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Showing posts with label magic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magic. Show all posts
Friday, September 19, 2014
Friday, September 19, 2014
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Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the most fascinating cultural figures of the last hundred years. Equal measures director, actor, artist, philosopher, author and magician he's produced works of genius across a many media, developed his own religion and travelled the globe giving giving philosophical lectures on his philosophy. Like most people I became a fan through his films; the first time I saw The Holy Mountain knocked the stuffing out of me, instantly becoming my favourite film of all time.
Rabid for more I hunted down everything I could find that he'd touched (though I never got my hands on his poorly received 1980 film Tusk). Once I'd exhausted his cinematic works I moved onto his writings. As the years passed I resigned myself to never seeing a new film from him, you'd hear odd whisper about phantom projects like Son of El Topo or King Shot, but the financing always fell though and the hype amounted to nothing.
But here we are. After 23 years a new Jodorowsky film: The Dance of Reality. Virgin mental soil to be ploughed. Has the master lost his touch? What fantastic images lie within? Can this possibly live up to expectations? Five minutes in a feminine, blue clad boy had killed every sardine in the ocean. Later I would see a busty opera singer urinate on her plague-stricken husband. Soon after there'd be a dog dressed as a kangaroo, graphic genital torture and a man inflicting brutal psychic kung-fu on parading Nazis. He's BACK, baby!
All of Jodorowsky's major films are autobiographical to some extent, though previously confined to his philosophical and symbological development. The Dance of Reality, adapted from his own autobiography, skews closer to history than any of his previous films in depicting Jodorowsky's actual childhood. Shot through with a procession of indelible imagery, the film is a perfect realisation of the director's philosophy that "reality is not objective but rather a “dance” created by our own imaginations."
Born to Jewish-Ukrainian parents in the Chilean city of Tocopilla, Jodorowsky puts his younger self and father Jaime (played by his son, Brontis Jodorowsky) through a series of allegorical trials. Childhood is presented as a world of strict binary divisions; the young Alejandro forced to choose between masculine and feminine, faith and atheism, fascism and communism, charity and selfishness and so on.
Jodorowsky paints his upbringing in broad, traumatic strokes. Most notably his mother and father physical manifestations of their traditional gender roles. His mother (who only communicates through opera) is caring, artistic, soft, healing and erotic, while his father is uniformed, angry, disciplined and physically strong. This will change.
One of Jodorowsky's trademark philosophical flourishes is the disintegration of boundaries. These can be physical, historical, ideological or psychological, but by the end of the film the walls are comin' down. There's a but of beautifully straightforward philosophy early on when Alejandro encounters the 'Theosophist' (played by Cristobal Jodorowsky, the director's son). He hands Alejandro three medals, the Christian cross, the Jewish star of David and the star and crescent of Islam, saying "They think they're separate, but melt them down in an oven and they will turn into a single drop."
Alejandro's father undergoes this process, going into the oven a hard-nosed ideologue and coming out as some kind of ruined saint unwilling to accept enlightenment. Late in the film, with wild and hair and thick beard, Brontis Jodorowsky begins to bear an eerie resemblance to the younger Jodorowsky we know from El Topo and The Holy Mountain. A hall of mirrors effect quickly develops among the three central characters: the director as a boy, the director's father (also a symbol of Jodorowsky himself) and the director himself as ghostly presence.
This tangle is a cinematic realisation of Jodorowsky's self-devised psychomagic therapy. The method works as an exploration of the unconscious mind and to relieve repressed trauma. This trauma can be accumulated over the course of a lifetime and unconsciously passed through generations. This dovetails with his theory of the unconscious as "over-self", and the collective weight of history pressing down upon individuals. A human being thus becomes like a flower pressed in the pages of a book, locked in place with invisible psychological pressures acting on them from all sides.
The key to relieving that pressure is the transmutation of psychology, history and compulsion into imaginative, artistic acts. So, The Dance of Reality is a performance; the creation of the film a psychomagical exorcism of the director and a nudging of his audience towards an artistic reimagining of their own lives.
