“In Turin, on January 3rd, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the door of number six, via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his mail. Not far from him, or indeed very far removed from him, a cabman is having trouble with his stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the cabman—Giuseppe? Carlo? Ettore?—loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and that puts an end to the brutal scene of the cabman, who by this time is foaming with rage. The solidly built and full-mustached Nietzsche suddenly jumps up to the cab and throws his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His neighbor takes him home, where he lies still and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words: “Mutter, ich bin dumm” (Mother, I am dumb). Of the horse… we know nothing.”

—The Turin Horse, 2011

We hear these words, read by narrator Mihály Ráday, over a black screen; the first few minutes of Béla Tarr’s 2011 film, The Turin Horse. The first shot — a horse. It’s slow, rhythmic gait is almost hypnotic. It pulls the carriage forward, its hooves sinking slightly into the muddy earth with every step, creating a syncopated rhythm of movement that is somehow both mechanical and organic, as though the two forces—the animal and the cart—are both struggling under the weight of existence. Along a barren dirt road, a ragged figure—Ohlsdorfer—sits quietly, draped in heavy, tattered clothes, hunched over with the weight of age or perhaps the weight of the world. His posture is stiff, his hands gripping the reigns with a lethargic kind of purpose. There is no rush here. 

It is, in a sense, a perfect encapsulation of the entire film’s ethos: a world locked in a cycle of never-ending effort without any sense of progression, any sense of redemption, or escape. Béla Tarr’s camera moves at the same pace, insistent yet languid, as though it’s too tired to speed up, too resigned to the futility of acceleration. The shot feels like a representation of life itself—endless, trudging forward, where the only certainty is the weight of time, the passage of existence, and the sheer, Sisyphean futility of it all. Tarr's films explore existence as a philosophical question, where time is not just a passage, but an oppressive, cyclical force demanding endurance and resignation. The endless repetition, the eternal recurrence, is not a cosmic joke, but an invitation to confront the most profound truths of human life: that we must continue, even when there seems to be no purpose, and that time, for all its cruelty, is a force we can neither escape nor control. 

The characters in Tarr’s wildly intimidating epic, Sátántangó (1994)—a film so gorgeously punishing that even the thought of sitting through its seven-hour runtime feels akin to an act of pure masochism—seem to resist the very idea of time. There’s no driving ambition, no sense of “I need to get somewhere” because getting somewhere isn’t a possibility. These characters—their actions are all drawn from obligation, not desire. They move because they have to, like mindless clockwork, coiled up in an unceasing pull toward nothing. It’s Estike, played by Erika Bok, clutching her dead cat, laying in the barren landscape of rural Hungary for minutes on end. Or, Irimiás (Mihály Víg) and Petrina (Putyi Horváth) walking through heavy gusts of wind, the garbage around them whipped and stirred around like a snowglobe. However, with Tarr’s films, what I’ve realized is that inadvertently you’ll reach a moment—a seismic shift. You don’t care about what the characters do anymore; you care about how long you’ve been sitting there, suspended, lost in time. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes Sátántangó such a unique exercise in patience, but I think it’s that Tarr doesn’t just show us the passage of time; he forces us to live it. Characters go through the motions of their lives, but there’s an unmistakable reluctance in their actions. They don’t do anything because they want to—they do because they have to. Time doesn’t pass in real time, it stretches, like rubber pulled too thin. In this sense, Tarr’s vision of stasis isn’t just a matter of technical stillness. There’s an emotional and psychological aspect to it, a certain trudging weight that permeates every scene. There’s a certain rawness to it all, an emotional purity I think Tarr is reaching for when he says, “I wanted to show you my image of the world... It’s not about giving a message. It’s about capturing life as it is” (qtd. in Kuzma). Tarr’s camera gazes, quietly, and lets the world unfold without intervention. There are no easy tropes. No gentle guiding hands leading us into the “feelings” we’re supposed to have. No manipulation. Nothing is designed to give us hope, and if it were, that would be a lie. It’s just there. 

