The animal gaze, the human gaze, and Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO.
Returning to the early soviet dialectic of montage, of the third, invisible image emerging from the in-between when juxtaposing the two, thus ascribing signification only via the union, we have, then, Bresson’s posterior version: that what cinema does is produce contiguity between objects and subjects through the gaze. Those conceptions follow the observation that, in the ambiguity of an image for itself, provided by its matter, the real in all its density for being photographic, it is the deliberateness of assigning place and cutting which provokes the human eye to create specified meaning and reading of intent onto cinema as an object.
Clearly, one can poke holes attending to the equal deliberateness of camera manipulation, but that ignores that even those acquire sense, not by itself, but when passing it through the perspective at the heart of montage: prevailing that a shot gains further, semantic values by alimenting the need of deciphering that a juxtaposition and factorizing it approximates us. Meaning finds in the relation of things.
The veteran Polish provocateur, Jerzy Skolimowski, is lucid about this topic; subjectivity is the unifier factor of his cinema and its ambitions, that all is transversal to the unique gaze of the given subject. Deep End (1970), arguably his most acclaimed picture, benefits from this notion to access the psychology of premature obsession as perpetual image-making, eradicating the other via replacing them with your gaze for how you see them. Applying this governing rule of his narrativity and stylization to a non-human, a donkey, is of interest as conceptual. An animal gaze distinguishes, associates, and remembers in unique terms, not responding to the linguistic and cultural norms of the human eye.
EO (2022) presents a question of how, if possible, to access the cognition of an animal and imprint it onto a filmic form. Eo’s gaze is crucial for its exercise, not only in the lens’ tender observation of those profoundly dark, glassy eyes where lights reflect. We always return to Eo as observer-subject, with his surroundings as observed-objects. Sublime white horses, agitated ecologist protests, erratic drunken drivers, savage football matches, the vast Polish grass; all counterpoint as reverse shots of what Eo witnesses in his travelogue, only continuous spatially.
To an extent, I congratulated the film. I thought, “how courageous to mirror back our necessity for asserting human meaning onto it all with the inherent ambiguity of an animal gaze, which fits differing terms to our own and places a critical distance.” However, at one point, Eo expresses melancholy, looking at a plain dirty wall. A whisper emerges naming him, and Skolimowski decides to cut to a shot of Kassandra, Eo’s owner when laboring at a circus, backlit by fire, dearly holding and pressing her lips to that hairy face, returning to Eo, alone in a blue, wide shot, contemplating outside a window.
There, in that rationalized division of past/present, imagined/material, the realization came to me of what Skolimowski’s grammar was truly grasping: to turn the donkey not a mere subject but an anthropomorphic one, crying as Kassandra parts away in a motorcycle, kicking a man as justice for inflicting abuses against foxes, trembling for the hazy menace of the forest as owls discretely attend; the incessant chords in the soundtrack, the causality in the precise order of the montage, and what the camera emphasizes in its framing. Thus create an anthropomorphic perspective with underlined causes around the action. Three flashback shots at different instances reveal a motivation in Eo’s travelogue, a logical course with the social structures of control as an impediment to reaching the affection of the beloved owner.
There is still an elementality to its images in the sporadic bursts of arbitrariness, a primal feel evoked in those landscapes, but reduced by the necessity to mold the odyssey after decisions that humanize the animal. Skolimowski assassinates all mystery. Failing his noble intent that the tired determinism of the conclusion in using Eo as a cautionary fable and the final title card explicate of attempting to raise awareness about industrial and social animal cruelty. But how can its empathy be pure in its incapacity to inspire it, if not through identifying human attributes rather than empathizing with the animal for itself?
It is not that it is far from the beauty that it fails, is that, by eliminating the ambiguity of the real systematically in the tension of the photographic with montage, which would provide a closer commitment from the audience to engage with Eo in its animal terms. The comparison is inevitable, and their goals might differ, but in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Bresson’s formal rejection of directly accessing character psychology allows the donkey to be, as an animal, permitting distance from the human pathos. EO (2022), abstracts with its artificiality the density it could achieve, supplanting it with vacuous archetypes and unearned sentimentality. Despite all the dazzling visuals, the effort reads as arrogant, closer to reproducing anthropocentrism instead of disarming it.
EO
Year: 2022
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski
Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Isabelle Huppert, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz.
