Y Tu Mama Tambien

Y Tu Mama Tambien ( And Your Mother Too)

                                  A film by Alfonso Cuaron

Write a short biography for Alfonso Cuaron. 

Alfonso Cuaron talking about his achievements

The trailer for Y Tu Mama Tambien

'Life has a way of teaching us'

'Life has a way of confusing us'

'Life has a way of changing us'

'Life has a way of surprising us'

'|Life has a way of hurting us'

'Life has a way of healing us'

'Life has a way of inspiring us'

Alejandro Jodorowsky

ABOUT ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY

This eccentric, outspoken Chilean-born director, writer and actor is best-known for two avant-garde cult films, "El Topo" (1970) and "The Holy Mountain" (1973). Jodorowsky, born to Russian immigrants, grew up in a tough Chilean port city. His family moved to Santiago, and Jodorowsky formed a circus troupe and moved to Paris in 1955 to study mime with Marcel Marceau. By 1960, he was writing and directing for the theater, traveling between Mexico and Paris. He co-founded the surrealist review "S.NOB" and, with playwright Fernando Arrabal and artist Roland Topor, formed the theater of the absurd company (heavily influenced by Antonin Artaud) Producciones Panicas. Their first major play was the scandalous four-hour, multi-media "Sacramental Melodrama", staged at the Paris Festival of Free Expression in 1965. Eventually giving up on theater, Jodorowsky returned to Mexico, where he wrote books and comics and experimented with film. His first was "Fando and Lis" (1968), a Fellini-esque love story which was promptly banned after provoking riots.

Jodorowsky then wrote, directed, scored and acted in the film which brought him more fame and notoriety, "El Topo/The Mole" (1970). A meandering, violent and highly impressionistic film, "El Topo" follows the travels of the eponymous hero (Jodorowsky) and his son (Jodorowsky's own seven-year-old son Brontis) as they encounter bandits, massacres, hippies and lesbians, in search of knowledge and/or redemption. A weird combination of the styles of Bunuel, Fellini, Antonioni and Russ Meyer, "El Topo" found its audience through New York's Elgin Theater, which screened the film at midnight showings every night for more than a year. Discovered by trendy downtowners, artsy intellectuals and finally by critics, "El Topo" became possibly the first "cult" film.

"The Holy Mountain" (1973), Jodorowsky's next film, was equally bizarre and portentous (many said "pretentious"). Also filmed in Mexico, "The Holy Mountain" told the story of a thief and his Dante-like travels, chock full of eye-popping sex, violence and religious references. Another midnight movie hit, "The Holy Mountain" disappointed critically and a disillusioned Jodorowsky retired to Paris.

His career never really came back to full-throttle. In 1980, Jodorowsky wrote and directed "Tusk", the tale of an elephant hunt, then went underground again until 1989, when he wrote and directed the Italian-made "Santa Sangria/Holy Blood", the story of a young serial killer (played by Jodorowsky's son Axel) redeemed through love.

Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky


FILMS

La Danza de la Realidad (post-production)                                                        2013

1990The Rainbow Thief

1989Santa Sangre

1980Tusk (as Alexandro Jodorowsky)

1973The Holy Mountain (as Alexandro Jodorowsky)

1970El Topo (as Alexandro Jodorowsky)

1968Fando y Lis (as Alexandro Jodorowsky)

1965Teatro sin fin (video short) (uncredited)

1957La cravate (short) (as Alexandre Jodorowsky)

"One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.” 
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.” 
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.” 
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.” 

“Failure doesn't mean anything, it just means changing paths.” 

“Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.” 
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“And I imagine... with great pleasure... all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsion and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live. ” 
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited.” 
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Let the inner god that is in each one of us speak. The temple is your body, and the priest is your heart: it is from here that every awareness must begin.” 
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

Statistics about Mexico

President: Enrique Peña Nieto (2012)

Land area: 742,485 sq mi (1,923,039 sq km); total area: 761,602 sq mi (1,972,550 sq km) Population (2010 est.): 112,468,855 (growth rate: 1.1%); birth rate: 19.4/1000; infant mortality rate: 17.8/1000; life expectancy: 76.2; density per sq km: 57
  Capital and largest city (2003 est.): Mexico City, 19,013,000 (metro. area), 8,591,309 (city proper)
  Other large cities: Ecatepec, 1,731,900 (part of Mexico City metro. area); Guadalajara, 1,665,800; Puebla, 1,345,500; Nezahualcóyotl, 1,250,700 (part of Mexico City metro. area); Monterrey, 1,135,000
  Monetary unit: Mexican peso

Official name: Estados Unidos Mexicanos Current government officials Languages: Spanish, various Mayan, Nahuatl, and other regional indigenous languages
  Ethnicity/race: mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%
  Religions: nominally Roman Catholic 89%, Protestant 6%, other 5%
  National Holiday: Independence Day, September 16
 Literacy rate: 91% (2004 est.)

