Some background:
[I first discovered Alejandro Jodorowsky while getting a bit deep into the dark parts of the film-web which discussed weird and disturbing movies, ranging from benign-strange like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to just completely batshit what-the-fuck-did-I-watch strange like E Elias Merhige’s Begotten. Jodorowsky falls somewhere smack in the middle of that, and completely by surprise to me, it was an artistic sweet-spot.
I came to admire his passionate wonder and other-worldly vision when I watched his greatest masterpiece The Holy Mountain. I was further sold after watching the good-but-overrated El Topo and the lyrical and most emotionally mature of his films, Santa Sangre. Even his lesser work, a mainstream Hollywood film starring Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, The Rainbow Thief, is a film I conclude is only not-great because Hollywood producers handcuffed Jodorowsky from expressing his true vision. None of these films are easy to digest at first glance. Jodorowsky is a filmmaker who’s films do absolutely everything in excess. Their philosophy is haywire, their violence is vulgar, their sexuality is uncomfortable, and their love is heart wrenching.
But there is a purpose behind everything. Much of what made Jodorowsky such a cult icon is that he created a cinematic universe all his own, guided by his own divisive ideas of life and art and shared it, bare naked, unfiltered, and uncensored for all to see.]
Now, with his latest two films, he bares for us all, his childhood, and his path to becoming the filmmaker he is today.
This “new” Alejandro Jodorowsky, the one risen from the ashes after his 23-year hiatus following the commercial and critical disaster that was The Rainbow Thief, is someone I still have to get readjusted to. From an ideological standpoint, not much has changed. Jodorowsky is who he is. But from an artistic standpoint, there is something plastic-like about both The Dance of Reality and Poesía sin fin (Endless Poetry), the first two films of his 5-film cycle recounting his childhood and adolescence. Jodorowsky’s aesthetic doesn’t really hold up in the 1080p high definition world. What was endearing about his early-to-mid films was that their ambiguous sense and time and place was augmented by the graininess of the celluloid. That authenticity is gone in this movie, which plays more like a glossy stage-show. Throughout these two films, there are embedded vignettes where the characters will expand on a theories or ideas, and asides where a present-day-Jodorowsky will break the fourth wall and prophesize to us and his past self simultaneously.
Much of this sort of symbolism is a little too straightfoward. Jodorowsky’s imagination is not as bold as it once was, even though the violence and sex throughout the films are just as provocative and weird. Especially with The Dance of Reality, it was clear to me that there wasn’t much of an interesting story going on here. Sure, Chile’s tumultuous political backdrop amidst Pinoche’s rise is noteworthy as is Jodorowsky’s father’s abusive attitude and a not-quite-obvious-but-still-uncomfortable Oedipus Complex between the young Alejandro and his very large-bosomed mother, who sings all of her lines as parts of an aria. Though, in regards of his self-discovery, hardly anything illumniating comes about. The young Alejandro has vague conversations with a pan-religious monk, tatooed with all sorts of symbols, reminiscent of The Alchemist in The Holy Mountain. These conversations don’t seem to move the needle much with whatever Jodorowsky is trying to say and many of them are repetitive.
In Poesía sin fin, as with previous Jodorowsky offerings, much of the verbal philosophizing that goes on can be taken with a grain of salt, and much of may be dismissed by most as nonsensical blabber anyway, but what cannot be ignored is the brutal events which the central characters undergo and their constant search to find meaning in the physical pain and suffering they go through. Here too, Alejandro is beaten, raped, bled, and abused in several instances, and his anger is always accompanied with a questioning of his existence. This is how Jodorowsky thinks. After all, he is a man for who limitations and convention are a complete detriment to his world-view. Much of the film still struggles to bind interesting scenes together, and a good portion of the film is decked with filler material, this time explicitly sexual rather than philosophical, but there are clear ideas being sprouted unlike in Dance of Reality.
Poesía sin fin comes into it’s own when it starts examining the two things which truly drive Jodorowsky’s art… poetry and the neglect and abuse of his father.
The best scene of a rather messy film is when Jodorowsky and his real-life poet-buddy Enrico Lihn discuss the idea of “poetry in action”, spontaneously compelling them to travel through the town in a literal straight line, with no deviation; if there is a car in the way they climb and walk over the car, if there is a house in the way, they knock on the door and ask permission to walk through the house, even climbing over the bed in the master bedroom. There is no actual need for this rigidity and it is rather inconvenient for the duo and moreso for everyone around them, but it encapsulates the eccentricity of Jodorowsky within a single sequence. It highlights his own view of art as an expression of unwavering, dedicated movement rather than mere theory and discourse. This idea is present in all of his previous films, as most of his characters go on rigorous and tortuous journeys of self-understanding and artistic enlightenment.
Likewise, the most emotionally charged sequences in the film occur near the beginning where the still young Alejandro is forced by his father to savagely beat a poor couple and strip them naked in front of a crowd as a sign of power, and near the end, when he finally confronts his father’s savagery with some of his own, taking joy in the fact that his parents’ house has burned down rendering them homeless and poor. It is a bit uncompromising, perhaps an immoral mark of Jodorowsky’s character, but it’s the first time in this 5-film cycle we’re seeing Jodorowsky express deep feeling and understanding of who he is in relation to his disturbed past.
It’s quite clear Jodorowsky’s obsession with himself and his continued deeper discovery of cinema is still just as rich as it was at the beginning of his career, and if not necessarily works of great storytelling, The Dance of Reality and Poesía sin fin are still pure Jodorowsky and for his fans that should be more than enough.
Extrasensory 