Part of my coverage of the 58th Chicago International Film Festival.
EO ***
Jerzy Skolimowski2022
IDEA: Passed from owner to owner, a circus donkey witnesses human kindnesses and brutalities.
BLURB: To what degree do animals have internal lives, thoughts, and imaginations, and to what degree do we simply anthropomorphize them? Without denying the latter inevitable impulse, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO endeavors to express a consciousness beyond the limited scope of human perception. When the writer-director and DP Michał Dymek aren’t reveling in the tactile earthly textures of donkey fur, grass, and mud, they’re launching into hallucinatory flights of fancy that suggest something like the titular creature’s fever dreams. Suddenly, the image might become drenched in a hellish crimson, the camera detached from any corporeal subjectivity as it soars weightlessly over forests and streams or curiously examines the travails of a four-legged robot. We always return to the donkey, who looks alternately indifferent and perturbed as Paweł Mykietyn’s booming trance-cum-classical score floods the acoustic environment with foreboding. What is EO really seeing and feeling? The shape and content of Skolimowski’s montage – which is driven by an often inscrutable, arbitrary-seeming logic – conveys a sense of temporal confusion and alienation. Perhaps EO is feeling obsolete in a modern world where his labor has become outmoded due to mechanized industry. Most likely he doesn’t much care about us humans, whose cruelties and follies appear as mere dots on the periphery of his implacable journey, until they actively impede his progress. EO may be directly inspired by Bresson’s classic Au Hasard Balthazar, but it has just as much in common with Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda or even Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, films that seek to channel non-human perspectives by confounding our naturalized modes of experiencing the world. Skolimowski’s film is a similarly transfixing, at times bewildering audiovisual trip, gesturing toward something insuperably out of grasp.
IDEA: Passed from owner to owner, a circus donkey witnesses human kindnesses and brutalities.
BLURB: To what degree do animals have internal lives, thoughts, and imaginations, and to what degree do we simply anthropomorphize them? Without denying the latter inevitable impulse, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO endeavors to express a consciousness beyond the limited scope of human perception. When the writer-director and DP Michał Dymek aren’t reveling in the tactile earthly textures of donkey fur, grass, and mud, they’re launching into hallucinatory flights of fancy that suggest something like the titular creature’s fever dreams. Suddenly, the image might become drenched in a hellish crimson, the camera detached from any corporeal subjectivity as it soars weightlessly over forests and streams or curiously examines the travails of a four-legged robot. We always return to the donkey, who looks alternately indifferent and perturbed as Paweł Mykietyn’s booming trance-cum-classical score floods the acoustic environment with foreboding. What is EO really seeing and feeling? The shape and content of Skolimowski’s montage – which is driven by an often inscrutable, arbitrary-seeming logic – conveys a sense of temporal confusion and alienation. Perhaps EO is feeling obsolete in a modern world where his labor has become outmoded due to mechanized industry. Most likely he doesn’t much care about us humans, whose cruelties and follies appear as mere dots on the periphery of his implacable journey, until they actively impede his progress. EO may be directly inspired by Bresson’s classic Au Hasard Balthazar, but it has just as much in common with Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda or even Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, films that seek to channel non-human perspectives by confounding our naturalized modes of experiencing the world. Skolimowski’s film is a similarly transfixing, at times bewildering audiovisual trip, gesturing toward something insuperably out of grasp.
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