Tag Archives: Santa Sangre

The Dance of Reality: Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Dance of Reality
The Dance of Reality

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 August 2015

DVD/Blu-ray release date: 14 September 2015

Distributor: Curzon Artificial Eye

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Writer: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cast: Brontis Jodorowsky, Adan Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores, Cristóbal Jodorowsky

Original title: La danza de la realidad

Chile 2013

130 mins

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in 23 years is a strictly personal affair, an attempt to reconstruct his life from childhood to the present. For most of its 130 minutes, The Dance of Reality (La danza de la realidad) feels like a potpourri of adventures both magical and tragic. There is no point in trying to compare it to the vicious energy and boldness that his earlier midnight movie masterpieces (El Topo, Santa Sangre) generated, as clearly it would do this beautifully constructed and aptly surreal biopic injustice. Besides, the more revealing film about the Chilean director might be Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune, an entertaining glimpse into the truth behind Jodorowsky’s famously aborted plans to bring Herbert’s epic fantasy novel to the screen. But where Pavich’s documentary is eye-popping and hilarious, Jodorowsky’s own account of his past quests and journeys is poetic, haunting and mystical, flashing with insight and lingering in the mind long after the tale is told.

Pamela Jahn met with Alejandro Jodorowsky at the Cannes film festival in May 2013 and told her about the healing power of filmmaking, the joy of creating and the magic of reality.

Pamela Jahn: It’s wonderful to see a new film by you after so many years. Why did it take you so long to make another film?

Alejandro Jodorowsky: In the beginning cinema was an art, a really great art, but then the stars came, and with it the money. When the stars came, that was the illness of the industry. And today, cinema is in the hands of producers, it’s all about money. I wanted to make art and every time I tried to do something, people said no, because there was no money in it for them. So I waited and thought, ‘One day I will do it’. And it’s not that I didn’t get asked to make films. People suggested I should make a political film about South America or an erotic film, but I said, ‘No, I want to do what I want to do’. So I waited – 23 years. And I suffered. Because making films is the most beautiful art in the world. I have hundreds of films in my library and every night I would wake up around 3am and watch a film. Every single day I was suffering, but I kept saying to myself, ‘One day I will do it again’.

Why did you decide to make this film at this particular moment in your life?

I am an artist. I don’t know why I do these things, because they come to me. I needed to do that film, because I wanted to heal myself, my soul, my family. And I wanted to show the audience a way to heal their memories, their past, because I feel it is necessary to do that.

Do you see cinema in general as a healing art?

Yes, I don’t believe too much in commercial cinema. These films are not really useful for the human being, because they are only entertainment. You go to the cinema, you see the film but then you instantly forget what you have seen. For me, making a film is like changing a part of my life, like having children, and to do something that opens up the perspectives of life. That’s what I am trying to do. But the problem is that for the industry, making film only means making money. So first of all, I make films that are not expensive, because if the film is too expensive I am forced to become a prisoner of the industry. Instead, I make a film with less money, but more creative intention. For this particular film though, I really needed producers who didn’t want to make money. There is a saying that if God gives you sugar, open your mouth. So if the film makes money, that’s fantastic, and I’d be very happy. But if it doesn’t, I am happy too, because I want to do whatever I want. And what I wanted to do here is to go to my little town, where I was born, and where the other children used to laugh at me, and kick me, and hate me, because I was different. I was white with this big nose, the son of Russian-Jewish parents, and nobody wanted to play with me because of that. And that made me very sad, because I loved this town. Then, 70 years later, when I came back to this place, it hadn’t changed at all. It’s like a dead town. Apart from maybe one new building nothing had changed. When I was a child, I used to have my hair cut by a Japanese guy, and when I came back, I went to get my hair cut, which turned into quite a dramatic experience for me. Because it was still the same place and the guy who cut my hair now was the son of the man who used to cut my hair when I was little – that’s in my film. In fact, I changed my town, I cleaned things up, I got the houses painted and I made the people appear in my film. I changed it, like a hero who brings the elixir to the sick, I sort of healed my place, and I needed to do that.

