Five Degrees North

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We only caught up with the films of Béla Tarr a short while ago, when we saw A torinói ló, The Turin Horse, his latest and last film. Tarr has been making films for 30 years. The Turin Horse starts with the captioned story of an incident in 1889, when Nietzsche saw a horse being whipped by a cab man in a street in Turin. He intervened, falling weeping on the animal’s neck. It was the start of his disintegration into madness and death. The story ends “We do not know what happened to the horse”.

This story may have no direct relevance to the film. The film opens with a long take of a horse driven along a road. But there is nothing to indicate that this is the same horse and we seem to be somewhere on a nameless central European plain rather than in Italy. The remainder of the film is set in the farmhouse where the cabman lives with his daughter. Each day is a repetition of the last. The daughter fetches water from the well, cooks a meal, which is always baked potato, helps her father, whose arm is injured, dress and undress. When the tasks are done, she stares out of the window at the wind battered plain. There are only two interruptions. A neighbour calls by and harangues the cabman about the influence of a mysterious they and a party of gypsies draw up noisily to drink from the well. They leave behind a book which the women read’s haltingly.

But this world is disintegrating. This is maybe the connection with the story about Nietzsche. Each morning the cabman tries to hitch the horse to the wagon but the horse refuses to move. It refuses to eat. The well dries up. They decide to leave, load everything into the cart, and the woman pushes because the horse won’t pull. They disappear over the horizon and then, with no explanation, return and unload. There is no escape. Finally the lamps will no longer light and even the sound of the wind drops away.

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During our recent trip to Ankara we visited the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations (*). The museum houses artefacts from the Palaeolithic through to the modern period, including the finds at Çatalhöyük, the most important Neolithic site, and Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite state.

Çatalhöyük is south of present day Konya in southern Turkey and at the northern edge of the Levant where agriculture in Europe originated. The site at  Çatalhöyük was occupied between 9,500 and 7,700 years ago. Unlike modern villages, the public space was the rooftop, from which the building was accessed by ladder or steps. There is evidence of the domestication of sheep and cattle as well as hunting. There is also evidence of the use of woven cloth to wrap the dead. The artworks produced include murals and figurines, such as the massive women giving birth. There is little sign of social stratification. The dwellings are of similar size and there is no obvious ceremonial centre.

Something I hadn’t appreciated before visiting the museum is that the sedentary lifestyle preceded farming rather than being a consequence of it. The sedentary lifestyle is thought to have originated in the Levant in what is called the Natufian period between 15,000 and 11,800 years ago. Although still a hunter gatherer economy, the sedentary lifestyle was made possible here by very favourable conditions. The hypothesis is that farming first developed in the Near East as a response to a period of colder weather between 12,200 and 10,800 years ago and then later spread across Europe, westwards and northwards, between 8,500 and 6,500 years ago.

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