It is not that there is something wrong with Jodorowsky’s perseveration on sex and violence per se; it is that he is not saying anything about it. It is an unprocessed emotional conveyance, a likely unconscious projection of a total disinterest in real intimacy and a totalizing interest in whipped-up hysteria as a relational vector. The real turn-off for me is the lack of insight the film has into its own mechanisms, its own psychology, and its own nature as a self-referential production.
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An uninspired, languid, stoned wanderer is what I am, and how I’ve found myself. My graduate studies are snared up by interminable labour action. I’m not sure what to do, and my apartment has gone drab. I’ve got nowhere to be, no schedule, and no timeline. Everything has started to look the same, even films. I’ve been searching for something – some cinematic sublime to make a feeling in me. I haven’t found it. I think it’s my fault, I don’t think I’m working properly. My temporal experience is slow lately, and it’s hard to pay attention to things. Can you get psychosis from an unscheduled vacation? I’m sure my rabbits will have some French to speak on it. Honestly, I think it’s a pleasure-seeking problem, I am chasing the dragon, if you will. I’m one cinephiliac moment away from transcendence. My search drove me to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre. I thought “well, this sounds awfully strange, doesn’t it?” It was far and away from my usual choices, and I’ve got a weird aversion to circuses as a setting for films that I cannot even begin to explain. Aside from anything at all, the key point of Santa Sangre’s synopsis, and why I chose it, was that Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky) becomes his mother’s arms. That is utterly literal. That detail rang out to me like a siren in the night. Fascinating! Freudian. I’ve known a lot of men who became their mother’s arms in midlife. It’s quite common when you think about it. When I considered, also, my ongoing psychoanalysis, spectacular mental illness, and obsession with trauma – there was no way I could pass up Santa Sangre, none. But I want to get something out of the way before I go on: I did not like the film. It is not unusual to read a piece of puffed-up lay criticism by a person who did not like, or understand, a film, thought they should, and rather than admitting it, write meaningless things about the “stunning visuals” or such muck. For surely, many of us have heard of Jodorowsky, and who are we to say his immortal cinema just isn’t cutting it? But such is the trap I set for myself, and one set by all who choose what to say based on insecurity. Surely, no one would say, or criticize, anything at all if we all lived by such a standard. The airwaves are filled with noise; could what I’ve got to say be any worse? The real question becomes, who am I not to criticize Santa Sangre?
The film opens on a peculiar man, Fenix, in a peculiar mental health facility before flashing back to the traumatic circus events that will define him. Fenix, a child magician, is the unwitting collateral damage between his father, Orgo’s (Guy Stockwell), affair with the tattooed knife lady, and his mother Concha’s (Blanca Guerra) rage. When Concha attacks Orgo for his infidelity and he chops off her arms (with the smallest knives!), Fenix’s life is permanently altered. Later, as an adult, he escapes from the mental health facility when Concha beckons to him in the street. Fenix finds himself playing his mother’s arms in a stage show. Soon, it becomes apparent that Concha is using Fenix’s arms to murder women who might take Fenix away from her.
I left the film cold. I wanted things out of Santa Sangre that Santa Sangre could not give. I wanted the type of exaltation experienced by Concha, and the red-robed worshippers of the armless schoolgirl at the beginning of the film. That is as weird as it sounds. They have a pool full of paint, I meant blood. Unfortunately, Santa Sangre is a floppy motion picture that loses steam about halfway through. It is belaboured by its insistence on linear narrative, a slovenly pace, and one-note characters. The narrative is sectioned out in a supremely uneven, blocky sort of way, so the whole confection gives the effect of being extremely lengthy. The lack of character depth feels particularly egregious in a film that was very personal to Jodorowsky. Himself a child of rape and subjected to a traumatic upbringing, one would think Santa Sangre might have some mature consideration of emotional immediacy, but it doesn’t. Maybe it’s too high a bar, but when I’m looking for emotional immediacy, the first thing I think of is the climax of Autumn Sonata. The adroit way the camera weaves between, and centres, Eva and Charlotte’s conflict creates a visual language out of their words and feelings. It’s a sublime totality of form and content, seamlessly woven together, as if a fine tapestry. In Santa Sangre, the camera is often away, and off to the side during quieter moments of emotional intimacy. Moments of tenderness are somewhat mute and immature next to the sudden bursts of cinematographic interest brought on by violence. The graphic stabbing of the tattooed woman by an unseen hand is animated by a frenetic, fractured editing, augmented by very beautiful lighting and set design. The scene where Concha’s arms are chopped off is positively glorious. The camera tracks her, and Orgo, as he wrestles her onto a board filled with knives. The same board the tattooed woman stood before earlier in the film, when Orgo threw knives at her and she writhed in orgasmic ecstasy. The present scene cuts to a full screen close-up of Concha’s screaming face, then down to her midriff, her body pinned to the board. The lighting here feels almost tender, caressing Concha’s face with a shocking beauty. Orgo thrusts two knives upward, at the same moment the scene cuts to Concha as seen from above, looking up and screaming, as her severed arms fall from her body. The lights flicker in rainbows over the golden tulle of her costume. These moments are isolated, but numerous. The in-between times are like passages from one catharsis of violence to another. The trouble with this is that I’m not sure the film is aware of it. Things spring up in art all the time; they come to us totally unconsciously. We perseverate on themes, and it would seem we also perseverate on the language we use to express our experience of the world, both visual and literary. Surely, if Santa Sangre was a person I would likely assume they had rather troubled, dramatic relationships. Considering Jodorowsky as a person, that assessment seems accurate. If the film does not appear to be aware of its emotional reliance on explosive violence, it loses something for me. It is not that there is something wrong with Jodorowsky’s perseveration on sex and violence per se; it is that he is not saying anything about it. It is an unprocessed emotional conveyance, a likely unconscious projection of a total disinterest in real intimacy and a totalizing interest in whipped-up hysteria as a relational vector. The real turn-off for me is the lack of insight the film has into its own mechanisms, its own psychology, and its own nature as a self-referential production. Complicated by a poor sense of time and a lack of meaningful dialogue, Jodorowsky’s narrative is so clunky that such things that might seem like artful touches in another movie feel like an accident in this one. The effect is that Santa Sangre is quite a slog to sit through.