Watch the trailer for The Dance of Reality:

Your last film before The Dance of Reality was Rainbow Thief with Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. Was the experience of making that film part of the reason why you didn’t want to compromise again?

Oh, I hated Peter O’Toole. And I still do today. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

What was so bad about him?

He was terrible to work with. He wanted to do what he wanted. At one point I asked everyone to leave the set and I took a stick, because he’s like a dog, you need to hit him in order to get him to do what you want.

Do you think your life and work as a filmmaker could have turned out quite differently if Fando y Lis hadn’t caused such a stir when it was first shown?

I made Fando y Lis in 1968. Today, even young people understand that film, but when I first made it, it was a scandal in Mexico. They wanted to lynch me, I had to hide because [Emilio] ‘El Indio’ Fernández said, ‘I will kill that guy’. And I knew he wasn’t joking because he had killed someone before. It was a terrible time. And then we managed to sell the film to the United States. At that point, I idealised America and I thought of it as some sort of triumph at last. But then the distributor who bought the film cut out everything that was somehow surrealist and creative, and they tried to make a romantic film out of it. It was shit. I wanted to explain to them that this was not my film anymore, but no one would listen. No journalist wanted to do an interview so that I could explain it to the American audience. And so of course the film was a failure. After that, I decided to make a cowboy film. But I didn’t want to make a ‘Western’, so I made an ‘Eastern’. I made El Topo, and people came to see it.

Why do you think El Topo became such a cult film?

I don’t know, really, because the whole of Mexico was laughing at me when I made it. People said I was crazy. Even the actors sometimes didn’t believe in it when we were making the film, which is also partly why I acted myself, because no one wanted to play that role. And all of a sudden I receive an invitation to the Concert for Bangladesh in New York. I was very poor at that time and the ticket was first class and all paid for, so I thought, why not, and I went there. At the airport, they picked me up in a limousine to bring me first to the hotel and then to a big concert with thousands of people. But I didn’t know why I was there until my producer Allen Klein said, ‘Don’t you know you are a star? The Beatles want to meet you, everyone wants to meet you’. And when we went to the concert, they were all there, Ringo Starr, John Lennon. The next day, they showed my film at midnight. It was my first time in America and when I came to the theatre, there was a cloud of marijuana smoke, it was unbelievable. I went on stage to introduce my picture to the public and all of a sudden I was the star of the underground. In a way, it was the birth of what they now call ‘midnight movies’.

How did you come to make Santa Sangre with Claudio Argento as producer?

After The Holy Mountain, nobody wanted to make a film with me. Allen Klein, the producer, didn’t like the film at all and so he wanted me to make an erotic film next. And then I escaped, because I didn’t want to do that. One day, I got contacted by Claudio Argento, the brother of Dario Argento, who said, ‘I am the executive producer for my brother but now I want to make a different experience, I want to change, and I want to produce a picture for you. I want you to make me a film about a serial killer woman’. I said, ‘Well, ok, I will do it’. Then I gave the script to Argento and because it was in Spanish of course, he gave it to an Italian guy to translate it. And that was my luck. Because that guy didn’t really know Spanish either, and the translated script he came up with wasn’t my picture anymore. He’d invented something completely new, a completely idiotic film. So I went to Mexico and I did Santa Sangre, which sort of was about a serial killer, but my version of a serial killer. Until today, I have not made a cent from this film, but I am happy that I made it. In fact, Santa Sangre is the film I like most of all my films. I am glad I did it.

Watch the trailer for Santa Sangre:

Do you enjoy writing comics as much as making films?

Yes, but you can’t really compare the two, it’s not the same. I don’t get the same immense pleasure from writing comics as from making a film. Because with comics, I write them in one or two months, but to make a film, it takes one and a half years.

How did you convince Michel Seydoux to give you money again, after he lost quite a lot on Dune.

