Jerzy Skolimowski's newest film, EO, employs six donkeys to play the titular role. The collectiveness composing his identity is counter to what follows: EO is consistently ripped out of places and away from other people and animals.
People give EO all sorts of things: a name, unpaid jobs, shackles, food, warm company and romance. They furnish him injuries a living being can barely sustain. A sense of connection: one so mysterious and strong that it may be worth living and dying for.
Colors are saturated to the breaking point or as grey and white as a frozen forest. Bright red rattles outward. Sounds hammer and shatter; a call of alarm. Distance is crossed but the movie conceals much in the passage of time. A birthday is remarked upon once, though its unclear if EO has had several or one.
Color, unfamiliar angles and uncertain sound compose a map of insular, sentient experience. The map draws a worldview which is hard for us to see (and feel), because we are used to seeing as people, but here we see as something more.
Its a movie felt by a donkey and it tries to express what is outside of language. Implication of familiar feelings ground the movie as inside a mutual history: a shared trauma, an extermination.
What motivates EO? There is desire to find adulation, a need to flee danger. Its eyes cut through like words: how they look at us and look to us.
EO's movement is mapped in stereo; two tracks, and the movie's conceit is that there is convergence. Geography and population color in our sense of place as narrative action kicks in -- the donkey advances across Europe. One track is Emo EO's love-starved quest; the other track less attached to causality. It may be genetic instinct, earthly curiosity, or a vague urge to run away.
The two tracks never meet, and they never can. Can EO be free? It s an irrational hope, but when fortune finds EO every so often, the film lets in the possibility. This failure to accept reality may keep us alive. For a time.
If an animal is an ass it is because he thinks he is free, or that he could be. Echoes of Auschwitz, "Arbeit Macht Frei." The tenor and vistas of Skolimowski's movie run in parallel to ecosystems and ruins of WW2 Europe. Alternating scenes of free movement are cut short with scenes of static capture; boarded up animals. Corralled into final moments. Cooked. EO escapes deep into forests that once hid (and buried) Jewish people. The timeline is obscured, intensifying the indication of specters. Matzevah are seen in fleeting shots of EO's run in the forest. The Holocaust intrudes in the world of the present. A chronicle from the bottom rung of souls.
EO's slavery crushes us all. One can not un-see or-un hear EO. It serves up a stereographic record of ecstasy and horror. It shows the truth that humans and donkeys share; we strive for significance, and we are reduced to meat.
People are the beasts, and the animals are people.
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