Alejandro Jodorowsky
38 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)
Directed by Frank Pavich
influenced by Santa Sangre (1989), The Holy Mountain (1973), Fando and Lis (1972), El Topo (1970)
It's a wonderful and human moment from the man whose midnight-movie titles, "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain," gave Jodorowsky a certain cache and mystique.
After almost singlehandedly inventing the midnight-movie phenomenon with “El Topo,” Jodorowsky had scored a second hit — in France, at least — with his massive head trip, “The Holy Mountain,” prompting producer Michel Seydoux to encourage whatever project the director might want to do next.
Jodorowsky admits he hadn't read Herbert's 1965 novel when he picked "Dune" as his dream project, after French producer Michel Seydoux -- an admirer of the Chilean director's visionary and violent " El Topo " (1970), the original "midnight movie," and its even more far-out follow-up, "The Holy Mountain" (1973) -- offered to back any cinematic enterprise the filmmaker might choose.
El Topo was downright linear compared with the 1973 The Holy Mountain , in which a Christlike "alchemist" played by Jodorowsky acquires apostles, one from each planet in the solar system, to renounce greed and find a new Ararat.
That may seem odd considering the source, the Chilean-born director of such hallucinatory cult classics as " El Topo " and "The Holy Mountain."
In 1975, empowered by two very profitable cult films, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) attempted to mount a massive, acid-laced production of Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic Dune.
Freaks (1932)
Directed by Tod Browning
influenced The Holy Mountain (1973), Santa Sangre (1989)
Visuals Themes
Despite all its fanciful Buñuelesque surrealism and echoes of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), it’s not that far removed from the pop-culture movies that surround it.
Watch "The Holy Mountain," and you'll see two naked women have their heads shaved; a man whose face is covered in flies; a cougar; the stem of a flower painfully and almost palpably plucked from the palm of a man's hand; children with their genitals painted green; a quadruple amputee (in a nod to Tod Browning's "Freaks") lighting a joint with the stumps of his arms and legs; a parade of soldiers carrying flayed lambs on crosses; a tourist happily taking pictures of the rape of his wife; songbirds emerging from the wounds of a dead student; and a tabletop re-staging of the conquest of Mexico enacted by lizards dressed as Aztecs and frogs dressed as missionaries and conquistadors.
The first half of the film, when Fenix is a boy, is a surreal circus story that owes a debut to Browning's masterpiece "Freaks" (1932) as well as to such lurid thrillers as "Circus of Horrors" (1960).
On paper, Jodorowsky's vision seems drawn equally from the works of Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock (most blatantly Psycho ), and perhaps incidentally, Tod Browning's Freaks , but the effect of his kaleidoscopic vision never feels culled from any cloths not of his own making.
Santa Sangre is as familiarly esoteric as Jodorowsky’s other efforts, but it possesses very pronounced influences, including Psycho , Freaks (Tod Browning is Jodorowsky’s cinematic father), The Who’s Tommy, The Invisible Man, and even Fellini’s partiality to the circus.
Only God Forgives (2013)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
influenced by El Topo (1970), Santa Sangre (1989), The Holy Mountain (1973)
Interestingly, Refn also dedicates the film to The Holy Mountain’s Alejandro Jodorowsky.
The director has dedicated the film to the avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (" El Topo "), whose inspiration remains superficial at best.
The film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose surreal Western "El Topo" was an early midnight-movie hit; certainly with its sadistic violence and holy atonement, "Only God Forgives" could be a homage.
He dedicates his film to the Chilean-born Russian surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky , a cult director of the 1970s and 80s whose violent fables El Topo and Santa Sangre , which once outraged critics and pleased midnight movie enthusiasts, were infamous for their scenes of mutilation.
Additionally, Gretel & Hansel takes inspiration from famed Chilean director Alexandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain , using imagery that fans of that film will notice right away, most specifically in some of the Witch’s costuming.
The film’s visual palette channels Robert Eggers (The Witch) and Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain).
