children on a country road

In Kaurismaki's Le Havre Elina Salo reads to Kati Outinen, while she is ill in hospital, from an unusual text: Kafka's Children on a Country Road. Specifically she reads the concluding lines 'just think they never sleep...because they are fools'. Now Kaurismaki's work abounds in references to writers, often French; eg Micheaux and Prevert; but does the Kafka quote denote more than referentiality?  Benjamin discusses a clan of sleepless types who occur through Kafka: students, assistants, waiters, residents of the city in the south. About the faces of these figures he notes that Kafka says 'they seem to be those of grown ups, perhaps even students'. Kaurismaki does not derive films from Kafka but the 'grown up' look of the students may be very similar to Kati Outinen's persistent unblinking stare.

eternal noon

Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse is hard to watch; a man and his daughter spend their days in a remote farm house while a storm blows continually outside.Each day the routine is the same: she helps him dress, keeps the stove going, goes out to get water from the well in the wind, feeds the horse, and finally prepares a meal, always the same, of a boiled potato which they eat with their fingers at a bare table and so on recurringly. In due course the well dries and the horse flags; they attempt an escape but return and go back to the same routine. Perhaps Nietzsche had a couple like this in mind when he came up with his idea of Eternal Recurrence (ER); each moment in their life will recur; to the daughter going each day to the well Nietzsche says 'etch the image of eternity onto your life'.

Tarr quotes from Nietzsche at the beginning of the film. Perhaps he wants to reveal to us a flavour of ER or perhaps he has in mind a further thought; there is now a proposal that by fasting we can significantly extend our lives; rats on a restricted diet live longer. Imagine a time when large numbers of 120 year-olds exist; they will be very healthy with gleaming skin and bright eyes although many of them (notwithstanding medical breakthroughs) will have Altzheimers. For them, trapped in an eternal noon, the present will eternally recur. Watching The Turin Horse does feel like ER; the actors in the film will have experienced ER; the film may be a good picture of what ER is like; nor will the persons caring for the vacant 120 year-olds (with or without Althzheiners) escape eternally recurring boredom.