From there, it was notoriety and scandal to break the bank: Jodorowsky's lovably Bunuelian debut film Fando & Lis (1968) supposedly caused a riot at the Acapulco Film Festival and got the director run out of town as a heretic just one month after the Tlatelolco Massacre of protesting students. His second, El Topo (1970), was an international "cult" hit (or whatever categorization might best suit tantalizing films that spawn, seemingly, outside the ordinary ideas of genre or industry), and at the tail end of the hippie epoch was heartily consumed as a midnight movie along with recreational substances of all kinds. If his next film, The Holy Mountain (1973), was less so, all it proved was that the world could only handle a single uncut dose of Jodorowsky before it had decided it had had enough. Jodorowsky was undeterred, though his cataracts of absurdity came slowly: the relatively gentle Tusk in 1980, and then, in 1989, Santa Sangre, an almost autobiographical myth-movie that could be called a return to form.
Jodorowsky's "form" is, of course, what's at issue - he's a blustery, crude, fabulously pretentious three-ring provocateur, and in his heyday decorating a chunk of desert with crucified cow carcasses, or filling a Western-movie town with dwarfs and nude amputees and Christ references, seemed to be the height of mythic, pseudo-profound "transgression." His sensibility is equal parts Theater of Cruelty nuttiness, ersatz Christian imagery, south-of-the-border nihilism (life seems cheap in Jodorowsky's world, and for farm animals it often is) and grand circus orchestration. The filmmaker's years working as a traveling circus performer - think about that: in the '40s, in South America - left him with a knowledge and ardor for the milieu that no filmmaker can rival (not even Fellini), and in Santa Sangre, made when he was 60, he returns to it in earnest. (It's also his first film in English.) The story is, as always, dopey with self-importance, salacious as a freak show, and storybook innocent about the real world, tracing the pulpy tragedy of a circus family destroyed by the lust of the knife-throwing father (a grotesquely corpulent Guy Stockwell) for a tattooed contortionist (cabaret diva Thelma Tixou), resulting in the evangelical mother (Blanca Guerra) getting her arms cut off, and, years later, embarking on a performing career and a revenge rampage with her grown, traumatized son (Axel Jodorowsky) literally acting as her hands.
Take that synopsis on face value, and you can see where Jodorowsky's imagery becomes interesting - the armless woman and her son locked together pretending to be one body, the sexual thrill of knife-throwing (exploited only half as fulsomely in Patrice Leconte's The Girl on the Bridge), the circus life elevated to the stuff of legends and Greek tragedy. (Indeed, the scene everyone remembers best from the film is a solemn street funeral for a dead elephant, complete with a black coffin the size of a truck.)
Jodorowsky may be a unique and extravagant figure, but the fact remains that his films can be tedious and childish, and the impulses that guide many of their visual ideas, and most of their narratives, are often simplistic and sophomoric. He is one of those distinctive, self-marginalizing voices you desperately want to be far more accomplished and profound than they actually are. Santa Sangre ("Holy Blood") is his most grounded film, and the one that feels closer to the concerns of actual human beings - that is, the characters aren't merely symbols. They are, though, scenery-chewing iconic stereotypes, put to work by a yarn-spinning sensibility closer to the Arabian Nights and underground comic books than any normative notion of "art." Jodorowsky has not and will not ever win points for dramatic realism or insight, and certainly the Jodorowskians out there don't expect him to. Rather, they expect, and get in spades, a banquet of irrational juxtapositions and ghoulish tableaux and symbologies so overt and self-contradictory they must, for the initiated, signify something new. (The closest contemporary Jodorowsky has had is photographer Joel-Pieter Witkin, whose feverishly Surrealist work postdates El Topo.) Jodorowsky acolytes seem to love his films for how they exist as raging counterpoint to what a "normal" movie is, and it's easy to sympathize with this free-ranging cultural hunger for radical visions, with or without pharmacological assistance. But it is still difficult to love the films. If only Jodorowsky could have been a little less of a counter-culture showman, and a little more of an artist.
A valentine to die-hard Jodorowskians, the new DVD edition of Santa Sangre comes packing over five hours of supplemental material, including several documentaries, a film about the real-life killing spree that ostensibly inspired the film, multiple interviews with Jodorowsky, short films, music videos, and even an audio commentary by the filmmaker himself.
For more information about Santa Sangre, visit Severin Films. To order Santa Sangre, go to TCM Shopping.
by Michael Atkinson