Without irony I can thank Santa Sangre for giving me a modicum of inspiration, if not cinematic transcendence. I did not like the film, and I know why. Being able to say that, however, to have confidence in that, is an important lesson for anyone who stays quiet when they have something insightful to say. Surely, no one would accuse Jodorowsky of staying quiet. But even if, at that stage of his life, he struggled to tell this story effectively, the interesting thing is that he made this crazy film to tell it. The artistry is bolstered and stymied by its faults – a red-hot misdirected passion, a thin grasp of narrative, intermittent inertia, and stunning violence, all point to the confused ambivalence that Santa Sangre artistically makes interesting at least, and a minor failure at worst. So maybe I did like the film, and maybe it fed some other sort of hunger in me, of the analytical rather than the transcendent variety. I left the film feeling cold. I had to ask why, and I had to implicate Jodorowsky, of course. But I must circle back and implicate myself, and my boredom, for my harsh feelings about Jodorowsky and his strange little film. He might have caught me off-guard, for I’ve been grappling with uncovering my own voice in art, and criticism. I’ve been confronting my desperation to be a writer, and the seeming impossibility of articulating all the things I want to say. I become obsessed with detail, research, and utter minutia and it takes up all my time. So much so I’ve stifled myself, I’ve written so little. This is my insight, in contravention, and in solidarity, toward Jodorowsky, Santa Sangre, and the weird little triad we’ve made here on the page: each and every criticism I’ve levied at this film is of the utmost persnicketiness, almost, perhaps, a critical demand for conformity.
Am I saying that the film would be better if Bergman directed it? I mean, what pretentious impulse compelled me to bring up Autumn Sonata? Truly a magnificent film, but not Jodorowsky’s film. Does it matter if Santa Sangre’s narrative is slow and clunky? Well, I think so. I honestly do, and I think there is an actual line between my rigid ideal of what a film “must be” and the universality in any given subjective identification of cinematic form and style. Never mind that; the problem here is that I have faulted Jodorowsky for precisely the item I am struggling with. My attention to detail is a fault that gets in the way of what I want, so I criticize our fine filmmaking friend for his lack of formal rigidity, for his loose narrative, for things that “feel like accidents.” What’s so wrong with a little accident? Do I advocate for toxic perfectionism? I have been unfair, morose even, holding Jodorowsky to account like this. And yet I stand by it all, rationally speaking. It is true, the film is deeply flawed, but maybe that means the expressions are deepened. Maybe it is that Jodorowsky’s camera, alive with the dramatic, screaming hysteria that animates it, is speaking a deep internal language. Maybe when the film steps back from quiet moments and races into chaos, it is effectively, if indirectly, addressing its core theme of traumatic horror – a horror that follows you forever. Much like Jodorowsky I’ve kept away a bit, from the quiet moments here, only to knife at Jodorowsky for his artistic decisions in a flagrant display of projective identification. I’m too self-aware, and too bored not to be. I want to say everything and nothing at all. I’m misguided, and violent with my pen, compelled to strike out and assert beyond reason. I must change. I must revel in Jodorowsky’s uneven narrative, his people cut from bloody paper, and draw inspiration from his flagrant audacity – his presence declared on the tip of a bloodied knife, in a stab wound to the tattooed lady. So, may I wield my pen, and think two things at once, that I also apply to myself: be it declared that Santa Sangre is difficult film punctuated with moments of great beauty, as well as a terrific bore.
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All images are screenshots from the film.