There's a kind of radical honesty in the way Tarr's camera operates, and it’s this very quality that shapes the viewer’s perception. In a traditional film, the camera functions as a kind of semi-invisible puppet-master, subtly nudging the audience towards emotional responses—through framing, pacing, and often a kind of filmic musicality in the editing. But in Tarr’s world, the camera's lack of these “intrusions” doesn’t translate into neutrality or a blank slate. It’s not so much a passive window onto the world as it is an active, though unassuming, presence. The long takes, the extended moments where we are meant to watch not just the characters, but the world around them, are as much an ethical stance as they are an aesthetic one. They imprison us there, compelling us to witness life’s small, insignificant motions—the dirt, the creak of the wooden door, the shift of a human body under the crushing weight of time. In this sense, Tarr’s camera isn’t not manipulating. It’s manipulating in a way that doesn’t attempt to conceal its influence. What’s important here, and what gives Tarr’s work its power, is that by stripping away the artifice of emotion-laden close-ups or rapid cuts, he doesn’t leave us with nothing. Instead, he creates a space for the most harrowing kind of immersion: the kind that leaves us no choice but to reckon with the mundanity of life. We are confronted not with some climactic revelation or cathartic moment of transcendence, but with the relentless passage of seconds, the unyielding persistence of the now. 

Tarr’s films tend to flirt with the philosophical undercurrents of Nietzsche’s ideas—existentialism, the weight of time, the futility of human actions. His use of the “visitor,” that strange, almost spectral figure that shows up briefly in The Turin Horse (2011), is another example of his bleak view on human existence. This visitor—an old man who asks for a drink of water—represents nothing more than the emptiness of life in Tarr’s world. He doesn’t bring revelation, and his presence in the story is minimal, almost pointless. But that’s precisely why he’s important: he underscores the essential meaninglessness of human action. “Things don’t change,” Tarr muses in the interview, “they just persist, in an endlessly suffocating cycle.” And that’s the film’s message—not one of hope or redemption, but a relentless, suffocating insistence on the permanence of stagnation. It’s not about narrative, not about emotion, not about what happens. It’s about time itself, the oppressive nature of it, the endless wheel of existence. In The Turin Horse, Tarr’s camera is deliberately not leading us somewhere. It’s surveying, waiting, observing, and it enables us to do the same. He doesn’t want to trick the audience, doesn’t want us to feel anything in particular. “Cinema is not like literature,” Tarr notes, “it shows you only what is in front of the lens. You can’t fake it.”

The visitor’s inconsequential presence in The Turin Horse reflects Tarr’s broader approach to time, where the camera’s own ‘waiting’ serves as an integral part of the film’s meditation on existence. Time is raw and alive, an ever-present force that shapes the human experience with an uncomfortable immediacy. The long takes that characterize Tarr’s films are not just aesthetic choices; they are deliberate attempts to slow down the process of filmmaking, to hold the viewer in the suspended space of experience. “When I think about time,” Tarr has said, “I just think about the quality of human life… when I say ‘shit,’ I think I’m very close to it” (Daly and Le Cain). Time in Tarr’s world is a prison—one that traps us within our own existential boundaries, a never-ending loop of life’s discomforts, always testing the limits of what we can understand. We don’t digest time as a concept, but rather through material events. In “Jacques Rancière's Béla Tarr, The Time After,” author Rose McLaren puts it nicely, “...He resorts to the language of thesis, antithesis, synthesis—expressed through that tired old dichotomy of body and spirit, conjoined in a moral judgement to which we are subject” (McLaren). The sense of time in Tarr’s films is not merely a chronological sequence, but something far more visceral—a thick, oppressive presence, like the weight of gravity itself. It’s as if time isn’t just measured in seconds and minutes, but felt in the flesh, in the bones of the characters. This isn’t a universe where a clock can measure anything useful; here, the hours are liquid, ebbing and flowing like the mud-caked streets beneath the characters’ feet. And yet—perhaps this is what makes it so haunting—time’s passage feels inescapable. Like a slow poison, it leaks into every crevice, making every tick, every droplet of rain, every repetition of the mundane, feel unbearably heavy, as though there is no escape from the inevitability of it all.

