The Delirious Cinema: Their Later Films Vol. 5

Outside of Hollywood's most fanous cinematic releases, it's the auteurs whose films people really remember seeing for the first time. Argento, Romero, Bava, Fulci, Franco, Tarantino, Rodriguez, Lynch, Carpenter, and several others... but perhaps it's the surrealists that we really remember because, well, the films are fucking weird – and inspiring, on many levels (intellectually, emotionally, creatively)... Hands down any cinephile I've ever conversed with remembers the first David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and Alejandro Jodorowsky film they ever saw; usually because it changed their lives. I was a late-comer to the world of Alejandro Jodorowsky, having discovered him roughly a year-and-a-half before the first film in his new (intended) trilogy was released, Dance with Reality – but I'll get back to that film in a moment.

Funnily, it had all started with 2005's Masters of Horror television series, created by Mick Garris. The film (episode?) that would launch Garris' horror anthology series would be Cigarette Burns, by John Carpenter, in which a sort of film detective (played by a pre-Walking Dead Norman Reedus, fresh off of Guillermo Del Toros' Blade II) is hired (by Udo Kier) to track down a lost film; a movie that caused bloody riots upon its festival release and sent the enigmatic director into hiding. I don't know why I thought this at the time, but I felt, somewhere deep in my cinematic heart, that John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns was fictionally referring to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Upon seeing Carpenter's episode, I went out and purchased the then-new Alejandro Jodorowsky DVD boxset from Anchor Bay. And upon this purchase, I threw his first film, Fando y Lis, into the DVD player – a surreal, black-and-white, sexualized travel-epic. But I truly digress, as this essay is not about the first Jodorowsky film I ever watched – as I'd said, this is about the first time I actually discovered Jodorowski, and that wasn't until 2012, when I witness, for the first time (and from that very boxset), The Holy Mountain...

Following the life-changing experience of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, Vancouver's Cinemateque held a retrospective of Jodorowsky's work, where I went both backwards and forwards in the filmmaker's stunning career – first, having the pleasure of experiencing El Topo in the cinema, and then experiencing Vancouver's first theatrical screening of his 2013 film, Dance of Reality. This latter film was not like Jodorowsky's previous Fando y Lis, El Topo, or The Holy Mountain, yet no less important as those films because Dance of Reality so thoroughly infused Jodorowsky's own life and perspectives into the over-the-top and transgressive drama that had been his signature trademark throughout his career that Jodorowsky actually managed to recreate himself as a professional artistic filmmaker at the point in his life when most cinematic auteurs were well on their way downhill to artistic and commercial failure. He hired his son to play his father, and gave us a genuine life sentiment in the midst of a surreal cinematic experience that flirts with exploitation but in far more comfortable in arthouse, but in the end is a rich visual exposition of truth and things that we, as human beings, might prefer to keep buried under a shallow pile of earth.

There are few filmmakers that can manage to evoke emotional and intellectual engagement in their films that seem to transcend the mere opinions of the mainstream (or rather, those who control the mainstream media content), and Jodorowsky is one of the three – the other two being Lloyd Kaufman of TROMA Entertainment, the longest-running independent movie studio... well, ever; whose latest films Poultrygeist and Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High aka Vol. 2 epitomize his wildly outrageous and directorial and creative career with astounding over-the-top satirical and meaningful anti-conformist showcases contained as exploitation cinema (although anything of Kaufman's from Tromeo and Juliet forward is worth delving into if you're game to be exploring in this arena); and the director of the Mad Max films George Miller, whose latest Mad Max: Fury Road showed that this stratospheric auteur could not only deliver a surrealist, artistic, and exploitive film to international audiences (and with immense praise), but could also receive industry and commercial accolades in doing so. In one UK film critic's opinion, Mad Max: Fury Road was the “Movie of the Century”. I could be close to agreeing with this reactive sentiment. For all of this appreciation, it might be worth noting that Jodorowsky, Kaufman, and Miller were all in their seventies while enjoying these artistic successes; and in the case of all three of these auteurs' latest movies, each one of them at some point reminded me of each others' works.

After Dance of Reality, Jodorowsky had the opportunity, thanks to crowd-funding platforms, to create the second film in his late-life trilogy, Endless Poetry, which premiered at international film festivals in 2016. In this latest film Jodorowsky leans towards the far-more personal aspects of his life, and so Endless Poetry is far more autobiographical than even Dance of Reality – this time, not only does Jodorowsky's son play his father, but his grandson plays himself. The actress who played his mother in both films, Pamela Flores, also plays his life-changing girlfriend in Endless Poetry in a dual-role. Here we also get emotional closure between the father/son characters, as well as some closer in regards to what made Jodorowsky make the life choices that he acted upon, and it brings up some personal regrets, which he directs his real-life son and grandson to act out in front of the camera. Endless Poetry could be Alejandro Jodorowsky's most mainstream-accessible film, but really, without the history of his films, would it really have the same meaning...?

~V.

Fury Road...