Illustrations by Nicole Pavlov.
In the opening scene of Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (2022), harsh red lights pulsate across a woman’s face as she bends to caress a shape on the ground. It’s hard to make out through the strobes, but the camera lingers long enough for the viewer to discern two hooves and the visage of a donkey. The woman’s voice, faint and out of breath, cuts across the high-pitched orchestral score, “EO! EO!”
EO, bucking wildly, breaks the rose-tinted reverie as the crowd cheers, revealing the woman and the donkey in a Polish circus act as physically and emotionally intimate as making love. Skolimowski’s film turned heads by centering a nonhuman subject both narratively and visually, following EO as he wanders through the world while humans variously try to imprison, abuse, or care for him. Skolimowski drew inspiration from Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), a tragedy tracing the life of the eponymous donkey from birth to death, but Bresson’s focus is ultimately on his human characters, tracking their trials and tribulations across the French countryside as Balthazar is shuffled around and mistreated by nearly every caretaker. Skolimowski, conversely, dispels the idea of innate ownership of domesticated animals by heavily featuring EO in moments of liberated autonomy, as well as indentured servitude.
It was once rare to see a nonhuman animal appear in a film as anything but a pawn in a larger story, or else an anthropomorphized protagonist, given human qualities so as to be relatable to a human audience. In recent years, there has been a move toward using nonhuman subjects as a gateway to a different cinematic perspective. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, filmmakers have found a new muse through which to defamiliarize viewers.
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022).
Filmmakers seeking to depict a nonhuman subject must grapple with the irony that cinematic technologies are built to accommodate the human sensory apparatus. Many mammals have higher flicker-fusion rates than humans, meaning that what our eyes perceive as visually fluid, via persistence of vision, appears choppy to some other animals, as they can see the breaks between frames. This was the case for even digitized film until the recent advent of motion smoothing and frame-rate sampling options on television monitors, when many household pets were suddenly granted the ability to more smoothly perceive media made for the human eye. The strobing effect in Skolimowski’s poetic opening scene, combined with EO’s likely higher-than-human flicker-fusion rate, would render it a series of disparate images for him. Furthermore, EO would have difficulty seeing the red lights due to his dichromatic vision. A second irony emerges: films with an animalic subject must be based on learned rules of human perception that govern the now nearly ubiquitous construction of contemporary 21st century viewership, such as cinematic “reading” driven by a predominantly Western left-to-right directionality and the film grammar of cross-cutting between people or places.
Filmmakers filter their nonhuman subjects through what humans claim to understand about animalic behavior from both modern science and cultural tradition. In stories seeking to center their viewpoints, animals become unwitting actors or subjects. Converting the actions of a nonhuman into forms that humans understand—conceptually, emotively, and perceptually—is an act of highly speculative interpretation. The elephant in the room remains: in films about nonhuman animals, the bestial experience is flattened and distilled for human consumption.
Alternatively, films can be enjoyed nonliterally or without the need for rational interpretation. Non-human subjects are suitable for cinematic experimentation precisely because humans are incapable of replicating their perspective. Centering a nonhuman animal as a character opens possibilities for the viewer to embrace the uninterpretable and for filmmakers to create affective experiences that unsettle cinema as an anthropocentric medium. Rather than presume to make the lens of a non-human animal accessible to a human viewer, a more abstract approach might encourage engagement through emotions rather than intellectual interpretation. By pushing away from accepted conventions of technical methodology, narrative, and cinematic viewership, radical experimental film offers an untapped outlet for exploring bestial subjectivities.
Top: Pepe (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, 2024). Bottom: sr (Lea Hartlaub, 2024).
Unlike EO and other fiction films, in which viewers follow an individual or group of nonhuman characters with which the viewer is made intimately acquainted, some documentary and hybrid works encounter a different but related set of interpretive responsibilities. Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s swashbuckling collage film Pepe (2024) polarized at this year’s Berlinale with its humorous docufictional tales and voiceover from the perspective of the eponymous “cocaine hippo” that drug kingpin Pablo Escobar removed from Namibia. Lea Hartlaub’s meditative essay film sr (also 2024) interrogates challenges that the giraffe has posed to humans seeking to understand them from straight-laced, empiricist, behavioral-scientific, taxonomic, historical, and even historico-religious perspectives, bringing to light a series of interconnected mysteries. In both films, a species of animal becomes the focal point to explore a broader theme, imploring viewers to move from a character-based third-person perspective into a species-wide one. Humans are still a part of these narratives, but they are relegated to supporting roles.
