In tune with my surrealist forbears, I worked on a series of photomontages this fall: Turmwächter – Guardians of the Towers. The montages were propelled by two considerations: For one, they all depicted towers that I had photographed in Europe during multiple trips with my friends there across the years, a reminder of shared sights and better times. (The friends get a calendar each year with montage work that picks up on our travels.)

Secondly, I placed animals I had photographed (mostly) in the wild into these urban environments. I wanted to acknowledge the issue of habitat loss, ever closer contact between humans and animals, with all that that implies: the danger for those displaced and for those thrown into the company of wild animals, or the illnesses that animals now share with us, even if they themselves are harmless.

I was also thinking how our relationship to animals might change if we saw them as actors in environments belonging to us, rather than out on the pasture or other defined spaces (still) allotted to them. Would proximity and shared space make a difference, particularly when the non-humans seemingly had assigned human functions: guarding the towers? Would we afford them agency or still be masters, tempted to shoot the bears, hunt the geese, confine the giraffes to cramped zoo exhibits or slaughter the goats and sheep?

All this is a long-winded introduction to movie reviews that made me sad, because my immunocompromised body can’t sit in a theatre and watch films that I lust after, having read about them. The film in question is one that – if the reviews are on point – picks up on the issue of the relationship between animals and humans, ingeniously presented from the perspective of a donkey. What drew me last week to read the reviews of EO, the new film by the legendary Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, was this image – I gather I don’t have to explain why.

Here is an early review of the film that describes in detail what a master can pull off when putting his mind (and technical brilliance) to telling a story that covers so many relevant dimension of the anthropocene. It opened in PDX on 12/23, go see it if you can! (Update: After reading the blog a friend uttered intense disagreement with the film-critics’ raving reviews – she and her companion left the screening half way through, despised the music and urged me to withdraw the recommendation. What can I say – as explained above, I have not seen it.)

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I’ve talked about quite a few movies this year that were available on-line, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. C.G.Jung in the Wild West, delving into Jane Campion’s Power of the Dog, probably was the one that made me think hardest, and therefor lingers. If you are into violent and politically progressiv, astute modern Westerns – not for the faint of heart or stomach – there is a new series these days, The English, by Hugo Blick (on Amazon and BBC). Review from The Guardian here. Visually stunning, but goosebumps for the entire ride, be warned.

Music is the sound track for EO, by Pawel Mykietyn.