EO (2022), BFI Blu-ray/DVD out now.

This film is made out of emotion… it’s our song of love for nature…

Idea for a new streaming service: Jerzy Skolimowski being “interviewed” and talking about his films, his collaborators and his art, no ads, just 24/7 humility, intelligence and integrity, self-depreciating humour, pauses for thought as he translates from his English to The English aided by partner, co-producer and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska. Trust me, it’ll be compelling and, how you kids say, immersive.

This smashing new release features one such post screening interview from New York in which Jerzy, as he was at the BFI last month, in erudite and eloquent form, leaving his interviewer standing with lengthy freeform extemporisations you’d expect from a former jazz drummer, despite the urgings of Ewa to keep his answers short. He can’t help it; he has such a powerfully holistic view of his work and all of this is punctured by the honesty and charm of the former poet who once tried to steal and destroy his own books.

EO marks the apogee – so far - of his cinematic renaissance and is a stunning work for a man of any age but as the director says, this was the most democratic of creations in which he took a step back and encouraged his collaborators to do what felt the most natural and adventurous to them. But we’ll come to the donkey later…

The lonliness of the long-distance trotter

He marks the contribution of Polish composer Paweł Mykietyn whose beautiful score really opens up the simplicity and beauty of the donkey’s world, not in an anthropomorphic way but in terms of a connection to the feelings all animals must have regardless of sentience. If nothing else, this film asks us to not only unconditionally focus on the predicament of the animal but also our reactions to it and Mykietyn has us in bits.

Michał Dymek’s cinematography is frequently breath-taking, both in terms of patient equine close ups but also in covering the immense sweep of the journey from the confusion of the initial circus to EO’s journey into the lower Alps, mountains and lakes ahead as the truck carrying him snakes it’s way closer, an overhead drone shot on a straight bridge, the donkey in relief traversing a bridge in front of a dam and the waters swirling and then reversing in front of us; non-linear, time running backwards as we, or EO, attempt to make sense of the movement.

Agnieszka Glińska’s editing must also be mentioned, she’s so vital in establishing the action/reaction of the four legs and the two legs, the tone and the pacing of an apparently slow film in which so much happens and not all is resolved… that’s life and we can make our own dénouements…

EO with Sandra Drzymalska

Skolimowski talks of his first proper film, Barrier, being screened in Paris and then listed as the second-best film of the year in Cahiers du Cinéma's top 10 films of 1966. They wanted to interview him and, after he recovered from the shock of this unexpected accolade, he insisted on seeing the film that came first before. It was Robert Bresson's 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, the beginnings of Donkey core, and which took him from his semi-professional/semi-cynical filmmaker’s poise to tears by the final stunning reel.

Almost 60 years later he chose to make his own film about a donkey partly out of compassion – the film is a reality-checker for all careless carnivores – but also for technical reasons; he wanted to use an animals’ uncomprehending yet all too real responses to drive the narrative and he wanted a new, real character to help present a non-linear narrative. As with his earlier work, Essential Killing (2010) the film is a picaresque fable only more satisfying and successful, with enough human interaction to flavour the relentless journey.

Jerzy may be dissatisfied by some of his dialogue-driven work but he chooses his human performers well especially with Isabelle Huppert in the final human segment, she is always the master of interior expression and barely has need of dialogue herself. It’s tempting to draw a link to Jane Asher in Deep End – I think the director likes the red hair aesthetically but he also admires their silent stillness. Huppert is a Countess commanding a huge estate as well as her troubled stepson, Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo), a trainee priest, who rescues EO from a lorry load of stolen horses, confessing his meat-eating sins to his new friend.

Isabelle Huppert

The first human interactions are the key though with our hero EO performing in a circus and being loved by his trainer and rider Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska). This is the closest connection the animal has throughout the film and it is perhaps what drives him on to keep moving once he has been “rescued” from the circus by well-meaning animal rights activists who get the animals taken to a sanctuary. EO is visited by Kasandra but after she leaves, he sets off in pursuit and his adventures begin. He is only one donkey and it’s a confusing disjointed world out there.

EO himself is portrayed by six donkeys: Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, and Tako but none of them were hurt in the making of this picture. All of them look straight to camera, always in character, never flinching but always some how pleading… may we make the effort to understand them.