Cinematographer Galo Olivares and production designer Jeremy Reed – the latter a veteran of Perkins’ Pretty Thing (2016) – deliver a pageant of darkly mesmerizing visuals, drawing freely from German Expressionism, Hammer horror films, and the surreal visuals of transgressive 1970s European art cinema like The Devils (1971), The Holy Mountain (1973), and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
Perkins has said that the design of the film was inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain , but there are glimpses of giallo in the film too.
The Fall (2006)
Directed by Tarsem Singh
influenced by El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973), Fando and Lis (1972)
Themes Visuals
A fantasy told to a sickly child, The Fall has been compared to Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987), but it has just as much in common with Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006), while its exuberant imagery evokes the visionary works of Alejandro Jodorowsky â specifically Fando y Lis (1968) for the live birds flying out of a dead man's mouth, El Topo (1970) for the masked bandit and child, and The Holy Mountain (1973) for the group quest and kaleidoscopic pageantry.
A fantasy told to a sickly child, The Fall has been compared to Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987), but it has just as much in common with Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006), while its exuberant imagery evokes the visionary works of Alejandro Jodorowsky â specifically Fando y Lis (1968) for the live birds flying out of a dead man's mouth, El Topo (1970) for the masked bandit and child, and The Holy Mountain (1973) for the group quest and kaleidoscopic pageantry.
The Princess Bride, Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Jodorowsky’s Fando and Lis are all ingredients for Tarsem’s spellbinding movie (unfortunately saddled with a 15 cert for strong violence) but kids and adults sat in front of this are unlikely to forget its mystical atmosphere, achingly detailed visuals (big screen or HD viewings are mandatory), and beguiling story.
Yes, it's Psycho, but it's also the Theatre of the Absurd, acid castration, El Santo wrestling flicks, Whale's The Invisible Man, a chubby burlesque queen doffing off her schoolgirl plaids to "Besame Mucho," and a gigantic python slithering out of the hero's pants as he eyes a potential flame.
Bootleg discs and special screenings aside (the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art booked "Santa Sangre" in October, on a double bill with Whale's 1933 "The Invisible Man," a movie that "Sangre" embraces), "Santa Sangre" has been hard to see in America since its theatrical release, when it was edited for an R rating.
From the ever-present Greek chorus of clowns and circus musicians to Fenix's oddly poetic obsession with James Whale's The Invisible Man, Santa Sangre is at once disturbingly perverse yet strangely logical within its fucked-up framework; more than a handful of visceral images are likely to burn themselves into your memory banks for good.
Santa Sangre is as familiarly esoteric as Jodorowsky’s other efforts, but it possesses very pronounced influences, including Psycho , Freaks (Tod Browning is Jodorowsky’s cinematic father), The Who’s Tommy, The Invisible Man, and even Fellini’s partiality to the circus.
When David Lynch's "Eraserhead" was released in 1978, another of the '70s "midnight movies" ("El Topo," "The Rocky Horror Picture Show") that won fanatical repeat audiences, it still stood apart.
Although part of a larger movement in 1970s American film culture that embraced the concept of “the midnight movie,” turning riotous amateur works like John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), bizarre foreign art films like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1971), and off-beat studio experiments like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) into must-see-multiple-times late-night phenomena, Eraserhead still stands apart, a fitting tribute to its indelible, yet fascinating and unforgettable weirdness.
It is not hard to see why the film became such an immediate counterculture hit at the dawn of the 1970s, a decade that produced some of the most memorable of midnight movies, including John Waters’s 16mm gross-out Pink Flamingos (1972), Jim Sharidan’s campy rock musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and David Lynch’s avant-garde freakshow Eraserhead (1977).
The movie includes, among other things, elements of magical realism, a worker enslavement scheme lifted straight from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, and an insane third-act twist that takes a hard turn into Get Out territory.
A grisly, lurid cross between "Psycho" and the Tod Browning-Lon Chaney "The Unknown" — for its circus setting and slicing off of arms — it offers a mishmash of religious and Freudian symbolism amid torrential bloodshed topped with Fellini flourishes.
Director Alma Har’el, making her first fiction feature, was challenged on Twitter about influences, and she described Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Santa Sangre,” “El Topo,” “Fando Y Lis” and “The Holy Mountain” as “psycho magic”: that admiration provides one entry into fathoming the weave and wooze of her work, elevating what could have been narcissistic wallow into a fabric of memory about the bloom of consciousness and self-awareness, but also undying hope toward blood itself.