For our species, gazing is not a neutral act; human vision is consumptive. Popular nature documentaries exoticize and narrativize the lives of animals for our hungry eyes, while films like Pepe and sr decouple the lives of nonhuman animals from our governance. In Pepe, De los Santos Arias uses a trilingual narration directly from the hippo’s perspective to investigate the multilayered colonial imprints present in today’s Namibia, making decoloniality a cross-species effort rather than only a human one. In sr, the title a reference to the Egyptian hieroglyph for the long-necked mammal, Hartlaub positions humans on the outside of a giraffe-centric story by tracing the historical reappearances of the animal through debates, written records, cave paintings and stone carvings, and sociocultural fascinations (based on a combination of Judaic tradition and modern biomedical science, is giraffe meat kosher?). Just as the egg-laying platypus challenges conventional taxonomical science, centering the giraffe drastically reframes popular views of global human history.
Andrea Arnold, Cow (2021).
These films push back on the often exploitative human gaze and point to the emergence of a bestial, animalic gaze—not a singular approach, but a body of non-anthropocentric impulses as exemplified in cinematography and visuals. In Cow (2021), a documentary following the life of Luma, a cow on an English dairy farm,director Andrea Arnold employs cinematographic techniques to render her animal subjects as fully formed characters. She captures Luma from angles and perspectives a viewer would rarely see in film, let alone in real life: from underneath, from behind, and from across her back, as if the camera takes on the eyes of another cow trundling directly behind her.
Arnold goes as far as actively distancing humans in the film from the viewer. When they appear at all, their presence is exclusively interventionist: milking the cows, tagging their ears, branding them, or giving directions. Rather than following the human activity, the camera instead lingers with and follows the cows, which often involves more standing than moving. As pop music blares into the cows’ enclosure while they are being milked, Arnold’s camera remains static and extremely close to the animals rather than moving in time with the human labor. The music is for the humans, a soundtrack for concentration and entertainment in the course of their work. At a certain point in the scene, the soundtrack suddenly feels absurd. Music is a broadly understood cultural phenomenon in the human world, but there is no way of knowing how the cows perceive this impingement upon their sonic realm. By simply standing and mooing rather than moving toward the farmhands to be milked, the cows engage in an act of passive resistance against their use as dairy animals. The camera, too, resists the impulse to make the animals available for consumption and digestible for the viewer.
Los Reyes (Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff, 2018).
The directorial desire to take animals on their own terms engages in a refusal to “make tame,” the human desire to discipline animals and train them to fit comfortably into the framework of human life. Even starker examples of animals occupying and moving about spaces in violation of their intended human use can be seen in Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff’s Los Reyes (2018) and Bartosz Konopka’s Rabbit à la Berlin (2009). Los Reyes follows two stray dogs that live at Skatepark Los Reyes in Santiago, Chile, who engage in spatial appropriation of the park infrastructure. Their primary activities are rest and relaxation, chasing horse-mounted police officers, and running alongside the skaters. Bottles, cans, balls, and cigarette packs become unconventional chew toys as they scrounge up the discarded remnants left by the park’s human users.
In the park, the dogs are most often treated as extensions of the space, though they are the only full-time inhabitants of the park. The dogs act as a sort of metonymic symbol for the unhoused and the societally sidelined, drawing parallels between the experiences of marginalized people and those of nonhuman animals. One teenaged skater recounts how his grandmother has called him a “fuckin’ dog”; his displeasure at the comparison reveals in what low regard he holds the animals with whom he shares this space. During a skateboarding competition, the dogs are displaced, blocked out of the park by fences and barricades. They bark and bark, to no avail; the park’s permanent residents have been evicted, and nobody seems to realize it.
Los Reyes introduces us to a world foreign to us but familiar to our protagonists through macro-lens closeups of textured tongues, paws, and noses. Perut and Osnovikoff include diegetic dialogue that plays as voiceover, a mere soundtrack to the dogs’ lives; the faces of the speakers themselves are rarely seen. In an astute inversion of human perception, the filmmakers relegate the skaters to the peripheries of the dogs’ surroundings by placing them at the margins of one of the species’ most acute senses: canine hearing. “Who wants to come out in this fuckin’ heat?” complains a skater. Responding to this question, the camera cuts to the panting dogs, who lie in the grass and use the lawn sprinklers as a cold, refreshing shower. The film’s title can also be read as a moniker for the dogs: los reyes, the kings of the skatepark. Although the dogs’ given names are not spoken in the film, the directors reveal them at the end in on-screen text—Chola and Football—an active gesture to recognize and honor the dogs in the anthropocentric realm.