 

As usual with the BFI, the special features are indeed special:

Jerzy Skolimowski & Ewa Piaskowska on the making of EO (2022, 27 mins): director Jerzy Skolimowski and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska discuss the making of EO at the New York Film Festival

Skolimowski A to Ż (2023, 53 mins): an alphabetical journey through the work of Jerzy Skolimowski with writer Michael Brooke who also conducted that superb interview with the director at the BFI in March.

High Rise Donkey (1980, 56 mins): in this Children’s Film Foundation adventure, three children who live in a tower block try to save a donkey from small-time crooks.

The Clown and His Donkey (1910, 4 mins): rare silhouette animation by Charles Armstrong depicting a clown doing tricks with his donkey Charles Armstrong depicting a clown doing tricks with his donkey.

UK trailer and assorted teasers

First pressing only illustrated booklet with an essay by Ewa Mazierska, an interview with Jerzy Skolimowski & Ewa Piaskowska by David Thompson and a film review by Christina Newland for Sight and Sound, credits and notes on the special features

Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, or Tako

The BFI Southbank season, Outsiders and Exiles: The Films of Jerzy Skolimowski, a BFI Southbank season dedicated to the director, presented in partnership with the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, continues until 29^th April. A selection of films will also be available on BFI Player and EO will be available exclusively to BFI Player subscribers.

Details are on the BFI site… Jerzy Skolimowski is an unique talent who has often had to fight to get his films made but who always seems to deliver something unusual and mood altering just like his viewing of Bresson's film, you will be moved by EO… do not hesitate to purchase!

 

There’s more coming our way too with the BFI releasing two more Skolimowski features: Identification Marks: None (1965) and Hands Up! (1981) – made in 1967 and the film that got him exiled from Poland - will be presented together on a 2-disc Blu-ray on 24 April.

Both are screening at the BFI this month as is EO, see all this on the big screen!

Trick of a tail-ender… Jerzy Skolimowski in Conversation/The Shout (1978), BFI

This was an extraordinary evening in the presence of a remarkable man who probably needed an all-nighter to get through all of his amazing stories from a life encompassing boxing, drumming, poetry, directing, acting, writing, painting and then back to film. His last film, EO (2022) was Oscar nominated and is out on BFI Blu-ray on 3^rd April, his next film is due later this year written for some guy he met through a mutual appreciation of jazz – then illegal – back in Iron Curtain Poland in 1956, Roman Polanski.

 

Born in 1936 or probably 1938, Skolimowski explained that his mother had had to change his birthdate so that he would qualify for support post-war. During the war he was trained to play act as a happy child, jumping up and down on his bed when the Gestapo made a call, hiding the fact that there was a printing press underneath it, used by his parents to spread the news of what was actually happening. His father was executed by the Germans and after the war, in recognition of his parents’ activism, he was sent to a special school in Prague were his dorm included future filmmakers Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer, whilst future Czech President Václav Havel, was also there.

 

Jerzy wanted to make his mark and this began with attempts at being a poet – he joked (perhaps) of visiting libraries to steal his books so that no one could read how bad they were – jazz drumming, he couldn’t really keep time, and amateur boxing which taught him to keep his eyes open during every blow so that he knew how to recover and take evasive action. Lessons in life. When his chance came with film, he grasped it with the same alertness and co-ordinated aggression, writing scripts and then planning out a full feature film based on his four student projects in film school.

 

Michael Brook, Jerzy Skolimowski and his partner/co-writer Ewa Piaskowska

His films in Poland – and Belgium – during the sixties established his name and then he went too far into politics for the authorities to bear, a four-eyed Stalin in Hands Up!, being enough to ensure they delivered his passport as the biggest hint to leave. He came to the UK, where he knew no one, and made the sublime Deep End (1970) with Jane Asher and John Moulder Brown. The dialogue was partly improvised and it was the smartly experienced Asher who came up with the “de-facing Government property” line when she rips up a poster promoting contraception.

 

By now time was running short and we didn’t get much further than Moonlighting (1982) the making of which is as fascinating as the film itself and says much about the director's generosity and determination. Essentially in 1981 when Poland was put under martial law, Jerzy came across a crowd of Poles outside a hotel where he lived who were now without a country to return to, he took them in and found a place for every one through friends and looking up Poles in the phone book; just head to the sectionwith names starting "Sz..." Then, he decides to make a film about his country's hour of need, persuades Channel 4 to back it, Jeremy Irons to star in it and theatre impressario Michael White to also fund it through a mid-tennis match sales pitch. Another extraordinary circumstance and the resultant film is one of those I'm most looking forward to seeing on the big screen.

