Endless Poetry first published byLittle White Lies “I thought you had changed, but you’re still the same man,” complains Sara (Pamela Flores), near the beginning of Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s Endless Poetry (Poesía sin fin), to her unloving, bullying husband Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky). On one level Sara’s words serve as a reflexive joke. For, like every single film…
First published by Little White Lies, Issue 65, May/June 2016 (dedicated to Nicolas Winding Refn and The Neon Demon) In seven [now eight] avant-garde directorial features spread across five decades, Chilean-born Alejandro Jodorowsky has, in his own inimitable way, allegorised the ordeals of life, the paths of reality and the masks of identity. His cinema is…
Santa Sangre first published by Little White Lies When Midnight Movie maestro Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain) was commissioned by producer Claudio Argento, brother of giallo king Dario, to “make a picture where a man kills a lot of women”, the upstart director/mystic/prankster/mime-artist certainly delivered on his remit. Yet Santa Sangre (or ‘Holy Blood’) relates to…
First published by EyeforFilm In a sense Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first three feature films – Fando y Lis (1968), El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973) – all tell essentially the same story: a man goes on a metaphysical quest for self-knowledge and divine enlightenment through an imperfect world of symbols, delusions and perversions. Yet despite their shared DNA, each…
El Topo first published by EyeforFilm “If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited.” So says Alejandro Jodorowsky, writer, director and star of the 1970 cult hit – but before getting to the film’s greatness, and its limitations, it is worth looking at the man behind…
Fando Y Lis first published by EyeforFilm For surrealist filmmakers, creating a public riot used to be the equivalent of trashing a hotel room for today’s rock stars – a necessary rite of passage to announce your credentials as a scandalous outsider who holds society’s conventional values in contempt. Luís Buñuel and Salvador Dali did it…
Review first published by Grolsch FilmWorks The scene is Tocopilla, a small town between desert and sea in 1930s Chile. There the matronly Sara (Pamela Flores) seems so lustrous, so ethereal, so grand to her young son Alejandro (Jeremiah Herskovits), that, many decades later in his adult memory, her every line is sung operatically, as…