I know, he did lose a lot of money and for about 20 years I didn’t dare talking to him, because I thought he’d hate me. But then there was this young American filmmaker, Frank Pavish, who wanted to make a film about Dune. My first reaction was, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about a failure’. But eventually I agreed. Then Pavish came to me and said, ‘I want to set up a conversation with you and Michel Seydoux for my film’. I thought Seydoux would never agree to this, but he did. So we met again after all these years and realised that we didn’t hate each other. After the interview, we talked and he asked me, ‘Do you want to work with me again?’ I said, ‘Yes, sure, but you need to give me two million dollars without knowing what I will do with your money’. So within five minutes, I had the money to make this film. It was so fantastic. Incredible.

The Dance of Reality is a film about your life. Do you ever worry about getting old?

No, getting older is fantastic. Age only exists in what you see, but inside me I have no age. And I have no nationality, no sex either, really. I am not a man, only when I am with my wife. But when I wake up in the morning, I am a human being – I don’t define myself by my sexuality, or my age. And I don’t have a big ego, I am not proud, because I am mortal. I know that I could die tomorrow. But on the other hand, I am only 84 years old now, so I can still

What keeps you young at heart?

Art! Art is my life. I love to create things. Miracles are everywhere but you need to learn how to see them, that’s the ‘dance of reality’. The reality you see really is a magical thing, but people don’t realise it. You need to open your mind to be able to see the miracles.

Read Virginie Sélavy’s 2007 interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

The Genre Mask

Possession
Possession

To mark the UK Blu-ray release of Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, Daniel Bird looks at the genre implications which stem from the film.

In 1996, I met the writer and musician Stephen Thrower at a programme of Jess Franco films at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead, London. Thrower was the editor of Eyeball, a fanzine celebrating art and exploitation in European cinema (although in the last few issues Thrower expanded his horizon globally). Eyeball was designed to mimic the layout of the defunct Monthly Film Bulletin. With wit and intelligence, Thrower (along with the likes of Pete Tombs) mapped out a zone of convergence between European high art and more low-brow tastes (genre film, comic books, pornography, etc.). In Eyeball, a review of Godard’s Pierrot le fou would rub shoulders with a reappraisal of Franco’s Virgin among the Living Dead – and why not? Ado Kyrou flagged up the ‘sublime’ moments to be found in ‘bad’ films. Franco made lots of bad films (so has Godard). Thrower was particularly keen on Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) – a film that was, at the time, pretty much loathed all round. In short, its ‘artiness’ pissed off the horror crowd, while the monster and copious blood-letting excluded it from the prissy gaze of the ‘art house’ set. Thrower, however, loved it, and had no qualms about dedicating the last issue of Eyeball to Żuławski.

In spring 1997, Thrower and I travelled to Paris to interview Żuławski. Szamanka had opened in France and was about to close. It was only playing in one cinema in Saint Michel, and the reviews plastered outside the foyer made for an entertaining read. Libération urged anyone who saw ?u?awski approaching a movie camera to shoot him with a tranquilizer gun. Szamanka did not disappoint: it offered an unhinged performance by a beautiful unknown, and bruising social comment (not to mention cannibalism and nuclear war). Żuławski was admirably intransigent during the interview, rubbishing Terry Gilliam’s Fisher King, Ken Loach’s social realist camera set-ups while proposing that if Martians land on earth then they should be made to watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ‘because they might learn something about what it is to be human’. That is not, however, to suggest ?u?awski was a ‘fan’ of genre cinema – on the contrary. Anything that adhered to a ‘formula’ (ironic or otherwise) clearly bored him senseless. It reminded me of an interview Thrower conducted with Alejandro Jodorowsky around the time of the UK release of Santa Sangre. Jodorowsky said that, for him, the horror film was the only genre in which film poetry could still exist. Similarly, David Cronenberg asserted that he was not interested in gore, but rather imagery that could only be shown in the horror genre – like the tumour firing ‘cancer gun’ in Videodrome (Cronenberg, it seems, has gone back on this stance in favour of middle-class respectability). One of the things that impressed me the most about Possession was how Żuławski did not ‘suggest’ the monster (as Polanski did in Rosemary’s Baby), but rather showed it in its slimy, tentacled glory.

