Beyond the Human Gaze: Balthazar & EO
at Ilusion Cinema, the Museum of Film Art of the National Film Archive–Audiovisual Institute (FINA), Warsaw
October 2022
● Curating
Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) remains one of the most moving and metaphysical films in the history of cinema. Revered as a “saint” of film by many, Bresson crafted a parable centered around a donkey—an innocent, mute creature that suffers silently and with dignity. In Balthazar’s journey from owner to owner, we encounter a succession of human lives, each marked by selfishness, cruelty, or indifference. Through Balthazar’s suffering, Bresson builds a complex meditation on grace, fate, and the human inability to escape suffering or to act with kindness.
In Christian tradition, the donkey is both humble and holy—present at Christ’s birth and bearing him into Jerusalem. While culturally the animal is often seen as lowly or stubborn, Bresson uses its symbolic ambiguity to explore the duality of humiliation and sanctity. Heavily inspired by Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Bresson constructs a narrative where random events and human will intertwine, revealing both the randomness and the inevitability of pain.
Bresson deliberately avoids anthropomorphizing Balthazar. The donkey remains stubbornly opaque—a being without psychology or voice, whose physical reactions become universal expressions of fear, fatigue, and vulnerability. In this, Balthazar becomes the perfect Bressonian protagonist: pure, unknowable, and uncorrupted by narrative convention. In the absence of emotional cues or cinematic embellishment, the viewer is forced to project meaning, to feel without being told how.
Despite its austerity, Au hasard Balthazar is profoundly sensual—its texture, rhythm, and soundscape etched with precision. The film’s simplicity is deceptive: it invites philosophical, spiritual, and ethical reflection, while pushing cinema to the limits of empathy. As Bresson once said, “Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.” His Balthazar invites us to see—and feel—beyond the human.
For Jerzy Skolimowski, this film held such power that it moved him to tears. In EO (2022), the Polish director pays homage to Bresson with a contemporary reinterpretation of the donkey-as-protagonist narrative. After the closure of a circus, EO embarks on a journey from Poland to Italy, encountering both tenderness and brutality. But EO is not simply a retelling of Balthazar. Skolimowski ventures beyond human-centered storytelling, attempting to imagine a truly animal perspective.
The result is a cinematic experience both intimate and radical. With floating cameras, surreal lighting shifts, and fragmented storytelling, EO becomes a sensorial exploration of consciousness—where the world is seen as strange, threatening, and, at times, beautiful. Skolimowski’s film is not just about human cruelty; it’s about the opacity of the nonhuman experience, and our limited ability to access it.
Together, Au hasard Balthazar and EO form an extraordinary dialogue across decades and aesthetics—between reverent minimalism and emotional maximalism, between moral parable and audiovisual experiment. But both raise urgent questions: Can cinema escape the human gaze? Can empathy extend beyond species? Are these films quiet manifestos of animal studies in motion?
This double bill offers a rare opportunity to reflect on cinema’s ethical and poetic possibilities. At Iluzjon, we invite you to see—as Bresson might put it—what would otherwise remain unseen.