Rabbit à la Berlin (Bartosz Konopka, 2009).
In Konopka’s Rabbit à la Berlin (2009), a group of rabbits are trapped in a small patch of grass by the construction of the Berlin Wall. Here, the rabbits are free to roam and reproduce, appropriating and repurposing the no-man’s-land between sections of the wall that became an alley of death for many people seeking to cross. In a dry tone, the voiceover narrates what the rabbits might be thinking; viewers must contextualize the rest of Cold War history for themselves.
Konopka focuses the camera on the rabbits’ beady, watchful eyes, turning quite literally to the perspective of the small prey animals. He draws attention to their vantage point by exploring the prosperous lives of the rabbits who subvert the very concept of this strip of land, a place where life is not meant to thrive. From the animals’ perspective, the wall demarcates their protected playground, a luxurious gated community rather than a prison from which to escape. They bear witness to the violence of the human realm from the safety of their accidental abode. The border guards on either side are unable to shoot them for pleasure, as they are required to document every bullet shot and for what purpose. In an unexpected reversal of the perils of living in divided Berlin, the rabbits live freely until the crumbling of the GDR and the wall, which led to rapid urban development of Potsdamer Platz into a commercial center—and ultimately, the rabbit colony’s demise.
Bestiaire (Denis Côté, 2012).
In the case of fiction, animals contribute their own (at best, willingly trained, and at worst, coerced and manipulated) performances, but the filmmaker uses the story and other elements to imperfectly translate a nonhuman perspective for a human audience. In an early scene, EO is traveling in the back of a vehicle and he turns out the window as the camera rack-focuses on a group of gleaming wild horses. Skolimowski then presents an oneiric sequence of the equines running freely in slow-motion across luscious green fields, a translation of EO’s animalic imagination of autonomy into a cinematic language comprehensible to human viewers.
Skolimowski emulates EO’s state of mind with camera movements ranging from steady-going calmness to jittering anxiety. The viewer is encouraged to sit with EO, who is frequently shot in close-up as the camera moves from the soft hair on his mane to his gently blinking eyes. After EO escapes his latest captors, the camera follows alongside and behind him as he runs through the forest in the dark of night. This movement is interrupted by sporadic shots from his point of view as well as close-up shots of animals in EO’s surroundings that could not be seen by humans with the naked eye on a pitch-black night: a tiny army of ants, a owl high up in the trees, a camouflaged fox. The bright green beams of sniper lasers cut through the darkness, and EO’s ears twitch in response, the camera moving in slowly to capture his physical reaction. These two details closely reflect EO’s purported sensory experience: with more rods in their eyes than humans, donkeys and other equines have strong night vision as well as nearly 360-degree panoramic vision with an immense sensitivity to small motions as prey animals.
Denis Côté’s Bestiaire (2012) opens on a group of young artists sketching a stuffed antelope. He focuses on different elements of the animal before finally landing on a wide shot, which reveals its miniature stature, its body so small that it can be placed standing upright on a table. The film’s title refers to the bestiary, a type of book that compiles illustrations and descriptions of different animals. At the height of the form’s popularity, in the Middle Ages, the beasts were often tied to Christian symbolism.
The filmmaker focuses on animals in captivity, especially on ranches and farms, before turning to a broader exploration of human usage of animals in different forms while using different techniques to unsettle viewers from an anthropocentric perspective. Throughout Côté’s film, the camera often gazes at the animals head-on rather than from the side, as if standing face to face, and they gaze straight back. By presenting his subjects in this mirrored manner, Côte forces the intimate human gesture of eye contact between the viewer and a creature through the screen, placing both on level ground. Côté’s usage of a foreshortened cinematographic viewpoint puts the human viewer directly in front of the animal, a confrontational and vulnerable position for both. Foreshortening, which in the West was a perspectival innovation of the Renaissance, is meant to convey a sense of naturalism, whereas the flat side views of animal torsos in medieval bestiaries rendered the animals more fantastical and grandiose.
