
film credentials proudly (even though one film subverts pulp genres).
One is “The Turin Horse”, the final film made by auteur extraordinaire
Béla Tarr over a thirty-seven year career and that is inspired by an
anecdote about Nietzsche coming to the aid of a horse being beaten by
its livery cab owner. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he
was asked to name a film that had real quality. His answer was Aki
Kaurismaki’s “Le Havre”, a film he “really loved”, as did I. ( When the
Hollywood Reporter began mentioning that it might receive an Oscar for
best foreign language film, Tarr interrupted him:
Who cares about this stupidity? You know what I mean. This kind of
quality is not for the Academy Awards. This kind of quality and
sensibility is for you and the other people – for personal use. The
others are just part of a fucked-up business, which is not my business.
Béla Tarr came to mind after seeing “White God” at a press screening a
while back. Directed by fellow Hungarian Kornél Mundruczó, it about the
mistreatment of a teen girl’s beloved dog Hagen by various people and
institutions. As such, I decided to write about the two films as well as
about Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar”, a 1966 film about the
abuse of a donkey—a work that I had somehow ignored despite Godard’s
comment: “Everyone who sees this film will be absolutely
astonished…because this film is really the world in an hour and a half.”
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/30/the-cinema-of-cruelty/
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