Monthly Archives: February 2023

EO         Jerzy Skolimowski (Pol; 2022)   Sandra Drzymalska, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz

viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 Feb 2023; ticket: £10.25

now you see it

Jerzy Skolimowski’s ‘EO’ is a contemporary re- realising of Robert Bresson’s ‘Au Hazard Balthazar’.

In ‘Au Hazard Balthazar’ Bresson uses a donkey named Balthazar as device to enable him show something about human relations, to say something about the human soul. Bresson in a fashion posits Balthazar as being a creature in a state of grace, subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. As he is passed from hand to hand in rural France we see before us ordinary everyday human behaviour: the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, the violent and the tender. Balthazar is a touchstone for the cruelty and love endemic in human-animal interaction, and also a prism for us to see human relations laid bare, to see something of the fullness and emptiness of the human soul. When Balthazar dies, it is not through any direct act of malice or cruelty, but rather the accidental outcome of an act of human selfishness.

Skolimowski’s ‘EO’ develops the idea of ‘Balthazar’ as an invention who allows us to see things. Skolimowski’s opening shot is of the circus ring. The circus has become an emblematic symbol of the mistreatment of animals: where they are caged, tormented, reduced to living as spectacles for human amusement: but they do have a role. In accord with the times the circus folds; the animals including EO are sold off or sent to the knackers; what use does a modern society have for these creatures? For EO there is still some marginal use to which he can be put: traditional donkey work. But mostly he exists as a token a tolerated anomaly, occasionally useful. As he escapes is captured/re-captured, set free wanders across the asphalt of industrialised European landscape, EO is an animal out of time in an alien place. Rather like ourselves.

Bresson made ‘Balthazar’ in an era when Western society was still characterised by proximate relations between sentient beings, whether they were animal or human. Skolimowski is making his film when these relations are no longer so dominant in Western society. Of course interactions between EO and humans still have a significance; but Skolimowski’s donkey is a medium, a kindred being allowing us to open our eyes to the kinds of relations that shape our society: the relations between humans and their environment, humans and their technology.

It’s a moment of truth for an individual when the scales fall from their eyes and they see themselves as others see them. Through the eyes of EO we see something of ourselves, something of the world we have built. What characterises EO’s experience is the constricted point of view. In ‘EO’ this is often a travelling shot from a vehicle as EO is moved from place to place or the cropped views visible to him from out of the stalls in which he is housed. These all point to the existence of a world without vistas, a world that doesn’t open up to us. It’s a world where everything is framed or truncated. And there is something in the way EO is constrained to see the world that resembles how we also have come to see the world. Mostly it’s a world that is viewed through contemporary impedimenta such as the car window or a world seen through the framing of the screen. From whatever portal we might look out at the world, it is now often a world from which physically we are cut off. But so habituated are we to the restricted nature of what we can see, we are no longer aware of how limited our field of vision has become.

In relation to the built environment that surrounds us there is another aspect which the presence EO brings into focus. Through EO’s eyes we see the extent to which we are alienated from the structures that make possible much of our daily life; or perhaps better to say there is ‘distance’ now between us and strategic industrial parts of the environment we have created.  

We no longer move into the world, we move across the surface of the world: on roads and highways, motorways, autostrada. When we move in the ‘natural world’, we can merge with it become part of it, part of originary creation. Travelling on asphalt concrete and tarmac we move across surfaces that resist us. We can never be part of this world even though we have created it. There is one sequence where EO crosses a bridge built next to what looks like a hydro-electric scheme. It’s a vast structure built for the management of a river. It is huge and violent with its cascading churning water, terrifying in its non-human scale which defies our immediate apprehension. Surely it is not a human construction – rather an enterprise of Gods? We inhabit a world where its impossible for us to relate to the vast infrastructure systems that sustain our lives: they exist simply for us to use not to understand. In this sense the modern world reduces us to an ‘animal’ level of consciousness, we like them use and exploit without comprehension.   ‘EO’ draws us into an animal ‘being in the world’, a simpler mode of being enabling us to see how distanced we are from the most significant technological emanations of our civilisation.

Music tracks on film are mostly used to either reinforce or exploit emotional or emotive content. Skolimowski’s ambition for his music track in ‘EO’ is altogether different: his sound track is construed as an input discretely separate from that of his images. Skolimowski’s tracks have their own logic creating a world of suggestions moods and possibilities that run parallel to the picture but are never reduced to a mere supportive function.   The sound/music fills out and extends. Skolimowski’s sound is in a continually changing relationship to the picture: sometimes conjoined to image sometime creating soundscapes that exist in their own right independent of what we are seeing, encircling penetrating expanding the thematic content of the film.

