alejandro jodorowsky

Santa Sangre (1989)

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I’ve never had much enthusiasm for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s two signature films—the notoriously brutal acid Western El Topo & the psychedelic tableaux The Holy Mountain—despite the immense visual beauty both films convey as a collection of still images.  Jodorowsky is undeniably impressive as a visual stylist, but whenever he asserts full auteurist control over a picture, the visuals just kinda sit there, purposeless and without clear progression.  I suspect, then, that the reason Santa Sangre stands out as the director’s best work is because he did not have that authorial control as the sole writer-director.  The project was brought to Jodorowsky as an already fully formed idea by two Italian filmmakers: schlock giallo screenwriter Roberto Lioni and, more notably, Claudio Argento, who’s most famous for producing films directed by his older brother Dario (including the Argento classics Inferno & Tenebre).  Those two external voices do little to rein in Jodorowsky’s wildly expressive, surrealistic visual style, but they do help anchor it to a more familiar, generic narrative structure that gives it a much sturdier shape.  The imagery in Santa Sangre is just as gorgeous as anything you’ll see in The Holy Mountain, but it’s driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum. 

Santa Sangre is a fine-art sideshow that finds ecstatic melodrama in the backstage lives of traveling carnies.  In the early flashback sequence that establishes the dramatic stakes, there’s little stylistic difference from what might happen if Werner Herzog attempted a 1980s remake of Tod Browning’s Freaks (a possibility you can only effectively imagine by watching Herzog’s forgotten 2000s melodrama Invincible).  Strongmen, clowns, strippers, dwarves, and trapezists are shot with a confrontational, near-documentary candor that walks just up to the line of “Get a load of these freaks!” gawking, but invests in the sincere, scene-to-scene drama of their humanity enough to mostly get away with it.  The modern-timeline scenes set in a mental institution are even shakier in the tightrope they walk between honesty & exploitation.  It doesn’t help that horror is an inherently exploitative medium in the way it others the mentally ill and physically disfigured for cheap scares, a tradition this particular title leans into by mirroring the plot of Hitchcock’s Psycho.  In the flashback timeline, a young circus-performer child watches in horror as his mother’s arms are severed by his brutish, drunken father.  In the present, he escapes from an insane asylum to act as his mother’s phantom arms, wearing painted nails and voguing like Willi Ninja as part of her new, altered stage act . . . and, of course, violently murdering anyone she singles out as a target, despite his squeamishness for violence.  This perverse pantomime of Mommy Issues psychosis culminates in an all-timer of a twist ending that I will not dare spoil here.

There’s something deeply, spiritually honest about movies that act as circuses.  Both artforms are a kind of cheap-entertainment spectacle that can convey pure, illusionary magic if the audience is willing to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the show.  Some of the best scenes in Santa Sangre are just straightforward documentation of circus performers’ acts, costumes, and bodies, with Jodorowsky’s eye searching for ethereal beauty in their makeshift D.I.Y. glamor.  It’s Argento & Lioni who provide a linear structure to support that beauty, though, and you can feel their influence in Santa Sangre‘s many Italo horror cliches.  First of all, you don’t get much more giallo than borrowing your plot structure from Hitchcock – Psycho or Rear Window especially.  Then, there’s the intense color gels & neons that mark the modern timeline of Santa Sangre but are not present in Jodorowsky’s previous works.  The real signifier, though, is the framing of the first modern-day murder, in which a woman is stabbed to death by a disembodied arm wielding a knife, the killer’s identity obscured just off screen. It’s all classic giallo fare, right down to the awkward English dubbing and the sensational but nonsensical answer to the central mystery of the murders.  I’m not exactly sure why Argento sought out Jodorowsky to direct this film instead of collaborating with Dario or Umberto Lenzi or Michael Soavi or whatever Italo schlockteur was around & looking for a paycheck.  It was a smart choice, though, as the director’s attempts to elevate the carnival setting into a fine art gallery show combine with the producer’s assembly line horror filmmaking rhythms to craft something truly special that neither collaborator would ever achieve again on their own.

Generally, Jodorowsky movies are more interesting to think about in the abstract than they are to actually watch, which is why the unfinished-project documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune is the context where his name is most often repeated in modern discourse.  Santa Sangre is the major exception to that conundrum.  It may be just as exploitative & ableist as an actual carnival sideshow, but it’s also a work of tremendous beauty & emotional sincerity.  It would be difficult to claim that a movie that goes out of its way to include depictions of forced prostitution, elephant dismemberment, and child torture via tattoo needles is not on some level mining empty shock value out of its setting & drama.  The characters’ pain through surviving that outrageous violence is heartfelt, though, and the beauty of Jodorowsky’s photography protects the story from devolving into pure miserablism.  Besides the narrative similarities to Psycho & Freaks, the movie also includes direct allusions to the James Wale classic The Invisible Man, another example of horror filmmaking’s highwire balancing act between cheap visual spectacle and sincere emotional torment. It’s a shame Jodorowsky didn’t work with by-the-numbers horror producers more often. The genre’s readymade narrative familiarity & eternal marketability might have really bulked up his relatively small filmography, both in quantity and in quality.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Movie (1971)

