Animal Affect – EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022) by Rowan Abbott

Animal Affect – EO (2022)

Creator’s Statement

Across cinema canon, animals have rarely been considered worthy subjects for a serious film narrative. Films with animal protagonists will tend to be aimed at children; these characters are anthropomorphised beyond recognition, sharing only a surface resemblance with their real world animal counterparts, functioning more-so as puppets for telling human stories. Where cinema could be a valuable tool to make children – and adults – understand and empathise with real animal perspectives, the reliance on anthropomorphism to align audiences with these characters instead means that the real animal is being missed all together. Eco philosopher Val Plumwood, in her essay Babe: The Tale of the Speaking Meat, questions the role of anthropomorphism in cinema, noting that the very concept itself is often ‘used to support the claim that the attribution of characteristics such as subjectivity to animals must be anthropomorphic’.[1] This claim is based on the false assumption that animals do not possess such subjectivity. The attribution of human speech to animals has been a necessary tool to allow audiences to understand the emotions of fictional animal characters, undoubtedly generating a degree of empathy for real animals, but it is nevertheless achieves this via partially reconstituting the animal into a human, distancing the real animal perspective. Through my visual essay, I aim to explore how a film can connect viewers to an animal’s true subjectivity, without the use of anthropomorphism, spotlighting the film EO (2022)[2] as a rare example of a fiction film that refuses to anthropomorphise its animal protagonist.

My suggestion is that Affect Theory explains how animal subjectivity can be captured on screen. The two concepts I highlight in my essay are Laura U. Marks’ Haptic Visuality, and Vivian Sobchack’s Cinesthetic Subject. The former explains how our bodies relate to the texture of the screen image. Marks states that haptic vision ‘enables an embodied perception, the viewer responding to the video as to another body and to the screen as another skin’,[3] the film texture is something that can be felt by the viewer, their sense of touch mediated through their eyes and ears. I posit that EO uses techniques of Haptic Cinema; where traditional filmmaking ‘appeal[s] more to narrative identification than to body identification’,[4] haptic cinema instead aims to relate the viewer’s body to the film surface. EO frequently emphasises the texture of it’s titular donkey’s body, as well as the environment he lives in. This emphasis facilitates a viewer’s haptic vision, allowing for a physiological connection between the viewer, EO, and the environment he inhabits. The concept of the cinesthetic subject more broadly explains how it is that a viewer relates their sense perception to images onscreen. The term ‘cinesthetic’ is derived from the psychoneurological condition synaesthesia, and the sensory state coenaesthesia; ‘both of these structures and conditions foreground the complexity and richness of the more general bodily experience that grounds our particular experience of cinema.’[5] The cinesthetic subject is the viewer themselves, using ‘embodied vision informed by the knowledge of the other senses’[6] to respond physiologically to the sensory experiences depicted on screen. Sobchack state that this sensory engagement with cinema is owed ‘not to our secondary engagement with and recognition of either “subject positions” or characters, but rather our primary engagement (and the film’s) with the sense and sensibility of materiality itself.’[7] This is to say that it is not our cognitive/narrative connection with the characters that make us relate to their sense experience, but rather it is our instinctual bodily reaction to them, in part facilitated by our haptic vision.

My visual essay sets out to ask whether the physiological empathy created by an embodied engagement with cinema, can apply to animal subjects, and not just humans. If we do not share language or cognitive reasoning with animals, then I suggest that our shared experience of bodily senses is our greatest means for empathising with animal subjectivity. EO’s choice to use a donkey as its animal protagonist makes this especially pertinent, as the nervous systems of animals in the Equidae family (e.g. donkeys, horses, zebras) share many similarities with humans, especially the Sympathetic Nervous System responsible for our fight-or-flight reactions to harmful stimuli,[8] thus it is not a stretch to say EO’s sense perception can be aligned with our own. Setting out to prove this theory, I draw direct comparisons between my own sensory experience, and the onscreen sensory experience of EO and the other animals featured in the film. I begin by trying to create a sensory dialogue between myself, and you – the viewer, using visually and aurally textural images of myself experiencing recognisable sensory experiences – prompting the use of haptic vision, and embodied sensory engagement with the images. To avoid drawing attention away from the affective experience, I chose to keep my narration to on-screen text, rather than voiceover. If successful, then these images demonstrate the ability of film to affect a viewer physiologically, when focusing on a human subject. I then transition to EO, emphasising how the film uses the very same techniques to evoke the animals’ sensory experience. By doing this I ask: if you can empathise with me and my sensory experience, then what is stopping you from doing the same with animals?

The goal of this visual essay is to spotlight the strides being taken in animal representation on screen. EO is not the only film to attempt this form of affective alignment with an animal subject, a recent wave of animal rights activist documentaries; including Kedi (Ceyda Torun, 2016), Gunda (Viktor Kossakovsky, 2020), Stray (Elizabeth Lo, 2020), and Cow (Andrea Arnold, 2021); use similar formal techniques to EO. These are important strides to make, in a time where the view of animals as biological machines underscores much of our agricultural practices, and animal subjectivity is all but entirely neglected in modern farming legislation. Once the autonomy and subjective experience of animals is acknowledged, it poses many difficult challenges to the modern world which relies so heavily on the disregard of their suffering, but these are necessary challenges to face, and I believe that cinema can push us further towards confronting them.

 

The video may also be seen on Vimeo here:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HorseHeadInfo. “The Autonomic Nervous System: You and Your Horse.” horsehead.info, 2019. https://horsehead.info/the-autonomic-nervous-system/#:~:text=Despite%20mammoth%20differences%20between%20horses,muscles%2C%20glands%2C%20etc…

Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Plumwood, Val. The Eye of the Crocodile. Anu Press, 2012.

Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, California: Univeristy Of California Press, 2004.

 

FILMOGRAPHY

Cow. United Kingdom: Mubi, 2021.

2022. Poland: Skopia Film, 2022.

Gunda. Norway: Neon, 2020.

Kedi. Turkey: Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2016.

Stray. Turkey: Magnolia Pictures, 2020.

 

[1] Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile (Anu Press, 2012), 66.

[2] EO (Poland: Skopia Film, 2022).

[3] Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 4.

[4] Ibid. 7.

[5] Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, California: Univeristy Of California Press, 2004), 67.

[6] Ibid. 70-71.

[7] Ibid. 65.

[8] HorseHeadInfo, “The Autonomic Nervous System: You and Your Horse,” horsehead.info, 2019, https://horsehead.info/the-autonomic-nervous-system/#:~:text=Despite%20mammoth%20differences%20between%20horses,muscles%2C%20glands%2C%20etc...