Balthazar and EO are donkeys, the main characteristic of their animal presence is their facial inscrutability. Neither Bresson nor Skolimowsi resort to tricks that might endow them with anthropomorphic expressive qualities: we are at the opposite end of the horrific Disney spectrum. As filmed the donkeys main features are their eyes, which is apposite in these films which are about seeing ourselves. The donkeys are links, the links to ourselves.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

him show something about human relations, to say something about the human soul. Bresson in a fashion posits Balthazar as being a creature in a state of grace, subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. As he is passed from hand to hand in rural France we see before us ordinary everyday human interaction: the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, the violent and the tender. Balthazar is a touchstone for the cruelty and love endemic in human-animal interaction, and also a prism for us to see human relations laid bare, to see something of the fullness and emptiness of the human soul. When Balthazar dies, it is not through any direct act of malice or cruelty, but rather the accidental outcome of an act of human selfishness.

Skolimowski’s ‘EO’ develops the idea of Balthazar as an entity who allows us to see things. Skolimowski’s opening shot is of the circus ring. The circus has become an emblematic symbol of the mistreatment of animals: where they are caged, tormented, reduced to living as spectacles for human amusement. In accord with the times the circus folds, the animals including EO are sold off or sent to the knackers; what use does a modern society have for these creatures? For EO there is still some marginal use to which he can be put: traditional donkey work. But mostly he exists as a token a tolerated anomaly, occasionally useful. EO, as he escapes is captured/re-captured, set free, wanders across the asphalt industrialised European landscape, is an animal out of time in an alien place, perhaps rather like ourselves.

Bresson made ‘Balthazar’ in an era when Western society was still characterised by proximate relations between sentient beings, whether they were animal or human. Skolimowski is making his film when these relations are no longer so dominant in Western society. Of course interactions between EO and humans still have a significance; but Skolimowski’s donkey is a medium, an analogous device for us to see anew of kinds of relations that now shape the society we live in: the relations between humans and their environment, humans and their technology. Skolimowski’s film allows us to see where and how we live through the eyes of EO.

It’s a moment of truth for an individual when the scales fall from their eyes and they see themselves as others see them. Through the eyes of EO we see something of ourselves, something of the world we have built. What characterises EO’s experience is the constricted point of view. In ‘EO’ this is often a travelling shot from a vehicle as EO is moved from place to place or the cropped views visible to him from out of the stalls in which he is housed. These all point to the existence of a world without vistas, a world that doesn’t open up to us. It’s a world where everything is framed or truncated. And there is something in the way EO is constrained to see the world that resembles how we also have come to see the world. Mostly it’s a world that is viewed through contemporary impedimenta such as the car window or a world seen through the framing of the screen. From whatever portal we might look out at the world, it is now often a world from which physically we are cut off. But so habituated are we to the delimitation and restricted nature of what we can see, we are no longer aware of how limited our field of vision has become.

In relation to the built environment that surrounds us there is another aspect which the presence EO brings into focus. Through EO’s eyes we see the extent to which we are alienated from the structures that make possible much of our daily life; or perhaps better to say there is ‘distance’ now between us and strategic industrial parts of the environment we have created.  We no longer move into the world, we move across the surface of the world: on roads and highways, motorways, autostrada. When we move in the ‘natural world’, we can merge with it become part of it, part of originary creation. Travelling on asphalt concrete and tarmac we move across surfaces that resist us. We can never be part of this world even though we have created it.

There is one sequence where EO crosses a bridge built next to what looks like a hydro-electric scheme. It’s a vast structure built for the management of a river. It is huge and violent with its cascading churning water, terrifying in its non-human scale which defies our immediate apprehension. Surely it is not a human construction – rather an enterprise of Gods? We inhabit a world where its impossible for us to relate to the vast infrastructure systems that sustain our lives: they exist simply for us to use not to understand. In this sense the modern world reduces us to an ‘animal’ level of consciousness, we like them use and exploit without comprehension.   ‘EO’ draws us into an animal ‘being in the world’, a simpler mode of being enabling us to see how distanced we are from the most significant technological emanations of our civilisation.

Music tracks on film are mostly used to either reinforce or exploit emotional or emotive content. Skolimowski’s ambition for his music track in ‘EO’ is altogether different: his sound track is construed as an entity separate from that of his images. Skolimowski’s tracks have their own logic creating a world of suggestions moods and possibilities that run parallel to the picture but are never reduced to a mere supportive function.   The sound/music fills out and extends. Skolimowski’s sound is in a continually changing relationship to the picture: sometimes conjoined to image sometime creating soundscapes that exist in their own right independent of what we are seeing, encircling penetrating the thematic content of the film.

