The acclaimed Mexican avant-garde film director and actor Alejandro Jodorowsky makes movies which embody the main elements of second cinema: an absence of continuity editing, parallel montage, and intellectual montage. In Sergei Eisentein's essay "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" he compares hieroglyphs to single shots in a film which, when combined, form a meaning or idea. Eisentien writes, "the point is that the copulation of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept." It is this idea of forming concepts through the combination of images that dominates much of Jodorowsky's work.
In his first feature length film, Fando y Lis (1968) (which caused riots in Mexico upon its release), Jodorowsky loosely creates a narrative involving a couple searching for the mythical city Tar. In the film there are seemingly insignificant shots of the couple painting their bodies in the other's name, interspersed with quick shots of a young boy riding on a white horse in the desert. A defining feature of Jodorowsky's films are jump cuts between two unrelated shots that eventually develop into an extended scene. This film is reminiscent of Fellini's film 81/2 (1963) in the sense that it is visually evocative and repeatedly explores femininity and gender (like the scene where a group of drag queens overtake Fando and Lis and dress them in the opposite gender's clothing).
Jodorowsky's next feature film El Topo (1970) is a radical departure from the dreamy and ethereal Fando y Lis, yet still falls into the avant-garde category. This film is primarily a spaghetti western as the film follows El Topo on his journey to defeat four masters in the desert. Unlike the black and white Fando y Lis this film pulses in color, like his most famous film The Holy Mountain (1973). The blood, the garish skirts of women in the town, and the undergarments of a priest remind one of the astonishing Technicolor days of films like Singing in the Rain. Both of these films are saturated in the bright and the beautiful. The Holy Mountain is, in some ways, more visually satisfying due in large part to the impressive sets. In one scene the protagonist awakes to find himself in a large room in which hundreds upon hundreds of life-like statues of his body surround him. In another scene, he climbs to the top of a bright orange tower and crawls into a tunnel that looks like the inside of a rainbow.
Jodorwsky's films are cerebral, provocative, self-assured, and dazzling. Though his style and sensibility require a certain degree of initial patience, his shots and scenes are hieroglyphs worth deciphering long after you finish his films.
image courtesy of nndb.com
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