EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022) (Patreon)

Plenty has already been written about EO, Jerzy Skolimowski's very strange, often exhilarating new film. And while the director himself has confirmed what most viewers detected immediately -- that EO is a loose adaptation of Bresson's Au hasard, Balthasar -- I actually noticed similarities to another Bresson film. In L'Argent, Bresson follows the movement of a counterfeit 500-franc note as it's passed from person to person. This is, of course, the essential structure of Balthasar as well, but EO made me recognize this similarity. Foregrounding the movement of objects is a fundamental premise of many of Bresson's films. But EO focuses on one of the key philosophical postulates inherent in this approach. 

The donkey is private property. We first see EO cast out of his own limited view of paradise -- a circus where he performs with Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), who treats him with love and respect. The reason EO has to leave is because the circus management has defaulted on its bank loans, and EO, along with the other circus animals, is seized as collateral. This is not just a narrative problem, although it certainly generates a sad irony. Animal rights activists are seen protesting the abuse of animals in circuses, and they are not wrong. But EO was living his best life under the big top. His particular circumstances cannot be accounted for when protestors are trying to improve the lot of "animals" in general.

The real crime, then, is not that EO is here rather than there. It's that, like the banknote or the wallets in Pickpocket, he is a unit of exchange, the trajectory of his life determined by human economic factors he can never understand. He exists in a twilight between subject and object. He is property, but he is alive. (Incidentally, in his essay "Art as Technique," Viktor Shklovsky cites a story by Tolstoy, in which the narration, from a horse's point of view, muses on the mystifying question of ownership.) And so, like Balthasar, EO is forced to be a passive observer to his own fate.

We see animals in movies and TV all the time, and we usually think nothing of it. That's largely because cinematic grammar regards them as plot devices, as instrumentally defined as if they were working on the farm. Simply by using reaction shots and point of view, Skolimowski sutures us into EO's perspective, demanding that we empathize with him. As we recall from Cast Away, Robert Zemeckis was able to humanize a volleyball. There's nothing so strange about this. But when we are inserted into EO's point of view, we cannot avoid occupying it from our uniquely human perspective. So, when EO is being transported to his next owner, we see him gaze out the window at a herd of horses running free beside the road. We cannot know how EO feels about this, or if he even notices. But we feel for him, regarding the scene as an unavoidable representation of freedom vs. slavery.

Like Bresson, Skolimowski recognizes that animals can function as mirrors of our own subjectivity. We don't identify with EO so much as identify at him, allowing his mute, stoic plight to reflect our own values back at us. (Eisenstein once wrote that the abattoir scene in Strike, meant to parallel the Czar's butchering of the peasants, didn't play well in the countryside, where animal slaughter is an unsurprising fact of life. I wonder how EO might play down on the farm.) Unlike a human protagonist, EO elicits both our sympathy and our recognition that it's never really possible to know "the other" at all.

This being a 2022 production, Skolimowski understands that he cannot simply remake Balthasar. EO is not just a donkey story but a story about seeing and feeling, interrogating the ways that cinema has historically encouraged or discouraged our empathy. There are numerous cinematic allusions in EO, some of which are very much about cinematic identification. One scene (pictured above) mimics the final shot of The Searchers, where the subject is forced to remain outside of society. Another sequence, in which EO travels by night along a river shimmering in an eerie, consecrated moonlight, recalls a similar scene in The Night of the Hunter. Both of these speak to cinema's capacity for isolating the perceived outsider.

But other sequences are more cinematically primal. Several shots of EO and a white horse he encounters, cantering in a circle in a training ground, resemble the motion studies of Muybridge, something Skolimowski amplifies with a pulsating flicker. Another late scene, with EO wandering down the the central aisle of a stable, uses undulating lighting to replicate Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity. These moments disrupt empathy, replacing it with an examination of cinema's raw data, the illusion of movement that is the precondition for identification and also refutes it in favor of a stark, materialist look at the world.

These scenes, like several others, are demarcated by a crimson filter, something which forcibly removes us from EO's diegetic space. At first these red segments seem to be EO's memories, or his impassive gaze out at the world around him. But at other times, the red scenes do not correspond to any available point of view, except the camera's and perhaps God's. In this way, Skolimowski asserts the camera's helplessness with regard to EO. Neither we nor the film can intercede on his behalf, and so Skolimowski asks us to exist alongside the donkey in a consideration of our own smallness. It strands us at the intersection of the mundane and the sublime.