Props to film writer Michael Brook for digging into this rich history and we literally could have gone on well into the next day had scheduling not intervened for Jerzy's uncanny masterpiece, The Shout (1978), was due to screen and he had to prepare himself for his introduction. Before he spoke though there was a unique introduction from Mark Jenkin who had taken the extraordinary step of a Cornishman, to cross the border into Devon, to seek out the locations of The Shout in ways that only he can. Is the soul of the story to be found in the spaces between the locations, Saunton Sands, the church of St Peter in Westleigh and Braunton Burrows, or in the stone and the land itself, echoing the themes of the film itself?

 

Alan Bates 

The director described this film as his happiest experience in filmmaking and that it was mostly down to his producer Jeremy Thomas, well that and the 200 Thai Sticks they were going to quote as a dedication at the end of the film! The film is indeed one wild trip but that’s more down to the story and setting as well as the performances from a remarkable cast to which he credits Thomas’ powers of persuasion. For himself, Jeremy is equally impressed with his director: “Skolimowski had a sense of shooting style then, this was the second director who I had worked closely with, and it was fascinating watching Skolimowski work. He came from a Polish tradition, the Wajda Film School, he had a different background to other directors… And it made the film much more creative to me. I saw it more as an artistic endeavour by him.”

 

The film features electronica from Rupert Hine who started out as a fold musician but ended up Chair of the Ivor Novello Awards having had hits of his own as well as producing everyone from Tina Turner to Rush and Underworld. The composers of the main theme and incidental music were Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford of the progressive rock combo, Genesis*, then extremely out of fashion but about to conquer the world with the aid of drummer Phil Collins.

 

Rutherford and Banks went to Charterhouse as did, coincidentally, Robert Graves whose story provides the basis of the film, a mysterious tale of a man who claims to have supernatural powers that is told largely in flashback during a cricket match played at a mental hospital. Jerzy was very keen to film a cricket match but this is unlike any you’ll have seen – of course – and I’m still having nightmares about a nearly naked Jim Broadbent running around in only his cricketer’s box and covering himself with cow dung. Jim worked with Ken Campbell early doors, what can one say?

Alan Bates and Tim Curry

 

The film’s flashback begins after Susannah York rushes to a remote hospital after an incident, crying “where is he?” before entering the billiard room in which three dead bodies are laid out under clothe. We don’t quite catch the faces before the scene changes to the pastoral calm of a cricket match as a young Robert Graves (Tim Curry) arrives in his whites. He meets the head Doctor (Robert Stephens) who introduces him to a man known as Crossley (Alan Bates), whom he describes as the most intelligent man in the place.

 

Crossley and Graves are set to score the match and as they watch it unfold from the edge of the pitch, the former begins to tell his strange tale involving his involvement with a couple who, he considers, have lost their way in their marriage. Anthony Fielding (John Hurt) is an experimental composer working away in his home studio supported by his wife Rachel (Susannah York). Whilst we have already seen Susannah, John Hurt is one of those out on the cricket pitch… we assume now that they’re the same characters and, they might well be.

 

In Crossley’s story, we see him engineer a meeting with Anthony after he has been playing the local church organ and had a secret assignation with a young married woman (Carol Drinkwater), he starts talking to Anthony about his faith and ends up following him home and inviting himself to lunch and to stay. Gradually he reveals his strangeness and his past decades spent in the Australian outback during which, in addiction to apparently killing any offspring as his right under their supposed rules, he learned much magic including the ability to kill men with his voice, The Shout or The Scream.

 

John Hurt, Alan Bates and Susannah York, a talented table

He pushes both of the couple’s sensibilities and the viewer is left wondering what is real and what is simple fantasy but there are so many layers as events unfold.

 

The cast is, of course fabulous, but its Bates who dominates with his thousand-yard stare and a restless power that continually wrongfoots expectation and social norms unsettling both those o and off screen. It’s a very centred performance that conceals as much as it reveals and only generates more mystery as the story is fully revealed.

 

The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival and received the Grand Prize of the Jury, in a tie with Bye Bye Monkey.

 

The Jerzy Skolimowski Season continues into April andthere are full details on the BFI site.

 

The BFI are also releasing the Oscar nominated EO (2022) as well as a double set, Identification Marks (1964) the film he made over four years at film school and Hands Up! (1967) the film that got him exiled from Poland, on 24^th April.

*Hence my incredibly forced and childish play on words... for the youngsters, A Trick of the Tail was an LP released by them in 1975.