Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch EO
2022 · Jerzy Skolimowski · EO on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch EO's eyes, not his surroundings, in loud or violent scenes. (performance)
Skolimowski builds his performance from an animal's stillness: a held gaze, an ear turning, nothing more. The eye becomes the film's only interior.
Payoff: EO can only watch what happens to him; he never gets to act on any of it. In the reading: the seer (voyant). Deleuze calls a character who can only look and endure, never act, a seer; EO is that figure made literal.
Notice when the whole frame floods with pulsing red. (light)
The red arrives without warning, breaking the journey into abstraction each time EO's world grows too much to bear.
Payoff: The color does not decorate the scene. It replaces the scene with a feeling too large for EO to express. In the reading: affective color. Deleuze calls color that stops describing a place and becomes the mood itself a color-image; the red is EO's voice.
Listen for Mykietyn's score swelling under the red interludes. (sound)
The music surges each time EO cannot speak for himself, carrying the emotion dialogue would normally supply.
Payoff: Sound carries the interior a silent, non-speaking protagonist cannot voice on his own.
Count how many times EO changes hands or owners. (structure)
Skolimowski stages a discontinuous Europe: circus, farm, stadium, villa, and each stop hands EO to a new, indifferent world.
Payoff: The repetition shows a creature with no say in where he ends up or who takes him next.
Watch for aerial shots that glide low over rivers and fields. (camera)
Dymek's drone breaks from ground level to survey landscape untethered from any human eye, then returns to EO's pace.
Payoff: The camera offers one interpretation of a nonhuman way of seeing, not a literal claim to it.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the eye throughout. Skolimowski builds his whole performance from a creature that can only watch and endure.