The term “eternal recurrence,” coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, refers to the idea that everything—the joys, the sorrows, the endless, mundane moments of our existence—will repeat themselves infinitely, over and over again, in some never-ending cycle until the end of time. When you watch Tarr’s films, it’s as though you’re caught in a sequence of events you can’t control, and which will just keep unfolding in a direction that has no particular end. And this is how Tarr traps you—the viewer—within this loop. It’s not just a narrative or a thematic structure; it’s a feeling of suffocation. But does this mean Tarr is offering us a nihilistic universe? Not necessarily, though it would be easy to fall into that trap. What Tarr’s films do—and it’s a subtle but important distinction—is invite us to accept that joy and pain are not separate. They’re wrapped together in this impossible-to-unwind knot, and the universe doesn’t care that we can’t untie it. It’s just there. 

Time, like the horse, drags us forward. Is that joy? Is there joy in a world like this? It’s a tricky thing to define in Tarr’s cinematic language. Sure, there’s something in these films that almost resembles joy—if joy is the odd, almost parodic triumph of surviving this endless, grinding loop. In The Turin Horse, the old man, struggling against the fury of the wind and the relentless, howling nothingness of the world, manages to get his horse harnessed to the cart once more—there’s no triumph in any traditional sense. There are no raucous celebrations, no confetti, no winning of anything tangible. It’s just him, gritting his teeth against the storm, holding his tired, shaking hands on the reins as the horse labors on, the last connection between him and the world outside of his decaying hut. It’s a moment that feels like it could almost be heroic, but only if you squint—only if you’re willing to take a hard look at the absurdity of it all, the absurdity of him, this ancient man whose every breath seems a protest against the elemental forces surrounding him. Or in Family Nest (1979), when Laci (László Horváth), after the ceaseless, frustrating turmoil of dealing with his family’s bickering, their financial collapse, their endless, joyless struggles, sits down at the kitchen table with his mother, and there’s this moment of quiet. It’s almost unremarkable—he’s chewing something bland and unidentifiable, probably greasy, maybe tasteless. The camera lingers just a touch longer than you expect, and you start to feel the weight of their exhaustion, the slow, heavy drag of their lives. They’re not talking much, just occupying the same space, their lives reduced to the smallest, most visceral gestures of survival. If joy is the ability to find something to hold on to after taking in seven hours of human futility in Satantango, then maybe, just maybe, that is joy. But it’s not the kind of joy we’re used to. It’s not easy. It’s not happy. It’s the satisfaction of having endured—having survived—and, in that survival, a kind of freedom.

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence does not follow as a conclusion of a simple argument. In fact, it would be easy to misunderstand what he’s saying by treating it as some neat, tidy cosmic order—a universe with a predetermined sequence of events, governed by rules or systems. But Nietzsche himself suggests that we can't really expect that, for example, the sequence of events (3, 4, 1, 2) will lead into another precise set (3, 4, 1, 2 again), or that some grand symmetry will emerge from these infinite combinations. Life, time, events—they just keep repeating. This is exactly how Tarr’s films feel: no neat patterns, no clean resolutions, just a grinding, recurring experience that rolls on and on until you don’t even know if you’re still living them or if you’ve been living them forever. 