Still with me? That all sounds a bit high-falutin I know, but Jodorowsky's work invites this kind of analysis. Anyway, even if you're not on board with esoteric mysticism this is still an incredibly beautiful and imaginative piece of cinema. Jodorowsky scatters indelible images through his films like confetti, occupying a unique territory somewhere between the circus and the psychologist's sofa. It's nearly always surreal (and often disturbing), but it's a rarely sincere brand of surreal, images chosen because of their precise meaning rather than for shock value.
At 84 Jodorowsky shows no signs of slowing down, though this could very well be his last film. It would be one hell of a cinematic swansong if it were, the elderly artist reflecting on his distant, dreamlike childhood and turning that fertile clay into art. The film ends with the young Alejandro purposely marching through a sea of photographs of those left in the past; the ghosts of memory. We cut a boat, and the director protectively embracing his younger self. The captain is Death, and Jodorowsky slips away across the white void of a Styx, reciting his own eulogy:
"I soar away from the past, land in the body present, bear the painful burden of years, yet in the heart keep the child. As the bread of life. As a white canary. As a worthy diamond. As a lucidity without walls. Wide open doors and windows through which blows the wind. Only the wind. Just the wind."
★★★★★
The Dance of Reality is available on VOD now.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
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Last week, after narrowly escaping a burning art gallery, I was strolling back through the gloomy, underlit streets of Notting Hill when my foot struck something on the pavement. It was a book, skidding along the stones in front of me. I stopped, bent down and plucked it from the pavement: Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn. The book, a history of the magical Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn constantly mentions Aleister Crowley; aka Frater Perdurabo; aka 'The Great Beast 666'; aka Baphomet; aka The Mad Mullah; aka Oliver Haddo; aka "The Wickedest Man in the World". Aleister Crowley, the most notorious occultist of all time - the man whose papers I had just booked a place to view the following Monday.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Friday, July 12, 2013
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*spoilers within*
A Field in England is a testament to what you can do with a couple of costumes, some great actors and an eye for cinematography. It's also a lesson on how little you really need to make a movie - get a couple of DV cameras, head out to a field and just starting shooting. There's a ton of limitations to shooting on a micro-budget like this and Wheatley demonstrates how to cleverly work around them - showing how to suggest with mood, dialogue and old fashioned cinematic sleight of hand what you don't have the money to put on screen.
All of this is important, because A Field in England is one weird as hell film with, to put it mildly, questionable commercial potential. Yet it's a film that raises interesting questions,: allowing Wheatley to continue his interrogation of the relationship between modern Britain and our violent, oppressive and chaotic history.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
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Burlesque is a tricky one. On one hand I like the retro aesthetics, the playfulness, the subversion and satire. On the other hand, for all that is trumpeted about female empowerment it is still women taking their clothes off in front of a whooping crowd.
The London Wonderground is part of the ‘Udderbelly’ temporary area near the London Eye on the South Bank. It’s quite nice down there, at least on a Wednesday night anyway (I suspect it might be a bit more crowded on a Friday). The Wonderland area is decked out in wood in a sort of Americana themed way. Customers can sit in model dodgem cars, sipping their drinks from plastic cups surrounded by cheesecakey retro 50s pinup pictures. The stage area seems to be a cross between a circus tent and an old Western saloon. For a temporary setup it’s pretty impressive, although on a night like this, hot, sticky and humid. But, if you’re going to sit around watching girls dance about with very little on it seems strangely appropriate for it to be all steamy and hot under the collar.
I’ve been to a few burlesque shows before, but this was probably the most professional and elaborate. Of the two I’ve seen before, one took place in a working men’s club, and the other in a burlesque club called 'Volupte' in the City. This was more of a corporate, slick affair. This company, “the House of Burlesque” has toured the world, and won prizes at the Edinburgh Festival. Its members have performed with burlesque legend Dita von Teese. It is, as far as burlesque companies go, one of the big fish.
The individual performances were pretty varied. There was the expected 20s/30s style retro feather waving stripteases, but there were also circus acts involving ten hulahoops spun at once, a woman acrobatically swinging out over the audience, there were comedy numbers – a sort of quasi-mime strip, and a magic act. There is no denying that these women are talented. All of them were enjoyable to watch, and in all of the performances the personality (or the stage persona at any rate) of the performer was accentuated. I can’t deny that I was entertained the whole time.
