Back to Back 33 - Donkey See, Donkey Do
Contrasting polar opposite approaches to the same story, a half-century apart
Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966) - writer/director Robert Bresson
EO (2022) - writer/director Jerzy Skolimowski
ASS: Now then, won’t some of the asses, or at least one of the asses, be allowed entrance into the Academy of the Humans?
FOOL: All are received into the Academy of the Asses, and it must not be so in the Academy of the Humans.
ASS: Which is more worthy: that a human becomes asinine, or that an ass becomes human?
Giordano Bruno, Dialogue of the Cyllenic Ass (1585)
Some of you may have trouble distinguishing between monkey and donkey, because they're both cute creatures, both with a number of cartoon manifestations beloved of kids, and linguistically are only a consonant - and a troublesomely distinct vowel phoneme - apart.
If that's the case, let me clear it up for you: a monkey is a little monk, who got tired of life in the monastery and took to the trees, whereas a donkey is also known as an ass, because you put your ass on it when you ride it. Clear? Very well then, let's move on to the transcendent theological immanence of assitude, or the metaphysics of donkeys. But first some qualia.
The famous Thomas Nagel essay 'What is it like to be a Bat?' discusses the basic question of qualia, the actual sensation of experiencing sensory inputs like pains, colours, tastes and sounds. If a bat doesn't see like we do, but builds a world-picture out of echolocation, what's that actually like?
Batvision, or something
The response by Peter Hacker, 'Is there anything it is like to be a Bat?' kiboshes all further speculation on this front, arguing that the very question is badly-framed, that a being without consciousness doesn't have a state that it is 'like' to be in, it just is, and doesn't even have qualia, conscious sensations, as we would understand them.
Meanwhile philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said in his brilliant and enigmatic late work Philosophical Investigations (1953) that "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him". That's why I never allowed my kids to see The Lion King, not wishing to expose them to nonhuman drivel that could only confuse them about the true nature of kingship, the centrality of class conflict, and the important role of hyenas in the savannah ecosystem. Contra the Disney Golden Age classic, then, and following Wittgenstein, we can assert that true verbalizable understanding of an animal's experience is just impossible. There are no words to describe what it is to be a bat, or a lion, or a donkey - no, not even 'Hakuna Matata'.
In summary, it's quite futile to even attempt to anthropomorphize an animal, to attribute to it any kind of point of view that we can 'relate to'. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't have empathy with the animal and even the plant kingdom, but it's an empathy that has to come with the recognition that what we're empathizing with just isn't us. That cute donkey isn't simply a happy little child in a donkey skin (or even a beautiful Catherine Deneuve princess in a donkey skin). It's a completely different creature to how we are, with a radically different and unknowable experience.
Robert Bresson is famously the 'Transcendental Guy', identified first as such by Susan Sontag ('Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson', in Against Interpretation and other essays) and then developed by means of an extended comparative study by Paul Schrader in his book Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972). The description of these cinema outliers in Schrader’s book is the key to not only their work, but also Schrader’s and a handful of Scorsese’s films too. It is basically a handbook for what would become later ‘slow cinema’.
Bresson in 1966 took on the work of making a connection between human and donkey experience, but not in the psychological sense - Bresson denied that even humans could understand each other in the psychological sense - but in a mystical, or you could say holistical, sense. And of course a donkey was not just a donkey, but stood for the whole of the non-human world. So maybe 'Hakuna Matata' after all?
This is where Bresson's notorious emotional austerity comes in. Bresson despised psychologizing, particularly in the dramatic way that was portrayed in the theatre and the cinema. Of course he agreed that humans are moved to joy and to sadness, that emotions are a real thing, not some thespian fakery. But he believed it was something more mysterious than the superficial gesturing and expressiveness of actors' performances pretended it was, more akin to a mystical experience.