 Economic summary: GDP/PPP (2009 est.): $1.48 trillion; per capita $13,500. Real growth rate: –6.5%. Inflation: 3.6%. Unemployment: 5.6% plus underemployment of perhaps 25%. Arable land: 13%. Agriculture: corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, beans, cotton, coffee, fruit, tomatoes; beef, poultry, dairy products; wood products. Labor force: 45.38 million; agriculture 18%, industry 24%, services 58% (2003). Industries: food and beverages, tobacco, chemicals, iron and steel, petroleum, mining, textiles, clothing, motor vehicles, consumer durables, tourism. Natural resources: petroleum, silver, copper, gold, lead, zinc, natural gas, timber. Exports: $229.7 billion (2009 est.): manufactured goods, oil and oil products, silver, fruits, vegetables, coffee, cotton. Imports: $234.4 billion (2009 est.): metalworking machines, steel mill products, agricultural machinery, electrical equipment, car parts for assembly, repair parts for motor vehicles, aircraft, and aircraft parts. Major trading partners: U.S., Canada, Spain, South Korea, Japan (2006).

 Communications: Telephones: main lines in use: 19.861 million (2006); mobile cellular: 57.016 million (2006). Radio broadcast stations: AM 850, FM 545, shortwave 15 (2003). Radios: 31 million (1997). Television broadcast stations: 236 (plus repeaters) (1997). Televisions: 25.6 million (1997). Internet Service Providers (ISPs): 7.629 million (2007). Internet users: 22 million (2006).

 Transportation: Railways: total: 17,665 km (2006). Highways: total: 235,670 km; paved: 116,751 km (including 6,144 km of expressways); unpaved: 118,919 km (2004). Waterways: 2,900 km navigable rivers and coastal canals. Ports and harbors: Acapulco, Altamira, Coatzacoalcos, Ensenada, Guaymas, La Paz, Lazaro Cardenas, Manzanillo, Mazatlan, Progreso, Salina Cruz, Tampico, Topolobampo, Tuxpan, Veracruz. Airports: 1,834 (2007).

 International disputes: prolonged regional drought in the border region with the U.S. has strained water-sharing arrangements.

History of Mexico

History At least three great civilizations—the Mayas, the Olmecs, and the Toltecs—preceded the wealthy Aztec empire, conquered in 1519–1521 by the Spanish under Hernando Cortés. Spain ruled Mexico as part of the viceroyalty of New Spain for the next 300 years until Sept. 16, 1810, when the Mexicans first revolted. They won independence in 1821.