Dune (1984)
Directed by David Lynch
influenced Endless Poetry (2016), El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973)
Brontis Jodorowsky (who made his screen debut in El Topo and was his father’s choice to play Paul Atreides in the director’s famed, ill-fated adaptation of Dune) returns as the stern, difficult patriarch of the family.
If you are at all familiar with the movies of madman director Alejandro Jodorowsky — like the ’70s cult hits “El Topo” or “The Holy Mountain,” or his aborted effort to adapt Frank Herbert’s “Dune” — then you have an inkling of the divine weirdness that fills his autobiographical drama “Endless Poetry.”
In 2010, he was reunited after 30 years with Michel Seydoux, Jodorowsky’s producer on his famously ill-fated attempt to film Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, Dune.
His meager output (eight films as a director since 1968’s Fando and Lis) was as much about taking various diversions as it was recovering from his failed involvement prepping an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
However, outré Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky of El Topo and Santa Sangre fame/infamy was nearly the first to adapt Dune for the big screen in the mid-1970’s.
The "Fando y Lis" disc includes a 90-minute documentary, "La Constellation Jodorowsky" (1994), which features an interesting look at the director's ill-fated attempt to adapt "Dune," several years before David Lynch brought Frank Herbert's mystical sci-fi novel to the screen.
Masked and Anonymous (2003)
Directed by Larry Charles
influenced by El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973)
Visuals
At times, watching a Jodorowsky film is liking seeing the images in a Bob Dylan lyric come to life (something that would happen almost literally in 2003, when Dylan starred in "Masked and Anonymous").
At times, watching a Jodorowsky film is liking seeing the images in a Bob Dylan lyric come to life (something that would happen almost literally in 2003, when Dylan starred in "Masked and Anonymous").
Drive (2011)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
influenced by El Topo (1970), Santa Sangre (1989)
Visuals
No wonder the end credits include a thank you to director Alejandro Jodorowsky, impresario of such arthouse/grindhouse sideshows as " El Topo " (a mystical Spaghetti Western) and " Santa Sangre " (an allegorical slasher film).
No wonder the end credits include a thank you to director Alejandro Jodorowsky, impresario of such arthouse/grindhouse sideshows as " El Topo " (a mystical Spaghetti Western) and " Santa Sangre " (an allegorical slasher film).
It�s something of a jumble, but the kind of risky jumble in which the sun-blasted desert brings to mind Jodorowsky's El Topo as much as Chuck Jones�s Road Runner.
The movie has echoes here of Godard’s “ Pierrot le Fou ,” in which the characters make their way out of a gangster movie and into a musical, and wind up against their will in a Western.
It is easy to see why Luis Buñuel, the godfather of cinematic surrealism, chose to make his early masterwork Un chien andalou (1929; codirected with the surrealist painter Salvador Dali) only half an hour long.
Mr. Jodorowsky is the Chilean director who arguably invented the midnight movie with two features that have become cult classics, "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain."
Here, brutality reigns: One of the companions is a Nazi-like officer and human testicle-collector, in anticipation of the Naveen Andrews character in Robert Rodriguez's episode of " Grindhouse " (which also features a peg-legged person, as in "The Holy Mountain").
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
influenced by The Holy Mountain (1973), El Topo (1970)
Themes
The black-and-white "Fando y Lis" -- a film about an ill-fated journey to "the magical city of Tar" that may have influenced fellow Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's dark "Alice in Wonderland" update, "Pan's Labyrinth" -- is serviceable but contrasty, and exhibits some distracting strobing during scenes of motion.
The black-and-white "Fando y Lis" -- a film about an ill-fated journey to "the magical city of Tar" that may have influenced fellow Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's dark "Alice in Wonderland" update, "Pan's Labyrinth" -- is serviceable but contrasty, and exhibits some distracting strobing during scenes of motion.
Much of the art direction and even ensuing violence would be at home in Alejandro Jodorowsky films like “The Holy Mountain.”