That's why he thought of actors as 'models', to be carefully placed by the filmmaker in the scene to say their lines as drained of 'performance' as possible, and why he preferred those with no acting experience at all, like the young Anne Wiazemsky in this film. And it's also why he doled out the emotion in carefully rationed packets, saving them for a climactic end sequence when the transcendent meaning of the story could be revealed to the patient viewer.
So when Balthazar comes into the world, he doesn't get a cute voiceover, nor a privileged POV shot showing 'what it's like to be' a baby donkey. He's observed from the outside, in exactly the same way that all the human characters are in every Bresson film. There is a difference, however. Bresson very often gives the written words of the protagonist in voiceover as a declaration of their inner state, most obviously in Diary of a Country Priest (1951) where that text appears in the title, but also in A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959).
These kinds of writings, our journals or letters or memoirs, are always claimed by their writers to be true descriptions of our thoughts and feelings, whatever the performative or self-justifying nature of their narrative drive might be. Bresson gives them as spoken passages without any comment for us to accept or not as true depiction of the character's inner state. The sincerity of these texts is never questioned and so gives some sense of the interiority which Bresson's ban on psychological performance doesn't. But donkeys don't write diaries. What you see is what you get in the case of Balthazar. This made Bresson stretch further in the use of a symbolic substructure to carry the meaning of the film.
So at the very heart of the film is the question of what it means to say this narrative is 'about' the donkey Balthazar. Balthazar lacks a voice; lacks subjectivity; lacks agency; lacks any aspect of character as it is commonly understood. We can empathize with Balthazar but we can't relate to his experience.
Though Balthazar is in nearly every scene, he contributes nothing to the development of those scenes, except by his very presence. He is, in the fullest sense of the word as used by Julie Kristeva, abject:
What is abject... the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses... It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) p.2
As I understand Kristeva's characterisation of abjection, it's based on an opposition and a play on words against the object, something unitary and coherent, a body with agency. The abject is outside this order, and Kristeva gives her own double condition as woman and Jew as two examples of this excludedness, describing how she is a body without agency in the 'straight world' of the object.
Just now we suggested that the donkey lacks agency. This is not strictly true, because there is one course of action open to him at certain moments: run the fuck away. And in fact this is the only way he gets to shape the narrative, by trying to escape it.
After he is involved in a crash, his cart overturned by the roadside, Balthazar is liberated from the straps somehow. A comical mob of villagers armed with pitchforks comes after him, as if he were a monster in a horror movie. He gets away and returns to the place of his birth. At this point the viewer is almost certainly making up a voiceover for Balthazar's internal narration: This is where the little girl petted me, this is where the children played. We interject childhood nostalgia on the donkey's behalf. But Balthazar says nothing. That's abjection: no voice even in your own story.
Bresson would go on to take essentially the same passive, agency-less, abject protagonist of his next film, Mouchette (1967), on a journey of the same suffering at the hands of the callous and cruel men that make up the world. But where Balthazar is a donkey, Mouchette is a young woman. Bresson explained why he liked the novel that makes up the source material for Mouchette: "I found neither psychology nor analysis in it." Mouchette, an abandoned, abused girl with no psychology that we know of, becomes as with Balthazar the perfect exteriorized vehicle for a story about suffering and grace.
Because by the end Balthazar has become a vehicle for grace in the theological sense. At the beginning he ritualistically receives gifts at his 'baptism' - a scene which in the strictest sense is blasphemy, but which didn't prevent it from winning the 1966 OCIC Prize at Cannes, a.k.a. the 'Catholic Oscar'. The donkey is blessed with holy water and some salt which is given by the children as "the salt of wisdom".
At the end, among the cargo he carries for the contraband gang is perfume and gold, pretty close to the biblical gifts of the Magi (after one of whom he is named). Enough signs seem to point to him as a kind of messiah, or at least a donkey saint, conferred with a special grace. This makes all his suffering, and by extension, all the suffering of humanity here shown, redeemable in the eyes of the filmmaker.