From 1821 to 1877, there were two emperors, several dictators, and enough presidents and provisional executives to make a new government on the average of every nine months. Mexico lost Texas (1836), and after defeat in the war with the U.S. (1846–1848), it lost the area that is now California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In 1855, the Indian patriot Benito Juárez began a series of reforms, including the disestablishment of the Catholic Church, which owned vast property. The subsequent civil war was interrupted by the French invasion of Mexico (1861) and the crowning of Maximilian of Austria as emperor (1864). He was overthrown and executed by forces under Juárez, who again became president in 1867. Bloody Political Strife and Trouble with the U.S. The years after the fall of the dictator Porfirio Diaz (1877–1880 and 1884–1911) were marked by bloody political-military strife and trouble with the U.S., culminating in the punitive U.S. expedition into northern Mexico (1916–1917) in unsuccessful pursuit of the revolutionary Pancho Villa. Since a brief civil war in 1920, Mexico has enjoyed a period of gradual agricultural, political, and social reforms. The Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR; National Revolutionary Party), dominated by revolutionary and reformist politicians from northern Mexico, was established in 1929; it continued to control Mexico throughout the 20th century and was renamed the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party) in 1946. Relations with the U.S. were disturbed in 1938 when all foreign oil wells were expropriated, but a compensation agreement was reached in 1941. Economic Growth Following World War II, the government emphasized economic growth. During the mid-1970s, under the leadership of President José López Portillo, Mexico became a major petroleum producer. By the end of Portillo's term, however, Mexico had accumulated a huge external debt because of the government's unrestrained borrowing on the strength of its petroleum revenues. The collapse of oil prices in 1986 cut Mexico's export earnings. In Jan. 1994, Mexico joined Canada and the United States in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with the plan to phase out all tariffs over a 15-year period, and in Jan. 1996, it became a founding member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In 1995, the U.S. agreed to prevent the collapse of Mexico's private banks. In return, the U.S. won virtual veto power over much of Mexico's economic policy. In 1997, in what observers called the freest elections in Mexico's history, the PRI lost control of the lower legislative house and the mayoralty of Mexico City in a stunning upset. To increase democracy, President Ernesto Zedillo said in 1999 that he would break precedent and not personally choose the next PRI presidential nominee. Several months later, Mexico held its first presidential primary, which was won by former interior secretary Francisco Labastida, Zedillo's closest ally among the candidates. Turn of the Century Presidential Elections In elections held on July 2, 2000, the PRI lost the presidency, ending 71 years of one-party rule. The new president, Vicente Fox Quesada of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), vowed tax reform, an overhaul of the legal system, and a reduction in power of the central government. By 2002, however, Fox had made little headway on his ambitious reform agenda. Disfavor with Fox was evident in 2003 parliamentary elections, when the PRI rebounded. In 2004, a two-year investigation into the “dirty war,” which Mexico's authoritarian government waged against its opponents in the 1960s and 1970s, led to an indictment—later dropped—against former president Luis Echeverria for ordering the 1971 shooting of student protesters. In 2005, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the enormously popular mayor of Mexico City, emerged as a presidential candidate for the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution. López Obrador seemed likely to defeat the party of the deeply unpopular incumbent, Vicente Fox. But in Oct. 2005, Felipe Calderón unexpectedly became the candidate of Fox's National Action Party (PAN), defeating Fox's chosen successor. By spring 2006, Felipe Calderón had caught up to López Obrador in opinion polls. In the July election, Calderón won 35.9% of the vote, a razor-thin margin over López Obrador, who received 35.3%. López Obrador appealed the election, but on Aug. 28, Mexico's top electoral court rejected López Obrador's allegations of fraud. His supporters held massive protest rallies before and after the verdict. Calderón was sworn in on Dec. 1. He vowed to make fighting the drug cartels a top priority, and he dispatched tens of thousands of soldiers and police to confront them. Drug Violence Plagues the Country In May 2008, Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora announced that over 4,000 people had been killed in drug-related violence since President Calderon took office—1,400 of the deaths occurred in 2008 alone. In Aug. 2008, hundreds of thousands of protesters across the country marched for the more than 2,700 people who were killed and 300 kidnapped in drug-related violence since January 2008. In Dec. 2008, the number of killings registered between 1 January and 2 December was 5,376—a rise of 117% from the previous year. In Nov. 2008 alone, there were 943 drug-related murders. In Dec. 2008, the U.S. released $197 million of a $400 million plan called the Merida Initiative to help Mexico fight the drug cartels, yet drug violence continued mostly unabated. By the end of 2009, an estimated 6,500 people had been killed in drug-related violence. Late April and early May 2009 brought a new challenge: a flu outbreak. A new strain of influenza, known as swine flu, originated in Mexico and spread to at least 24 other countries. The World Health Organization declared that a pandemic was a possibility. Originally, Swine Flu was thought to be quite dangerous, though as time passed, Mexican authorities said they may have overestimated the threat. As a precaution, the Mexican government shut down all nonessential business for five days starting on May 1, 2009. Other governments limited travel to and from Mexico. Despite Calderón's pledge to bring down the drug cartels, drug-related violence escalated into 2010. After the fatal shooting in March 2010 of a pregnant U.S. consulate employee by an alleged drug trafficker, Calderón stepped up his pressure on the U.S. to take responsibility for its role in the crisis; U.S. arms traffickers supply weapons to the cartels and drug users in the U.S. are consumers of Mexican drugs. As the violence spilled over into the U.S., officials did in fact acknowledge the country's role in the growing problem and the potential risks to U.S. national security. The U.S. and Mexico revised their counternarcotics strategy with a $330 million program intended to expand the Merida Initiative, which was begun under President Bush. The plan includes strengthening poor communities to give citizens alternatives to crime, better screening at the border, and shifting the focus of funding from military equipment to a civilian police force that will patrol Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. Drug-Related Violence Continues More than 34,600 deaths due to drug-related violence have been reported in President Felipe Calderón's first four years of office. According to the government, 2010 was the heaviest year yet with 15,237 people being killed. In October 2010, the government announced its plan to do away with the country's 2,200 local police department and place all officers under one unified command. In February 2011, the U.S. began flying unarmed drones over Mexico to collect and turn over information to Mexican law enforcement agencies. One drone reportedly provided information on suspects linked to the Feb. 15 killing of Jaime Zapata, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. In July 2011, violence broke out in several cities. Over 20 people were killed in Monterrey when armed men began firing on a bar. During the same weekend, 11 people were found dead from gunshot wounds just outside Mexico City and 10 decapitated heads were found in Torreon. Although authorities did not identify suspects in the killings, officials said that all of the incidents occurred in the wake of cartel fights. On November 11, 2011, Francisco Blake Mora, Mexico's secretary of the interior, died in a helicopter crash. The crash killed all eight passengers onboard. Due to his position, Mora, the country's second most powerful government official, led the battle against drug traffickers. His death was a major blow to Calderón's presidency. Calderón appointed Mora to his cabinet in July 2010. Mora became the second interior minister killed during Calderón's term. Calderón's first interior minister was killed in a plane crash almost exactly three years ago. Party Official Resigns as the Presidential Election Approaches In December 2011, Humberto Moreira resigned from his position as president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Moreira stepped down because of a financial scandal which threatened his party's chances in the 2012 presidential election. News media coverage connected Moreira to debt and loan irregularities in Coahulia, a state which he governed until January 2011. His party's candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, became the early frontrunner in the 2012 presidential election. He worked to convince voters that the Institutional Revolutionary Party has moved passed its history of corruption. In February 2012, Josefina Vázquez Mota was chosen as a presidential candidate for Mexico's National Action Party. Mota, an economist and former education secretary, becomes the first woman nominated by a major party to run for president. "I am going to be the first woman president in history," said Mota, accepting the nomination. After a narrow defeat in the 2006 Presidential election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador was nominated again by the Democratic Revolutionary Party to run in the presidential election, which occurs in July 2012. Enrique Peña Nieto Easily Wins Presidential Election On July 1, 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto was elected president. A member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Peña Nieto received 38 percent of the vote, defeating both National Action Party candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota and Democratic Revolutionary Party candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who lost the 2006 President election by a slim margin. Peña Nieto's victory was another political shift in a country plagued with a violent, ongoing drug war and economic uncertainty. After ruling the country since 1929, Peña Nieto's party, PRI, suffered a huge defeat in 2000. Since 2000, the country has been in a period of multiparty democracy. During his campaign, Peña Nieto promised voters a change in Mexico's fight against the drug war. He vowed to focus more on reducing violence instead of making arrests and raids in attempts to block drugs from getting into the United States.

