THE TURIN HORSE

 A man and his daughter in the middle of nowhere, though presumably somewhere in Hungary, at an indeterminate time, pass their days cooking potatoes, getting water from the well and saying almost nothing to each other while a storm rages outside. They have a horse which looks like it's on its last legs and mostly refuses to move. They appear to collect its manure. The film, of course, is Bela Tarr's "The Turin Horse", hailed by critics around the world not just as a masterpiece but quite possibly one of the greatest films ever made and it's proof that a beautifully constructed piece of film-making, (and it is brilliantly filmed and superbly shot in just 30 takes), can also be incredibly boring.

Films can, of course, be about anything. Stories can be as short as a few pages in a book or as long as 'War and Peace' and Tarr does have a story, of sorts, to tell; whether you find it interesting or not is another matter but he takes what is a plausible account of man versus nature, (and man versus man, I suppose), and which might have made a good 30 minute short and dragged it out for a punishing 145 minutes and no-one will ever convince me that just because this is a 'different' kind of film and totally unlike most films made today, (shot in black and white it has the look of a film made 90 years ago), that it's a masterpiece.

Of course, with a good deal of cutting it might well have been but making your audience go through the rigours of the characters on-screen dosen't in itself add anything to your film except perhaps, in this case, length. "The Turin Horse" is a classic example of a film made for film snobs, art-house aficionados who first check if their film is sub-titled, preferably from Eastern Europe and in black and white and by a director whose reputation for putting audiences to sleep goes before him; in other words, the kind of film art-houses and film societies were made for. Yes, it is radical and yes, I was certainly impressed by the technique but I think I would rather stick pins in my eyes than sit through it again.