The Thinking Machine 33

Equine Story

Felisberto Hernández was a celebrated Uruguayan writer who died four years before the production of Au hasard Balthazar in 1966. It may or not be a coincidence that so many details in Hernández’s haunting tale “The Woman Who Looked Like Me” – which is the autobiography of a horse – resonate strongly with the images and events of Robert Bresson’s classic film about a donkey. Yet the tone and intent of each author are very different. What if we juxtapose some words of the text with fragments of the movie, in order to create a composite “Equine Story”?