Critic Daniel Kieckhefer comments on the impenetrable animal gaze, which seems on the face of it to contradict all this talk of transcendence and grace:
When the donkey finds himself among the caged circus animals, the movie cuts between him and a tiger, a polar bear, a chimpanzee, and an elephant, drawing special attention to their eyes as they appear to gaze at each other. Their glances are inscrutable, and all we can infer is that they recognize each other as living creatures.
Kieckhefer, ‘Au Hasard Balthazar’ at The Cinematograph
But within the transcendent world-view of Bresson all this alienness and unknowability simply doesn't matter. Because all of it, all the humans, all the animals, everything, is all wrapped up in the grace of the transcendent, which he viewed essentially as a Catholic universe of a personal God, but is open to many other spiritual readings too. But all the time he insisted too on this exteriority, this inscrutability of the human and the animal likewise. All of this is what is challenged at its very foundation in the 2022 Polish retelling of the Balthazar tale, EO.
—-INTERMISSION—
Oooooh, this is another one of those 'onion' things, isn't it?
Donkey from Shrek (2001)
When Robert Bresson was making his seventh feature Au Hasard Balthazar in 1966, 28-year-old Jerzy Skolimowski was already making his eleventh film as director, and his third feature, having also written the script to Polanski's famous thriller debut Knife in the Water (1962). I specify this not to quantify these directors and say one is better than the other because he has made more stuff - which you might call the Netflix Sheer Volume Path to Greatness - but to emphasise what an incredible veteran Skolimowski really is. His film really looks like the vision of a much younger person, for better and for worse.
The octogenerian filmmaker took a much-admired film of Bresson and, 56 years later, made a reimagining of it with a radically different approach. Why Bresson's film? "[It] was the only film at which I really shed a tear at the very end," said Skolimowski, in sharp contrast to Ingmar Bergman's take on Balthazar: "It was so completely boring... A donkey, to me, is completely uninteresting, but a human being is always interesting".
Now, instead of the Bressonian absence of interiority, the rigorous application of austere exterior vision, we go inside the donkey's POV, and our subjectivity becomes his, bats and lions be damned:
We shot scenes in a kind of objective master shot to establish what was going on. Then we came closer to the donkey, and to his eyes for a point-of-view shot. The same scene seen through the donkey’s eyes seems slightly different. In a mysterious way some of the details of what the donkey notices make the scene more meaningful than in the objective shots.
Jerzy Skolimowski, Interview on EO, BFI Sight & Sound (2023)
Emotivity and subjectivity, interior psychology and subjective point-of-view, applied not merely to humans but to a flippin' donkey? It would be enough to make Robert Bresson spit blood. But Skolimowski has a very different vision to Bresson’s, and whatever the merits of Bresson's austere transcendental style, it has never been popular with the viewing public, who generally find his work unapprochable.
Though his essentially religious sensibility may have contributed to his unpopularity today, Bresson is not much liked even among religious folk, Paul Schrader excepted. Of all the thousands of YouTube videos analysing hundreds of movies, there are only two which deal with Balthazar, and my own previous essays on Bresson's work are unregarded too. There is no BFI monograph on this film, despite its high placing on both critic and director's Top 100 lists at the BFI.
No, it's not the spirituality, it's the austerity and coldness that turns the modern audience against Bresson. This is something that Skolimowski is determined to reverse, making his donkey epic emotionally hot and engaging at every turn.
And, as Gaspar Noé did with his dying drug-dealer in Enter the Void (2009), he will take us into the POV of his subject, hallucinatory flashes and all. Where Balthazar is slow, measured, observational, detached, EO will be a wild ride which grabs you and forcibly pulls you into donkey world.
Is there anything it is like to be a Polish donkey? Let's find out...
So where Au hasard Balthazar is about the transcendent metaphysics of the donkey, the donkey as a carrier of grace whose patient suffering promises redemption, EO is about the phenomenology of the donkey, the donkey as the subject experiencing sensations: visual beauty, exotic sounds, physical pain, nostalgia, and even hallucinogenic sensations of synaesthesia.
