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.

Filmic Measures-The Documentary Rule

When Gene Siskel said that a movie needed to be better than having lunch with its stars he, in a way, unconsciously, if not changed film criticism, than changed the way films are consumed. Although the statement was, I assume, meant merely as a means to have a quotable critical tagline for which to evaluate movies, the buried implications are worth unearthing. To think about films this way is to uncover their relationship to the world or art, society, etc, for a film, in order to succeed, must always be better than something else. Is there another art that bears such a burden? Theatre is comparable to other theatre, music is judged based on it's worth next to other music and the success of the writer depends on their ability to convey meaningful thoughts through words. But film is at once art, culture, politics, philosophy, psychology anthropology, history, sociology, what have you on top of all the physical tradesmen it employs simple to make it happen. And although all art is, in some way, influenced by these things, does any but film ever truly embody them? Most arts, after all, usually have something that keeps art separated, for lack of better phrasing, from politics. The play has the luxury of unfolding in real time in front of a crowd in which, if one desired, could be reached out and touched, but it is, aesthetically speaking, built upon the suspension of disbelief. The writer is not so much responsible for the events they depict as they are their interpretation of such, which are only as real as the writer's negotiation of them. The writer has poetry on their side. But, because of this disconnection, to come full circle, theater must only be better than other theatre, the novel only better than other novels, etc. But film, despite the "lie" of editing as Godard would have it, is captured with sound, movement, colour. It's a literal embodiment of whatever has been placed before the camera, no matter how artificial it's construction may have been. Film must not only be art, politics, philosophy, etc., it must be better than art, politics, philosophy, etc. That's why we're always judging film based not only on reality, believability, aesthetic invention and so on, but also the depth of it's thoughts, it's moral centre, it's ability to speak something, anything, be it the banal or the humorous. To paraphrase what Ossie Davis once said: art is a form of power; it has the ability to move us and make us move. Is there, looking back on history, a more powerful art form, in this sense, than film? That's why we create these sayings, these filmic measures because, as Siskel pointed to us, all film must be better than something else. So here's one: A film must be better than a documentary made on the same subject. The difference between fiction and documentary is simple: documentary is fact, fiction is being there (note-I am using fact in an abstract way, not in a literal way as if to suggest that documentaries are not subjective). A fiction film should take you to the heart of it's subject, take you along for its journey, let you understand its hero and their cause, morals, beliefs, whatever it is that makes the experience as personal and intimate as possible. A documentary on the other hand should be, as it's name suggests, a document of something; a chronicling of a belief, a movement, a moment in time. Fiction is built from emotions. Documentary is, in one way or another, built from thesis. That's why a fiction film needs to be better. It needs to, in a sense be more real, because it needs to immerse the viewer. Documentaries impart knowledge and feelings. Fiction does this too, but also takes you for the whole ride. Take a real example: Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is based on the story of Dieter Dengler, the subject of Herzog's documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Although Little Dieter is a special and informative documentary, Rescue Dawn shows us what Little Dieter can only leave in the crevices of our imagination. It makes the story more real by putting us alongside Dengler in that moment. It may not be an exact representation of his story as it actually happened, but when the finished product is as good as Rescue Dawn, who's complaining?  Some films are so boring and so dramatically uninspired that to see a documentary on the same subject would be so much more enlightening, entertaining, informative, whatever. The September Issue must certainly be of more worth than The Devil Wears Prada, no? That's because the documentary tells us something about high class, sophistication, fashion, and so on, where the film simply uses that world in order to fulfill it's own superficial fantasies and fairy tales. You see the difference? Other Filmic Measures: The Chocolate Bar Movie, Where's The Airship Movies

Werner Herzog

During my down time over the Christmas break I managed to catch up on a few of the movies over the last couple years that have eluded me for one reason or another. One such film was Zak Penn's slightly amusing Christopher Guest-like mockumentary The Grand about a Las Vegas poker tournament and all the colourful characters who participate in it. What inspired me though is that one of the film's stars was German madman director Werner Herzog, who steals the show and also starred in Penn's slightly amusing debut mockumentary The Incident at Loch Ness.

What strikes me about Herzog, whose work I admire very much, is how, despite his reputation and his self-parodying appearances in films like The Grand, these things never undermine his reputation as a unique and original voice in filmmaking. It is testament to the true talent of his craft that, despite his personal exploits, which would overshadow the whole of a lesser talent's entire career, his own films always manage to be grander and more extravagant experiences in and of themselves tham his headlines manage to be.

This is, after all, a man whose actions have, by now, became the stuff of myth and legend: stories that, if they didn't involve Herzog, you probably wouldn't believe them. True or not (and in most cases I believe they probably are), here are some of the best:

• Herzog threatens to murder actor Klaus Kinski if he walked off the set of Aguirre, the Wrath of God in 1972. This would be the first of many such incidents. For a nice look deeper into the Herzog/Kinski relationship, his 1999 tribute documentary My Best Fiend is worth a look.
• Herzog promises that he will eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever completes work of his debut documentary Gates of Heaven. The event was captured in Les Blank's short documentary, aptly titled Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe. The short can be found as an extra on the Criterion DVD version of Blank's insightful documentary on Herzog and the making of Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams. You can also see it free here.
• Herzog is shot in the stomach by a sniper while conducting an interview outside in L.A. See the video here.
• Herzog contracts malaria after being put in an African jail for being mistaken as a German mercenary.
• In order to reward his dwarf cast for completing Even Dwarfs Started Small in 1970, Herzog jumps into a cactus patch.
• Hearing that his film historian friend Lotte Eisner was ill and probably going to die, Herzog, deciding that she was far too influential to German cinema to die, set out on foot from Munich to Paris, believing that completing the walk would save her life. His journals during the adventure were published under the title Of Walking In Ice and also inspired a fan to do something similar in the 2006 documentary Walking to Werner.
• After Joaquin Phoenix is in a car accident in Beverly Hills, Herzog mysteriously appears, saves Phoenix and disappears.

And yet, in spite of all this fodder (certainly more interesting than what passes for celebrity gossip these days) Werner Herzog's films and documentaries stand as bold, original works by an artist who dances only to his own beat. If you haven't seen a single work by Herzog now is the time to start.