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When Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky burst onto the screen in the early 1970s, movie buffs were captivated by his highly cinematic El Topo (an eye popping, spaghetti western that John Lennon declared a “masterpiece”) and The Holy Mountain (about a spiritual quest). A longtime cult favorite, Jodorowsky is credited with being the founder of “midnight movies”—late night special screenings of often outrageous films at theaters. Capturing the era’s psychedelic zeitgeist, Jodorowsky’s movies arguably had the cinema’s most poetic imagery since the films of Alexander Dovzhenko, the Ukrainian director of such classics as 1930’s Earth.
Now, at age 88, the Chilean-born writer and director is back with Endless Poetry (Poesia Sin Fin).
With stunning cinematography, bizarre sensuality, and heaps of humor, Jodorowsky recounts in creative, entertaining ways his adolescence growing up Jewish in Chile (his parents had emigrated from Russia). In his 2013 movie, The Dance of Reality, Jodorowsky unfolded memories of his childhood on the Chilean coastal town of Tocopilla. In this sequel of sorts, the filmmaker focuses on his youthful bohemian life in Santiago, as he struggled to become a poet. Along the way, Jodorowsky encounters other avant-garde artists, including writers Enrique Lihn, Stella Diaz Varín, and Nicanor Parra, who would become leading lights of Latino letters.
Jodorowsky’s conflict with his pennypinching father, who wants his son to become a nice Jewish boy and doctor, is imaginatively and poignantly depicted. The father, a shopkeeper, is portrayed by the director’s older son, Mexico-born Brontis Jodorowsky, as he also did in Dance. To round out the family affair, younger son Adan Jodorowsky (he composed much of the original motion picture soundtrack) portrays the father as a young man. A la Alfred Hitchcock, Jodorowsky himself appears on screen from time to time.
In an eyebrow-raising bit of casting, opera soprano Pamela Flores not only reprises her role as Alejandro’s mother Sara, whom she’d likewise played in Dance, but also portrays Stella Díaz Varín, the real life, extraordinarily outré poet and Jodorowsky’s first lover. (Paging Dr. Freud!) During Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in 1973, Varín reportedly resisted by, among other things, displaying photos of Che Guevara. She was detained and tortured by the dictatorial regime and subsequently honored in Cuba.
In terms of sex, grotesqueness and a sense of whimsy, Alejandro Jodorowsky is a South American counterpart to Federico Fellini. Like Fellini, Jodorowsky has a fascination, if not a fixation, on people with body types out of the norm. In particular, Endless Poetry reminded me of Fellini’s ode to his childhood, 1973’s charm-your-pants-off Amarcord (I Remember). In one hilarious scene, an Italian socialist sneaks a phonograph into a bell tower to repeatedly play “The Internationale,” causing fascist troops to literally open fire on the tower.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's son Adan, who plays a younger version of his father in this film.
If Fellini had to contend with Mussolini while growing up in Amarcord, the Jewish Jodorowsky had to contend with Chilean counterparts to Italy’s Blackshirts and Germany’s Brownshirts. Of particular interest are Endless Poetry’s references to pre-Pinochet fascism in 1930s and 1940s Chile. Towards the end, a Chilean Nazi movement backing General Carlos Ibanez drive young Jodorowsky into exile in Paris.
Endless abounds with striking images that pop off of the screen. Examples include Adan as Alejandro, clad in white with his face painted white like a mime’s, costumed like a cross between a clown and an angel, with outstretched wings, held aloft by a devilish throng wearing red, with horns. The scene has a few actors clad in black and white skeleton-like costumes, who dominate another shot, marching down a street—some of them atop similarly garbed ghostly horses.
Jodorowsky’s singular style and surreal vision has previously been too hot to handle. His 1967 movie Fando y Lis provoked a riot and was subsequently banned in Mexico. He didn’t direct a movie for almost a quarter century, from 1990’s The Rainbow Thief (starring Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif and Christopher Lee) to 2013’s Dance. As he approaches ninety, Jodorowsky seems to be finding that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
It’s great to see this genius, whose edgy artistry led to long stretches of exile from the big screen, continue to make movies. To echo John Lennon, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Endless Poetry, with its loving ode to family and the life artistique, just might be yet another movie masterpiece. Bravo maestro!
Endless Poetry begins its U.S. theatrical release July 14. What a great way to celebrate Bastille Day!
As part of the “Ten Films That Shook the World” series celebrating the Russian Revolution’s centennial film historian/reviewer Ed Rampell is co-presenting V.I. Pudovkin’s revolutionary classic Storm Over Asia on Friday, 7:30 p.m., July 28, 2017 at The L.A. Workers Center, 1251 S. St. Andrews Place, L.A., CA 90019. For info: laworkersedsoc@gmail.com.