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence does not follow as a conclusion of a simple argument. In fact, it would be easy to misunderstand what he’s saying by treating it as some neat, tidy cosmic order—a universe with a predetermined sequence of events, governed by rules or systems. But Nietzsche himself suggests that we can't really expect that, for example, the sequence of events (3, 4, 1, 2) will lead into another precise set (3, 4, 1, 2 again), or that some grand symmetry will emerge from these infinite combinations. Life, time, events—they just keep repeating. This is exactly how Tarr’s films feel: no neat patterns, no clean resolutions, just a grinding, recurring experience that rolls on and on until you don’t even know if you’re still living them or if you’ve been living them forever. In Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), this repetitive, indifferent universe is made even more explicit. A key moment, around the one-hour mark, occurs when a neighbor comes to share a drink with an old driver. The man sits at the table, musing aloud that “everything has gone to ruin.” As written in Sebastian Tow’s A Torinoi Lo: An Existentialist Reading of 'The Turin Horse.',” the man speaks of ruin and demise, of rumors of the end of morals, and of a generation adrift in despair, making an, “explicit reference to the death of God,” and echoing the “famous passage The Parable of the Madman from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, when a man comes to a village asking for God, but those he finds only inform him of His death” (Tow). Here, the film captures not only the existential malaise of the characters but also a direct philosophical resonance with Nietzsche’s declaration of God’s death—an absence that, much like the film’s world, leaves only a relentless, cyclical emptiness. The neighbor’s words underscore the collapse of meaning, a perfect complement to Tarr’s bleak depiction of time as an oppressive dominion, one that demands we endure its passage without any hope for redemption or progress.

Or even in the opening of Werckmeister Harmonies, where our protagonist, Janos, turns the bar into a solar system, is a perfect microcosm of Tarr's vision of time. Janos doesn’t just explain the cosmos; he maps it onto the bar, placing men, bottles, and tables into positions like planets and stars, a configuration that’s both arbitrary and vast. The camera moves slowly, meticulously, capturing the way life and time repeat themselves with no meaningful progression. The men around him barely listen—they’re drunk, disinterested, as if to underscore that the universe will go on, indifferent to their attention. Tarr’s camera lingers on this absurd gesture, and in doing so, pushes us into the same endless loop. Time isn’t a march toward anything—it’s the same stuff happening over and over again. What’s haunting about this scene—what makes it feel so deeply Nietzschean—is that we, the viewers, are forced into the same paradox. Janos’ actions are futile, yet they’re not futile in the traditional sense, because it’s not that the universe isn’t there, it’s that it’s too there, too vast and indifferent to make sense of. The camera, as it pans across these simple, everyday actions—Janos spinning around and arranging people as planets—becomes part of this stasis. Time isn’t moving toward anything. It’s as if we’ve entered a cosmic arena, one where life continues to unfurl endlessly in meaningless loops. The bartender shuffles around, ignoring Janos. The drunks sit there, indifferent. And yet we’re watching. And so, for a fleeting moment, we too become complicit in this strange, never-ending cycle of trying to impose meaning where none exists. Tarr’s cinematic universe, much like Nietzsche’s, is unyielding, dense, and indifferent.

However, Nietzsche also points out a crucial dilemma for those who are unable to come to terms with the coexistence of pain and joy. He suggests that some might be so overwhelmed by their suffering that the very thought of repeating their painful moments forever would lead them into “a nihilistic perspective that may prevent their potential to affirm anything” (Burchat 37). This, Nietzsche argues, is what makes the concept of eternal recurrence the greatest weight. And this weight—this tension—finds its way into Tarr’s films in such a visceral, almost unbearable way. We are forced to witness characters who cannot reconcile their joy with their pain, trapped in a cycle that necessitates them to confront their existential despair over and over again. This is precisely what Tarr seems to be asking of the viewer—to accept the coexistence of joy and pain, not as two separate experiences but as a unified whole, part of the same endless cycle.

Tarr doesn’t offer us catharsis. There are no moments of transcendence, no sudden bursts of light breaking through the fog of despair. What Tarr gives us is the possibility of affirming life—not despite its pain, but because of it. The invitation, then, is not to find meaning in the cycle, but to accept it fully, even as it spirals endlessly, without hope of release. In this, Tarr’s work is a kind of philosophical endurance test, a challenge to sit still long enough, to stay trapped in the moment, long enough to feel the full weight of Nietzsche’s question: How would you live if you knew every moment, every joy, every agony, would repeat eternally? In Tarr’s world, there’s no easy answer, only the slow, grinding persistence of life itself. And perhaps, in that persistence, there is a strange kind of freedom.