NEWS
EVENTS
Poetry Reclaiming Cinema
Other | Thursday 9th February 2017 |
Alejandro Jodorowsky has never played by money-based rules. “What is there left for someone like me? For [an] old man like me, who thinks that cinema is art?” Having raised some of his funds for his new film Endless Poetry through crowdfunding, it is easy to see why Jodorowsky thinks like this.
Endless Poetry is a sequel to his initial auto-biopic The Dance of Reality, the film follows Jodorowsky’s life as a young adult living in Santiago, Chile as he escapes familial ties, falls in with a crazed collective of artists and begins to discover life as it is meant to be lived.
Utilising aspects of theatrical production, Jodorowsky uses an array of props – old facades unfurled across entire shop-fronts, black-suited individuals moving a cardboard cut-out train - to transport the viewer from modern day Chile to the world of the 50s and 60s. The young Jodorowsky, frustrated by his father’s infatuation with money and his mother’s suffocating affection, longs to break free from a world of masks – a recurrent theme in the film.
Eventually he finds solace with a group of artists who welcome him as one of their own, allowing him free reign to practice a rampaging, boundary-breaking style of art. As he finds his footing in this world, experimenting with his own poetry, he meets Stella Diaz Varín, Nicanor Parra, Enrique Lihn and many other unknown artists who would come to redefine the landscape of Latin American art and literature.
Exploring issues of becoming, sexuality and repression, the film thrusts the viewer into this disorientating world. It is clear that Jodorowsky’s surrealist style is confident and expressive. Immediately we find ourselves in a world saturated by flamboyance and we are challenged by the overwhelming excess of the images thrown in our direction.
As Jodorowsky himself states in the crowd funding video, “When I go to the theatre I should exit a different person.” This film embraces difference. It is not a distraction but a slap in the face, a kick in the balls and, in some sense, an instruction to live differently. We are with Jodorowsky as he moves from difficulty to difficulty, breaking out of multiple chrysalises (using the butterfly metaphor which matches the film’s conception of growth). Only to bang right against the hard shell of the next, with each confrontation we are forced to confront something within ourselves.
It is ultimately a film about maturation and about discovering how to live. Jodorowsky is evidently unafraid of disrupting the story, as he (the director) frequently steps into the camera frame. Orientating the viewer at crucial points and delivering instruction to his younger self: “The brain asks questions, the heart gives answers. Life does not have meaning. Live! Live!”
This feels as though it is not only a piece of advice to his younger self, but also a message to the audience. It is not an ordinary film, and it is not an escape. This is a literal piece of art which implores us to engage with each other and the surrounding world, to live unconventionally and above all, to enjoy life.
