More Jodorowsky

I rented Jodorowsky’s first movie, “Fando y Lis”, a black-&-white from 1968. It shows its Bunel, Artaud and Fluxus group roots a little more plainly than “El Topo”, but still has the rambling non-structure, the archetypal images and plenty of good old-fashioned weirdness (old ladies maliciously squeezing canned apricots, a man taking blood from a woman’s arm with a syringe then drinking it from a shot glass, e.g.) There is also a documentary on the disk from which I learned that Jodorowsky made a Hollywood movie with Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif and Christopher Lee; that he started but never completed a film version of “Dune” in the 70s; and that he invented the mime-trapped-in-a-box cliché for Marcel Marceau. The film also has one of the best commentary tracks I’ve ever bothered to listen to, in which he shares in his heavily-accented English such observations as, “Always I have a big...a good feeling about castration. No?”

By the way, the Blogger people made me open a Google account to access this site. I'm not sure why but I suspect everyone else will have to as well to be able to post.