Absolutely every category of Bresson's film is reversed in this film, which is nominally a tribute to the earlier picture. Where Balthazar is austere visually, in its cinematography and editing, to deliver a story which is made complex by an overlay of symbolic and mythical elements, EO is a rich sensorial indulgence where nearly every frame is a masterpiece of elaborate framing, and the editing is made to tease and delight with astonishing transitions and unveilings of new spectacular sights. At the same time the story as such is fragmentary and absurd, and much of the time is barely even there.
Take the scene where EO travels through a forest, following a masterful extended sequence in the darkest night when the night creatures come out, foxes and owls. The dark magic of the scene is evocative of witches' covens and midnight rides, and the music accompanies it with an unsettling terror theme.
The very next sequence is a series of drone shots, made with extreme red filter, as the camera passes through the woods and through the landscape to a hilltop where great wind turbines turn. The camera turns in synch with the great rotor of the turbine, so the rotors are still while the world turns around the axis.
All very magnificent to look at, but what does it mean? Whose experience is this? Is this anything more than eye-candy, beautiful but vacant? We have a five minute excursion through the world of magic fairytale horror, owls and foxes; then we have a five minute excursion through a flight in a blood-red world that is highly reminscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and so evokes alien worlds.
Left, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Right, EO (2022)
But the donkey doesn't really experience these worlds, and neither do we, except as short filmic trips into exotic sensation. Nothing substantial happens in either segment; only the symbolic death of a fox (shot by hunters with spooky laser sights) and a bird (presumably after hitting the wind turbines). In neither case does the protagonist interact with anything or do anything except travel through the scene, and in the second sequence not even that, because all the travel is done by drone-camera.
In Balthazar, the donkey had very limited agency, able to escape in certain fortuitous circumstances, but when it did so, the story changed to something else; in other words that very limited agency counted for something. In this film, EO is seen to consider and then take decisions, something that a real donkey never does.
Donkeys either act or don't act, and do it by instinct or whatever decision-making process actually goes on. They don't ruminate on how much they love their former owner and then decide to break out of donkey-sanctuary jail.
These objections are not about lack of realism, they are about lack of aim. Despite the dazzling beauty of nearly every shot, the eerie power of the music, the film says absolutely nothing - except ‘let’s not be nasty to animals’, with which sentiment I heartily concur.
Incidents happen chaotically and with no motivation, as with the sequence of the truck driver or the absolutely baffling scene with Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo) and his 'stepmother' (Isabelle Huppert). What has any of this got to do with the fate of the donkey? Or indeed with anything at all? Is it there just because it’s undeniably cool to see Huppert throw one of her tantrums and the sexy young priest come on to this mega-cougar? If there’s any more to it than that, then I’m an ass-drivin’ fool.
Even absurdist drama, the stuff of surrealism, tends to follow a dream logic, not just motion from point to pointless point. What surface narrative lacks, some kind of symbolic understructure must supply, or else what's the difference between a film and an extended music video? This is the whole 'style over substance' cliché in a nutshell. This film traces the course of a donkey from a point in film history (La Strada's circus strongman and his cruelty to women and animals) to a predetermined ending, taking in selected landmarks of horror, sci-fi and neorealist cinema on the way. It's a film about film, in the end, and the donkey gets lost in the mix.
So if we consider which donkey is better, Balthzar or EO, the question is for what? If you want to dazzle yourself with sensation, anthropomorphized journeying from one artificial set-piece to another in an arbitrary succession of wow-units, EO is pretty much unbeatable. Only Enter the Void and Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2001) and other of his epic allegories, as well as the hypertrpohied Nolan epics, offer so much bang for your cinematic buck.
But if you want to experience a powerful tragedy in which a donkey comes to stand for all of suffering humanity and the animal world humanity forms part of, an epic journey into primal simplicity, and a story of elemental starkness overlaid with redemptive symbolism, then Balthazar's your man…
Apologies, I mean donkey.
Sorry again, I mean donkey messiah and saviour of the world.