Balthazar and EO are donkeys and the main characteristic of their animal presence is their facial inscrutability. Neither Bresson nor Skolimowsi resort to tricks that might endow them with anthropomorphic expressive qualities: we are at the opposite end of the horrific Disney spectrum. As filmed the donkeys main features are their eyes, which is apposite in these films which are about seeing ourselves. The donkeys are links, the links to ourselves.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Enys Men     Mark Jenkin   (2022; UK;)   Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 26th Jan 2023; ticket: £10.25

Plastic flowers

Mark Jenkin’s ‘Enys Men’ is a assemblage of images revolving around a group of plastic flowers stuck into the ground on a cliff top setting on a remote island off Cornwall. It is not clear whether Jenkin’s protagonist ‘The Volunteer’ in responding to some deep psychological need, has stuck them into the ground herself or whether Jenkin himself misguidedly believes his audience might take them as real. Either way ‘Enys Men’ is a film, that in substance and form amounts to little more than a series of laborious filmic constructs, in particular his use of intercut historical ‘portraits’ reminded me of the films of Huillet and Straub, but lacking their intellectual rigour.

Like Jenkin’s first film ‘Bait’, ‘Enys Men’ is shot on 16mm. This system as used to shoot ‘Bait’ worked well in incorporating the suggestion of ‘memory retained’ into the actual body and fabric of the medium. The 16mm stock was edited so that the release print included reel ends, film processing marks and grain working into the film’s ‘present’ the idea of the omnipresence of ‘times that had passed’. As shot by Jenkin there was no need in ‘Bait’ for the structure of the script to incorporate flashbacks or other symbolic devices to represent the temporal tensions implicit in the scenario. The concept of ‘time’ was endemic in the use made of the characteristics of the film stock. “Enys Men’ was also shot on 16mm. In similar manner to ‘Bait’ it incorporates into its imagery similar features of the stock.

But can Jenkin pull off the same effect twice? My feeling is that in ‘Enys Men’ the use of 16mm yields greatly diminished returns to its artistic investment.

Besides the obvious problems involved in repeating the same film stock contrivances – repetition of same idea spectrum – there is the issue of the appropriateness of this stock to the subject of ‘Enyse Men’.   In ‘Bait’ the temporal aspect implicit in the way Jenkin used his 16mm film worked well as an expressive device underscoring the tensions in the relationship between the two brothers, with their contrasting attitude to change. In ‘Enys Men’ the central relation explored by Jenkin is between the volunteer and her own memory and its fusing with a collective memory. But in addition to the temporal aspect suggested by the 16mm film, we also have a script structure that uses flashbacks and other types of symbolic shots (tin miners; fishers; children in traditional Cornish costume a la Straudb and Huillet) to incorporate, to ‘block’, other ‘time’ into the scenario. In this respect the use of 16mm stock contributes little to the film which is sciptively structured so as to have ‘time’ itself as central to its concern.   Jenkin’s manner of using his stock comes across as a gimmick – or perhaps the conceit of stamping his signature onto his material.

Looking at some of the ideas Jenkin works into the scenario of ‘Enys Men’, they look like a mish-mash of ‘borrowings’ from other directors, ideas to which he fails to make any claim on ownership. Jenkin exploits the repeated imagary of the Volunteer’s daily round: her getting up, leaving, visiting the cliff top plastic flowers, dropping a stone into an old mine shaft, keeping a daily log of her observations. A routine that in form closely resembles Ackerman’s compulsive subject: Jeanne Dielman. The Volunteer’s two way radio communication, her ‘squawk box’ looks pulled straight out of Cocteau’s ‘Orphée’ and the sudden appearance and immediate disappearance of images from the past strongly recalls Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Back’. Second hand as it is, and lacking Roeg’s flair, the effect of Jenkin’s use of this device is flat. It’s part and parcel of many contemporary films to deploy ‘landscape’ ‘seascape’ ‘skyscape’ shots to imply some sort of psychological resonance with theme. But these sort of shots, spliced into an edit have simply become visual tropes, stand-by clichés exploited to bulk out impoverished scenarios with ‘meaning’. Occasionally as in Strickland’s ‘Katalin Varga’, there’s some psychic return; but Jenkin’s repetitious use of Cornwall’s sea girt rocks as suggestive of unchanging time simply overstates and overdetermines the obvious.

As the end credits rolled I noticed that Jenkin occupied all the key creative roles. He is: director – writer – DP – editor – composer – a man of many talents. Perhaps. In relation to ‘Enys Men’ the cinematography is second rate with a horrible over use of zoom shots, often accompanied by Jenkin’s music underscoring the emotional meaning of the zoom with a predictable crescendo. The editing seems uninspired as does such scripted dialogue, such as there is. Looking at Jenkin’s direction of his actors, for the most part they seem wooden as if frightened to do anything off their own bat and reduced to waiting on ‘the director’s instructions’. My feeling is that on this evidence Jenkin is a control freak, who needs to understand that film making is a collective enterprise.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk