A Few Words on writer/director/artist/genius Alejandro Jodorowsky

Have you ever seen an Alejandro Jodorowsky film?

How about Fando y Lis?

What about El Topo?

Holy Mountain anyone?

If you have, consider yourself lucky. If not, stop what you are doing, go out, and find one. Jodorowsky, after all is in the same business as Andrei Trakovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Terrance Malick, David Lynch, etc. which is to say the art business. The masterpiece business.

Jodorowsky is maybe the most influential filmmaker whose influence has gone mostly unsung. His 1970 film El Topo essentially invented the American Midnight Movie phenomenon and then quickly disappeared until 2007 when a box set of his best work was released.

The three second version of why this was: John Lennon saw and loved El Topo, convinced his man Allen Klein to distribute that flick and foot the bill for it's follow-up Holy Mountain. However, a falling out resulted in the films being yanked from distribution and basically locked away.

But you've seen Jodorowsky's influence everywhere. Nary has a Marilyn Manson video not provided at least some kind of wink and nod to Jordorwosky (his Shia LaBeouf-directed video for Born Villain even directly quotes Holy Mountain). 

I should probably throw out that this video is very NSFW.

    

And what do you know, the new Ryan Gosling/Nicholas Winding Refn pretentious art-film piece of shit collaboration Only God Forgives is dedicated to Jodorowsky.

But now, I'm poking fun and getting off track.

Okay sure, Jodorwosky's films are violent:

Surreal:

And blasphemous:

And boy, you thought the iguana's in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans were weird?

Well how about the Conquest of Mexico reenacted with frogs and lizards?

But now I'm reducing Jordowosky to no more than a weirdo whose films should be shared with a group and a bong.

Well, ya, but anyone who has read this space on a regular basis knows that I also believe in art, especially trash art, and art Jodorowsky most defiantly is.

What's my definition of art? I think film becomes art when it meets two sets of criteria:

1) It fully utilizes the power of film as a visual medium:

And 2) it transcends the filmic medium. What the fuck does that mean? When you take the film away, you're still left with ideas, ways of thinking, emotions, whatever, that exist outside of the running time of the film. The ideas are what's important, the film is simply the medium which brings them to life.

But alas, what Ryan Gosling going on a violent killing spree or Marilyn Manson finding eyeballs in vaginas, etc lacks is that the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, if you can brave them, are also beautiful, spiritual and leave you feeling fully empowered. 

Jodorowsky, who, besides being a madman, is also an academic, writes books and conducts sessions in which he acts as a spiritual healer of sorts, is always pushing his viewers to find enlightenment. In El Topo his gunfighter is on a quest to kill four other master gunfighters, who each first deliver a powerful lesson to him, and in Holy Mountain, a group of people descend a mountain in hopes of finding enlightenment.

Being a visual artist, this is all hard to take in upon first view, especially for those not accustomed to stories being told almost solely through images. But it all really dates back to a performance that Jodorowsky wrote for famous French mime Marcel Maceau when he apprentices under him.

To paraphrase, the mime encounters three people along his journey, each of which he kills and tries to eat their heart. The third is a child. Once the child's heart is eaten, the mime is so overcome with guilt from what he has done that he kills himself and offers his heart back to the child so it can live again. A positive through negative; beauty through violence; enlightenment through knowledge; redemption through self sacrifice. We could go on all day.

So what's Jodorowsky's purpose? To find balance in life. That's where enlightenment is. To come to grips with oneself by destroying one's past self and being reborn from the ashes. Jodorowsky's teaching asks it's subjects to look back through their family tree, pinpoint the moment in life where some sort of negative force arose, and to give away all the baggage that has been building up over the years as a result of that action/situation/relationship/whatever it is that is holding you back. With nothing in one's past and with complete knowledge of oneself one can move forward facing outwards, looking ahead to new experience instead of back at old ones. Or something like that. 

If that's not a good definition of enlightenment, what is?

And, look, I didn't even need to drop any acid!

Side Note - The Dance of Reality, an autobiographical look at Jodorowsky's life in Chile and first film since 1990, is currently making the festival rounds and looks like it will be one to keep an eye out for.

A Few Words on Brick

So question: Is Rian Johnson writing a straight forward film noir (genre dialogue and all) set in a modern day high school brilliant or pretentious?