In Bestiaire, as in Cow, the viewer is made to wait with the animals—llamas pace back and forth in the snow, oxen patiently rest in their enclosures. With the animals, time seems to pass more deliberately, prompting a mindfulness momentarily unbound by the active pressures to produce and labor. At a zoo, Côté turns the camera around on the spectators, quite literally, by shooting zoo-goers from inside the enclosures. From the vantage of the non-human animals, we might begin to understand the greedy and consumptive human gaze, epitomized by the overwhelming and invasive pointing and gawking of patrons, their voices turned down to an ambient murmur. Elsewhere, the scraping of shovels against floors, the throwing of feed, and the slamming of doors take precedence in the captives’ ears and our own.
Jamal (Ibrahim Shaddad, 1981).
Ibrahim Shaddad’s short film Jamal (1981)—a transliteration invoking both the English word “camel” and the Arabic name meaning “beauty”—instigates a more direct role reversal by portraying the interiority of a vengeful camel made to grind sesame. Whereas Côté uses sound as a byproduct of human labor to override the omnipresence of the human voice, Shaddad uses the harrowed voices of animals to distance viewers from human subjects. The primary soundscape of the 14-minute film is replete with the animal’s whining, mournful moans in an enclosure far too small for his size: a stark appeal for his pain to be not merely heard, but also understood. His human caretaker-cum-captor places him in a pitch-black room and attaches him to the mill, where he is forced to walk in circles for hours before he is released outside and eventually slumps to the ground, exhausted.
In the film’s last scene, the camel’s human captor pulls him back into the room despite his roars and reluctance to move, tying him to the mill and picking up a blindfold used to ensure the animal’s obedience. Suddenly, Shaddad initiates a rapid series of cuts: a shot from the camel’s point of view as the human tries to affix the eye cover, then a few dolly-in shots looking at the animal straight on like in Bestiaire, multiple shots from the side of the human’s continued approach, and finally a rapid zoom out as if the camel has divorced himself from this role-play of prisoner and warden. Immediately following are three shots of the man having taken the camel’s place, wearing his eye cover, harness, and saddle and laboriously attempting to grind sesame with the full weight of his human body on the mill. The film ends with the man’s successful application of the blindfold to the camel. But while the role-reversed fantasy ends as soon as it had begun, Shaddad refuses to fully make tame, offering the animal one fantasy—and the viewer one opportunity to understand the extent of his pain and captivity.
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022).
The death—or, if not, total subjugation—of any of these animals at the end of their narrative seems somehow inevitable. At the conclusion of both EO and Cow, our animal protagonists are killed, the former for his meat and the second due to her ailing body. Football, too, dies near the end of Los Reyes, while in Rabbit à la Berlin, the narrator explains how the rabbits, once a source of nonviolent amusement for border guards, later became target practice for bored soldiers. Côté dedicates one sequence to taxidermists in their studio quietly preserving animals for display and another to a human performer donning a rodent-like mascot costume. The camel in Jamal, too, is stuck in an endless cycle despite his pleas. Humans are depicted as the animals that endlessly consume others—in life, death, and even beyond the corporeal form.
Though directors pursue different methods of approximating a non-human perspective, it is impossible to entirely divorce humanity from its hungry gaze, which is rooted in the capitalist logics of consumption, production, and accumulation inherent to 21st-century human life. As much as they work to defamiliarize their audiences, a human viewer’s entry point will always be essentially human. From these films, a non-anthropocentric cinema could expand in a variety of ways; we might now ask how cinema could be made more animalic without becoming resolutely anthropomorphic. Rather than rushing to make each moment as productive as possible, these films make time for stillness and inactivity, make room for a certain fullness in absence.
Cinema might refuse to engage with humans as a main point of reference, a zoocentric intervention on our expectations of narrative. Or perhaps the more radical intervention is biocentrism’s rejection of the Enlightenment duality of human and nature. In this perspective, found in many Indigenous worldviews, all animals and living beings are given equal standing. Through what additional cinematic techniques can we continue to distance ourselves from the human logics we have superimposed over the whole of the animal kingdom and instead let other creatures stand for themselves? After all, turning the lens on nonhuman animals also means reflecting on human values as we accept them, reject them, or actively undo them in pursuit of something better.