But I find certain elements of burlesque problematic. From what I gather, feminist arguments for burlesque are along the lines that it is a celebration of the female body rather than an exploitation of it. The ‘tease’ subverts and satirises cultural expectations of how women ‘should’ act. Additionally, within burlesque a wide range of body types are celebrated and the stick-thin waifish body type prevalent in the media supposedly has little sway here: burlesque is portrayed as age and weight inclusive. The fact that burlesque is performed to the ‘male gaze’ does not, as such, imply that the woman is exploiting her body, rather that the performer is in control of the reactions of the audience. It is a way in which women can behave in an overtly aggressive and sexual manner in a public arena.
I can sympathise with nearly all these arguments. There is nothing remotely wrong with celebrating the female body. Societies that seek to repress female bodily imagery tend to be repressive theocracies. The fact that the current cultural model of attractiveness is the skinny waif is actively harmful in terms of encouraging eating disorders. Burlesque has its roots in satirising the behaviour of the upper-class, so it has a good pedigree in subversion. The creative director of ‘House of Burlesque”, Tempest Rose, says she “strongly believes in the empowerment of women worldwide to be free to express their creativity and personality without fear, judgment or oppression”. Who can argue with that?
Despite all this I can’t help but shake the feeling that burlesque does more reinforcing of gender roles than subverting them. The vast majority of performers at the Wonderground were slim and conventionally attractive. I think it is extremely telling that the only performer that didn’t do some kind of striptease was a woman of size, who kept her clothes on and did a mock magic comedy routine. Why is this? It seems to me that there is a very narrow line of between satirising the male gaze, and pandering to it. Even though the entire tone of the act is that the girls are in charge, they only have as much power as has been granted to them by their audience. How would the audience have reacted if the fat performer had been aggressively sexual towards them? I don’t know, because it didn’t happen. If it had happened that would have been genuinely subversive, and would have actually pushed some boundaries. It seems a bit shallow to promote diversity, and then have all of your stripteases being performed by women occupying a very narrow definition of conventional attractiveness.
It is interesting that the audience seemed to be fairly equally split along gender lines. It wasn’t even the case that the women were there with male companions – there were groups of women there together to watch it. I have never been to a dedicated strip club, but I’d hazard a guess that you don’t get too many groups of women in there. Burlesque has managed to gain a certain level of acceptability in society. When my colleagues at work asked me what I’d done with my night I didn’t feel any shame at all telling them I’d been to a burlesque show, and they took it in stride as if I’d been out to see a musical or concert. What if I’d told them I’d spent the night in a strip club? Would they have been so blasé? Why is one category of women taking their clothes off in public to music socially acceptable and one isn’t?
I suspect the acceptability of burlesque boils down to class. Burlesque is also something seen as being done “for fun”, while being straightforward stripping is something that society sees as shameful, as a last resort for purely economic reasons. Modern burlesque is safely middle-class, a way for people to dip their toe into the waters of experimental sexuality without immersing themselves in it or making any kind of commitment. It is possible to enjoy burlesque at an ironic distance. A pole-dancing club is more overtly sleazy, they don’t slather on the irony when it comes to the female body. In many ways it’s more honest in its titillation.
So I’m torn. On one hand I had a genuinely fun night watching talented girls performing highly skilled and imaginative acts. On the other hand, I find modern burlesque somewhat hypocritical in its philosophy. This performance did not practise what it preached. It offered a shrink-wrapped, easily consumable form of safe and socially acceptable transgression. It pushes far too weakly against mainstream gender roles. The burlesque philosophy of female empowerment via celebrating the physical body seems shallow and plays right into the patriarchal notion that the primary indicator of a woman’s worth is her appearance. Somehow, it feels like true empowerment should be based on character and personal achievements rather than getting a roomful of people to hoot and holler while nipple tassels are shaken.
I should add that I don't think it is impossible to put on a burlesque performance that is genuinely subversive and explores interesting themes, but this wasn't it.
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