Of course, I'm opening up an endless debate to which there is no right or wrong answer.

So I'll put my foot down: it's mostly fucking pretentious Mr. Johnson.

But what you will notice from the very first frames of Brick right until the very last is that Johnson and his crew know how to make a movie. Seriously. This film is cinema, plain and simple. It's empty gimmick cinema, but it's cinema no less.

During the moments when I simply sat and looked at it, it conjured in my mind thoughts of Malick:

And Kubrick:

And Lynch:

This is a filmmaker that knows a thing or two about production value.

But the whole thing is such an empty, meaningless experience. Who was this film made to appeal to? What is it supposed to be about? It's influences are too broad and don't make sense together.

So the film, below the aesthetics, is all pose and swagger...A handful of intriguing with a spoonful of who cares. There's no heart and it just doesn't add up in any meaningful way.

It's about a high school private eye played by Joseph-Gordon Levitt. His character, probably having watched The Maltese Falcon one or ten too many times, says things like this, "No, bulls would gum it. They'd flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. But they'd trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes, and if we're doing this I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit." He wisely at least delivers these gems straight.

He's on the case to discover who killed the apple of his eye, which leads him down back alleys, dark corridors and so on and so forth until the trail leads him to a femme fatal:

A heavy:

 

A local kingpin known as The Pin:

 

 

And a frame, composed in just such a way, that a chicken juice container distracts from an entire scene in which The Pin's mom offers orange juice:

 

 

You see, pretentious. 

 

Johnson, over the course of three feature films has proven that, as a writer, not a lot unlike Malick, Kubrick or Lynch, he's more into concept/idea than story. That's fine. His problem, however, lies in his inability to elevate his concept above the base level of gimmick, leaving the details of the plot to hardly matter.

 

 

The charm of Brick then is in that someone thought to do it. Now that it's been done, let's get over it and all move on with ourselves. 

 



Filmic Measues: Gateway Movies

Filmic Measures is a glossery of critical terms and rules in which help us define the movies we watch.

I don't really follow so I'm not so sure if it's the case anymore but once upon a time one of the big arguments against the legalization of marijuana is that it is a gateway drug. Once you have become accustomed to the high that smoking pot comes with it opens the mind up to trying other, more stronger highs. Once you've driven 110 on the expressway, why not try 120 as well? And so forth.

In that sense, based on that argument, marijuana is an introduction to drug use: the first step on a path to other things (ed: I am not, of course, making any kind of comment on how much I agree or reject this argument).

There are certain movies that act in the same way: They are the first step into exploring greater, more sophisticated, deeper filmic experiences. Some of them are good in their own right, many of them have achieved a cult status, a couple are unjustly praised by those who are using them as their gateway because they don't know any better and so on. Quality hardly matters in such a case as long as they serve their specific purpose.

Now that I've laid out the foundations let me lead with some examples: The Usual Suspects is a gateway to the classic noir of Double Indemnity or Out of the Past; Pulp Fiction is the gateway to the highly stylised and homage friendly cultural hipness of early Godard like Breathless and Band of Outsiders; Fight Club is the gateway to experimental film-as-state-of-mind works like After Hours, Goodfellas is the gateway to more under appreciated Scorsese classics; Donnie Darko is the gateway to more obscure movies that actually know what they are about; Inception is the gateway to great science fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and even the films of David Lynch are a cross between the surrealism of Luis Bunuel mixed with the Hollywood cynicism of Billy Wilder. And so on down the line.

Is it ironic that they are all American movies? Maybe it is. Whenever, after all, we see a bland European movie it feels too "Americanized." But that's not the point I don't think. The vast majority of film goers learn the trade off of American movies. They strike a nice balance between trying to be (sometimes at least) hip and original while also trying to be popular and profitable (Scorcese, Tarantino, Forester, Soderberg and so on all fall into this category).

Some people, of course, will never get beyond this stage. Some are content not pushing the horizons, not being introduced to new forms of expression, culture, history or society. Fair enough. But if they ever choose, there's a whole new arena of things to experience after the baby steps.

Other Filmic Measures:

Chocolate Bar Movies
Where's the Airship Movies
Monday Movies  
The Documentary Rule