Alexandro Jodorowsky
One of the ultimate cult figures in cinema and theater with many wild rumors buzzing around his name. His cinematic repertoire boasts only 6 movies in 35 years, and a riot by an angry mob in reaction to 'Fando y Lis'. He makes heavy use of the bizarre, the grotesque, the obscure allegory (often religious in nature), religious symbolism, surrealism, many deformed humans, dwarves, and amputees as well as numerous non-sequitur events and striking props. His movies are striking and even artistically or intellectually stimulating but mostly they feel like the work of an intellectual lunatic on drugs. At times his visuals feel like a Zen koan with the hidden meaning just out of reach, and sometimes you even grasp the meaning and feel awed by the artistic genius until you realize your mind is just forcing meaning onto bizarre information that could mean anything to anyone. Thus, comprehensible and stimulating scenes are often drowned out by self-indulgent cult intellectualism, artistic nonsense or pointless Dadaism. His movies may work as striking visual pieces, however, if you are looking for a unique provocative experience or are under the influence of drugs. His most telling quote was regarding El Topo: "If you're great it's a great picture, if you're limited El Topo is limited"... which sounds too much like a paraphrase of the tailor's statement in The Emperor's New Clothes. His only movie not listed here is Tusk, a mainstream film about a relationship between a girl and an elephant in India mixed with some action and slapstick.
Jodorowsky's strange imagination is pulled slightly down to earth by Dario Argento's involvement, and the result is something that we can sink our teeth into. The story (yes there is one this time) involves a group of circus performers, the main characters being a fat, knife-throwing strong-man, his aerialist and religious cult leader wife, his tattoed lady lover, his magician son who loves a deaf-mute girl, a midget and a few clowns. After a very violent, traumatic episode in the boy's life involving his jealous mother attacking the lovers with acid, getting her arms cut off and his father committing suicide, we follow the grown up magician through various stages of insanity, and an obsession with his mother who controls his arms and forces him to kill women. This is all very Freudian-heavy and dark and is comparable to Psycho at times, but the real star of this movie is Jodorowsky's bizarre visuals and symbolism, and the plot only ties it all together to keep us interested until the final surprise denouement. We are treated to such striking images such as a bleeding elephant and its funeral in a huge coffin, a huge bodybuilder woman that the little magician challenges, mongoloids being entertained with a whore, haunting female corpses covered with white clown paint, and many carefully choreographed duets where a woman with no arms uses her son's arms as if they were her own. The only flaw is that at times it's too twisted just for shock value but the story comes together very well and the visuals never leave you.
First short movie by Jodorowsky acted purely by mimes. A man tries to woo a woman who plays hot and cold with him and who seems to like and dislike different aspects of him. He tries different neckties, hats... and heads. A local woman runs a store for new heads, keeping spare heads on display, and changing them for customers on the fly. The problem is, the targeted woman is too picky and heads and bodies don't always see eye-to-eye.
A long allegorical, surreal western about a man in search for meaning (I think). The story starts with a gunfighter and his naked son who takes down a colonel who is terrorizing the people. A victimized woman attaches herself to him, he abandons his son, she convinces him to challenge the four wise masters of the desert, he defeats them all by cheating and finds he has gained nothing. She betrays him and chooses a lesbian lover instead and he wakes up years later in a hidden cave of social rejects and deformed people. He falls in love with a dwarf, tries to save them by digging a tunnel to the outside only to find a decadent and violent society on the other side. Along the way we see such images like a man with no legs on the back of a man with no arms, a man forced to have sex with a dwarf in public, bandits dancing with and sexually abusing four priests, a showdown where they wait for a whining balloon to run out of air before shooting, finding eggs in the sand between other people's feet and shooting rocks for water in a desert, etc. In other words, non-stop symbolic and insane vignettes posing as mystical, religious or satirical messages. It succeeds at rare times, but you only end up feeling confused.
Jodorowsky's first is also his most relatively accessible, albeit surreal movie with some graspable allegories and symbols as well as his usual impenetrable mysticism. Fando & Lis is a black and white surreal, Freudian story about an innocent young couple in search of a fantastical, Eden-like place called Tar. Along the way they lose their innocence and Fando trips over his ego, parents, homosexual tendencies and other psychological barriers. This is all portrayed symbolically of course but the movie seems to lack a center or goal and gets lost in pointless symbolism, half-baked ideas and aimless intellectualism.
The ultimate bizarre midnight movie. There are no words to describe this never-ending visual stream of the most creative and outlandish imagery you could never imagine. Forget plot, forget descriptions and reviews; Just see it for yourself. What Jodorowsky doesn't seem to realize though is that without some understandable meaning, even this incredible imagination can get boring. Like El Topo, this is full of obscure symbolism and allegory, and even more religion and occult heavy. The times that you do grasp some kind of meaning or message are far outweighed by all the nonsense and lunacy, the crackpot pretentious 'wisdom', the pointless grotesque visuals, and the mescaline or LSD experiences that you feel you're going through when watching this phenomenon of a movie. The ending actually contains a message: Jodorowsky tells us that all this search for enlightment is usually escapism from reality, that the answer lies inside you and you alone, and that if you have someone that loves you, you should appreciate it and stop running off into fantasy. But did we need 2 hours of unintelligible madness to come to that conclusion?
Compared to his earlier movies, this more recent offering by the lunatic is practically mainstream. But the use of some bizarre imagery, circus performers and most of all, inpenetrable allegory, is still here. The plot involves an eccentric rich man who, among other things, feeds caviar to his dogs and bones to his family, and hires a dozen whores to play with him. This man was supposed to leave his wealth to a crazed fool who shacks up with a thief in the sewers and attempts to teach him the purpose of life while living off his thievery. This is by far his most pointless movie, but as with the others, your curiosity is held throughout.