The perverted result of this is that Concha forces Fenix to slaughter any woman who arouses his interest. He is emotionally dominated by Concha, who controls his arms as if they were hers. He learns to perform with her, providing the arms for her surreal stage act. Years later, the adult Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky) escapes from an asylum after being beckoned by his armless mother. Young Fenix is forced to witness all this and goes insane when The Tattooed Woman leaves with young Alma (Faviola Elenka Tapia), a deaf-mute performer that has captured the boy's heart. In a violent confrontation, Orgo winds up dead after cutting off Concha's arms, turning her into the living imitation of her beloved saint. Concha only survives when her young son Fenix (Adan Jodorowsky) intervenes, but her anger rises again when she finds Orgo making love to his new performer. An archbishop declares Concha's church to be heretical, and a developer's bulldozers wipe it out. Orgo's wife is Concha (Blanca Guerra), a fiery priestess of a cultish religious order worshipping Santa Sangre, a schoolgirl martyred in a rape in which both her arms were cut off. He hires a profane performer called The Tattooed Woman (Mexican exotic dancing star Thelma Tixou). This born-again outrage to the social norm is the kind of anomaly guaranteed to ignite a surrealist's imagination.ĭebauched American showman Orgo (an obese Guy Stockwell) tours a popular circus through Mexico. Jodorowsky's only slightly over-plotted story is a phantasmagoria suggested by the life of a notorious Mexican serial killer, who eventually reformed and was released from prison to practice law and raise a family. At his most sympathetic, Axel brings to mind a haunted, obsessive Roberto Benigni. Too old to play the hero, he gave the lead role to his son Axel, a more talented actor with exceptional mime skills. This time out the director was blessed with a story properly scaled to his production resources. But Jodorowsky went a step further to energize an audience of hipsters with his hipster embrace of pantheistic spiritualism - the cult audience for The Holy Mountain considers it a religious experience.Īfter expending years of effort on a never-realized screen adaptation of the science fiction book Dune, Jodorowsky filmed another epic of symbolic imagery in Mexico for an Italian producer, 1989's Santa Sangre. With his irreducible simplicity and wicked logic, Luis Buñuel remains untouched by this newer breed of Spanish-speaking rebels, forever working out their anti-Catholic complexes. The director also admits that by starring in his early films he wasted a certain amount of energy on narcissistic aims. Always attempting subjects larger than his filming budget, Jodorowsky emphasized arresting, fertile images over narrative coherence. Jodorowsky's El Topo and The Holy Mountain were ambitious, scatter-shot epics fueled by the sort of sub-Buñuellian outrage seen in the misanthropic cinema of Fernando Arrabal and Carlos López Moctezuma. The eccentric Chilean made his name with a number of controversial cult releases of the 1970s that might be best described as "anarchic surrealism". In his interviews, director Alejandro Jodorowsky asserts that he is not a filmmaker per se but a visionary artist who happens to work in film. This time Jodorosky makes the magic work. ![]() ![]() Written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Roberto Leoni, Claudio Argento ![]() Starring Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Adan Jodorowsky, Faviola Elenka Tapia, Teo Jodorowsky, Jesús Juárez. His other film works include Tusk, Santa Sangre, The Rainbow Thief, The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry.1989 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 123 min. He wrote numerous books and made a documentary film about it too. He also developed and began giving lectures on his own form of personal therapy that he called psychomagic. The series, its spinoffs and other comic books made him an acclaimed comic book author. Later, he involved himself in writing science fiction comic books, The Incal series. He then formed the anarchistic avant-garde Panic Movement (named after the Greek god Pan) of performance artists and created his first comic strip and directed his first feature film (which was banned in Mexico). Earlier, Alejandro Jodorowsky began his career in theatre with an interest in mime and puppetry and established his own theatre troupe. El Topo began the midnight movie phenomenon in the US and made him counter-cultural icon in the 1970s. Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean-French filmmaker who is known for writing, producing, directing and starring in the surrealistic films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, both of which became classics on the underground film circuit.
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