TASK | Analyze character and story development

The Turin Horse

Year: 2011

Director: Béla Tarr

Country: Hungary

One day of 1882, Nietzsche went out of his house and saw a horse rider hitting his horse because it did not want to move. After seeing this episode, Nietzsche became demented and ill, and stopped to speak until right after his death. This movie tells the story if that horse rider.

The horse rider is a potato farmer which lives with his daughter and his horse. They live in a repetitive existence defined by nihilistic despair. They do not have any contact with other people and they don even have much contact with their selves. They often take turns sitting by the window alone. The horse, is also uncooperative, refusing to leave the property, eat or drink.

This movie is really interesting as a narrative piece because it has almost no dialogue. The audience has to recreate the story and psychology of the characters by their actions, expressions and silence.

Since the begging, the story narrates the apathy an lack of humanization of the characters. It tries to do an hiperbolization of the future within the past, taking as a main topic the apathy and individualism of human relationships. The movie looks like just passing by, as the characters. You realize that they are completely flat. Day after day, you can catch only minor changes in their behavior or reactions. In the case of the daughter, you can see a bit of increasing frustration, but in the case of the father, his behavior is totally intransigent. You can see that he is unhappy with his life but he truly believes it is the only and best way to act. In this sense, the man symbolizes the apathy of accepting a non comfortable reality, defending that truth as it was his; the woman symbolizes the frustration of still having faith in a world that seems lost, and the horse symbolizes the impotence of wanting to change the circumstances and not be able to. The correlation of the three characters is comparable with the correlation of this three feelings in the same person, which is common in nowadays life, due to the new order of the world which is coming upon us.

The Graduate

Year: 1967

Director: Mike Nichols

Country: USA

Ben has recently graduated from college. Everyone is expecting great things from him.

This period of the life is basically common in everyone, the step which lead from one stage to the other, the changing. Because of it, Ben is totally lost in his life. He does not know what to expect from his future, he does not who he is and he does not know what he wants. Over more, in this stage of weakness, Mrs Robinson steps into his life. She takes advantage of his confusion and she makes him fall into her charming, we can see that Ben is in a total stage of inactivity, just flowing with the things that happen around him, not being sure of what he wants or not. In this sage of emptiness and being lost, he meets the daughter or Mrs Robinson.  Then , is the moment when he is sure about something. He tries to reject her at first, until he find out that he is in love with her. He continues to date her despite Mrs Robinson strictly asked him not to do it. It makes us feel that Ben likes the forbidden, the hidden, all the things that he is not expected to do. But the game does not last long, the daughter of Ms Robinson quickly finds out the relationship between Ben and his mother and she became sad, angry, and decides not to speak to him anymore. From this moment, Ben decides to put apart everything and focus the motivation of his life to have her back. He move himself, he fight with her parents and with everyone, not caring about anything but getting her back.

In his limit, he realizes that she is going to get married. Therefore, he decides to run into the wedding in order to stop it and to ask her to run away with her. He does it, and in the peak of the chaos she run away with him and they escape together. At the end of the movie, once they have done the craziest thing, they finally seat down, and in the last scene you can see again that lost view in their eyes, once he has achieved the goal, we goes back to his initial stage: What happens next?