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After the breakout success of his debut film Easy Rider, Hollywood had immense, naïve faith in Dennis Hopper. Along with other late-60s game changers like Bonnie and Clyde & The Graduate, Easy Rider was one of the foundational texts of the New Hollywood movement, convincing producers that Hopper had the formula for a new kind of cinematic alchemy that could turn bargain-budget countercultural angst into buffo box office. It was this blind faith in Hopper’s money-making instincts that convinced Universal Pictures to allow him a long creative leash & a $1 million budget to film whatever project he wanted in his chosen location of the Peruvian mountains. It took two years of drugged-out haze & frustrated artistic hubris for Hopper to scrape together a cohesive first-cut of his sophomore feature, which he then destroyed when friend/mentor Alejandro Jodorowsky teased him for being a convention-bound coward. With a newly-charged ambition to break new cinematic ground (and amuse his own tragically stoned mind) Hopper cobbled together a much less straight-forward edit, one with zero commercial appeal. The Last Movie was a notorious flop, a commercial misfire that derailed Dennis Hopper’s career for more than a decade and has since had a long, hard-fought road to minor cult status. A new 4k digital restoration of the orphaned, little loved vanity project is now making the theatrical rounds for a second go, testing whether it was a secretly misunderstood, ahead-of-its-time masterpiece or the drug-addled ramblings of a power-mad ego whose ambitions had outsized their means. The verdict, of course, is that it falls somewhere in-between.

I was outright shocked by how much I appreciated The Last Movie, if not only because I’m largely cold on the cinematic titans it’s most closely comparable to: Jodorowsky, Easy Rider, any Malickian storytelling-though-editing picture you can name. I’m unsure that it would have the same potency in a home viewing, where it’s much easier for the mind to wander, but confronted with it on the big screen I was mesmerized. Admittedly, its central narrative is an incomprehensible jumble that only becomes clear minutes before the end credits (and only with the help of a few sentences of plot synopsis to guide the mental configuration of its strewn-about jigsaw pieces). Still, every disconnected image & jarring edit feels purposeful to the themes & tone of what Hopper was trying to accomplish, where they could just as easily have been for-their-own-sake indulgences (which is the sense I get from typical works by Jodorowsky & Malick). Considering its premise and the amount of confidence & money behind Hopper at the time, I fully expected The Last Movie to be a macho, self-aggrandizing act of modern colonialism where a director pilfered & exploited “local color” in Peru under the guise of making Important Art. Instead, the film is a self-lacerating critique of that exact monstrous attitude. The Last Movie plays as if Hopper realized mid-production that the film he was making was actively, directly harming Peruvian people and the discovery broke his mind. Watching the film for the first time, I got the sense that it may not actually have been Jodorowsky that convinced Hopper to derail his own career with this incomprehensible, self-sabotaging mess; it plays as if Hopper was filming his own epiphany that the movies were an inherently evil, exploitative business that he desperately wanted to exit.

The events are cyclical & out of sync, so no synopsis could fully do the story justice, but The Last Movie is more or less about a disenchanted Hollywood stunt man (Hopper) who drops out of the film industry after seeing the damage it causes Peruvian locals, yet remains haunted by its consequences all the same. A fellow stunt man dies while shooting a scene for a movie biography of Billy the Kid (as directed by Sam Fuller, practically playing himself). The industry dries up in Peru after that accident, but Hopper & the locals who stay behind in its wake are driven mad by the memory of the death. Hopper continues his colonizer role in a toxic romance with a local sex worker, only to be later shown exactly what that feels like by a wealthy white woman who holds financial power over him. Locals who worked on the Billy the Kid set strive to stage their own rendition of the script left behind by Fuller’s crew; only the violence they perform isn’t at all faked and puts everyone nearby in danger, especially Hopper. Everyone drinks to the point of perpetual blackout, confusing what’s real & what’s movie-making artifice, often to the point of meta-textual self-damnation. The camera’s POV is confused with a prop camera the locals make out of bamboo & adopt as a religious symbol. The real local church is abandoned for the prop church constructed for the movie set. Mountainous landscapes are covered up by tapestries depicting mountainous landscapes. Movies have made everything in the village fake, hedonistic, and empty; the only thing left that’s real is the lethal consequences of the violence staged for the mock cinema. The guilt of that social breakdown weighs on Hopper’s mind like a war crime.

The Last Movie isn’t always a pleasant watch; Hopper often overwhelms the soundtrack with a collection of the most annoying sounds imaginable: bells, jackhammers, screaming babies, moans, off-rhythm violins. That aural chaos always feels purposeful, though, especially when it’s echoed in the chaos of wrangling hundreds of crewmembers on a film set or a drunken Hollywood party or a town left in shambles once that party leaves & the money dries up. Hopper also acknowledges the narrative chaos of his jumbled editing by prominently featuring the script supervisor’s continuity concerns on the set of Billy the Kid. As frustrating as the sequencing of sound & imagery (the building blocks of cinema) can be in the moment to moment rhythms, their cumulative effect is directly tied to the film’s overall central theme: Hopper’s growing disenchantment & outright hostility towards moviemaking as an industry. After Easy Rider, Hollywood gave him complete freedom to do whatever he wanted wherever he wanted, and he chose this self-flagellating, career-sabotaging vanity project in the mountains of Peru. The shot from The Last Movie that most haunts me is a documentarian stroll through a Peruvian open-air market, where local merchants shyly cover their faces as the camera films them without permission. I get the sense that the guilt of that act weighed heavily on Hopper as well, as the film overall appears like a desperate attempt to escape an industry that feels increasingly exploitative & destructive to the supposed radicals who were given newfound freedom to run it at the start of the New Hollywood movement. The Last Movie may be the failure that derailed Dennis Hopper’s career, but that’s exactly what makes it a success.

-Brandon Ledet