Towards the end of the 1990s, the French magazine Starfix asked a number of directors to list their films of the 1980s. Żuławski’s list included:

The Shining
All That Jazz
The Thing
Fanny and Alexander
Blade Runner
Platoon

Two trends can be discerned: first, take The Shining, The Thing and Blade Runner – three films that were marketed as genre films, but whose beauty, initial commercial failure and current ‘classic’ status rest in the fact that they are – like Possession – anything but formulaic; second, All That Jazz, Fanny and Alexander and Platoon are rooted in personal experience – but in each case Fosse, Bergman and Stone take what could have been mere memoir material to the realm of cinema. All That Jazz and Fanny and Alexander are not just honest and painful – they are also fantastic and, in the case of Platoon, hallucinatory. Żuławski’s list is of films that, like his own, all in some way ‘pierce reality’.

I have no problem with the word ‘genre’. Genre just means category. The novel is a genre, as distinct from poetry. The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about how the ‘novel genre’ was rooted in banter, gossip and jokes of the market place as opposed to the sombre, authority of, say, a church sermon. By the same logic, a feature film is a genre in itself, period. However, when the ‘tropes’ that define that category become prescriptive, then the result is familiarity, boredom and apathy. Another Russian, the critic Viktor Shklovsky, wrote about how the job of the artist was to come up with a device that made the familiar seem strange. The ‘strangeness’ sets our brain a challenge, and the process of dealing with it is engaging – not just on an intellectual level, but an emotional one too (see Ben Wheatley’s ‘horror’ films – Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England). Take The Thing – the Howard Hawks original is a respected, but ultimately hokey ‘man in a suit’ affair. In Carpenter’s version, however, all bets were off: anything could be the thing; we, as viewers, had to readjust to this – the result was something very disturbing indeed. In Possession, Żuławski made a marital breakdown ‘strange’ by showing ‘the horror’ – this was not Scenes from a Marriage – it was something else. Let us not forget that Bergman also turned to the fantastic (The Hour of the Wolf – a film that would make a great double bill with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). The monster in Possession (like the thing in Carpenter’s film) is incredibly poetic in the sense that it conjures up intense emotions through imagery – not unlike Kafka’s cockroach in his short story, ‘The Metamorphosis’.

Kafka frequently wrote stories about animals, but Disney is never going to pick up the rights from the Max Brod estate. The problem, for me, begins with the culture of ‘pitching’ ideas. Frederic Tuten, the co-writer of Possession, once told me an anecdote about a friend who was commissioned to write a script for ‘Jaws in Venice’. Tuten said that while the idea is ridiculous – the juxtaposition of those two elements – a killer shark and urban canals – conjures up an idea that can be, above all else, sold. The problem with such pitches is that they are often reductive and restrictive. Yes, Anna Karenina is ‘about a woman who is unfaithful’ – but it is also so much more. Similarly, Possession is not just ‘about a woman who fucks an octopus’. To pigeonhole Possession as a genre film is to go into the film wearing blinkers. Genre elements are often a disguise, like masks worn during a carnival (see Dostoevsky – whose stories all feature ‘crimes’ but could in no way be confused with episodes of C.S.I. – although it might be interesting to see Crime and Punishment in the style of C.S.I. , just as The Idiot could easily be recast as a love triangle between a geek, a jock and a cheerleader). To only see the mask and not sense what the mask is hiding is to lose out on what makes a film special. The ‘genre mask’ in itself is not interesting. Rather, it is a prop in the game of cinema, which itself is a reflection on life.

Possession is released in the UK on Blu-ray by Second Sight on 29 July 2013.

Daniel Bird