Santra Sangre analysis

SANTA SANGRE

The Sacred, The Pure, and the Profane Santa Sangre is my favorite of Alejandro Jodorowsky's films. the Psychedelic Freudian images of this slasher film weave a very compelling tale. The film opens up with the main character, Fenix, in a mental institution. Naked, he crouches up in the denuded trunk of a tree. This image in the sterile, high ceilinged, white walled cell gives the impression that this naked man in a leafless, limbless, dead tree is an piece on exhibition in a museum. Doctors come into the room with a fish on a plate. They set the plate down; Fenix swings out of the tree and begins hungrily eating the fish. They tell Fenix that he cannot continue living like this and then dress him in a jumpsuit. It is as if he has left the world of the animals and rejoined the civilized world. The movie then flashes back to Fenix as a child. His mother and father operate a circus. They have fled to Mexico because his father, Orgo, murdered a woman in the United States. Fenix has an innocent freindship with a deaf mute girl, Alma, who is being abused by her mother who is the circus' tatooed lady. His mother, Concha, is a religous fanatic who is the acolyte of a temple devoted to a saint that has not yet been recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, St. Lirio. The devotees of this sect (who incidently are all, or maybe mostly, women) wear a red robe with two white x's on the chest. This is a pretty blatant symbol for the double x chromosome which determines female sexuality genetically. We meet Concha with her congregation as they are defending the temple which honors Saint Lirio from the police who are trying to drive them away so a developer can bulldoze their church. A bishop arrives to mediate the situation. The congregation take him inside the the church.

The inside of the church looks like a cross between a Mexican Roman Catholic Church and a Roman Temple. The most prominent feature of the church is a large rectangular pool of red liquid which takes up most of the space within the church. Fenix's mother then explains the history of Saint Lirio to the bishop. The saint was a young girl who two thugs tried to rape in the alley where this church now stands. She resisted them so they cut off her arms and raped her anyway. A miracle occurred, though. She bled and bled; and the blood never dried as a testament to the wrongs done to her. The bishop then sticks his hand in the pool of blood and declares that it is paint. The congregation try to shout him down with declarations that this is holy blood. One young woman goes so far as to jump into the pool of blood. The bishop grabs a teenaged boy that came in with him and drags him out saying that he hopes that this heresy has not ruined his young mind. It is hard to ignore the connection of this "holy blood" to that of menstrual blood. This is a temple of the feminine and within it the feminine is considered sacred. As the bishop runs out of the church he tells the police and the developer to bulldoze this sacrilege to the ground. As the bulldozer rolls forward the congregation scream and run out of the church. Only Concha stays. Ever the devout believer she rushes to the statue of the violated saint and holds it with ferocious devotion as the stone church comes crashing down around her. This entire scene could be interpreted as a rape scene. We have the representatives of masculine society (the police representing the government, the developer representing business, and the bishop representing masculine dominated religion) destroying the last sanctuary of the feminine. This is symbolic of woman's loss of power in our male dominated world. It also foreshadows the rest of the film. Remember that this is also witnessed by Fenix as a child. After he witnesses this, he and his mother return to the circus where they catch his father cavorting with the tatooed lady. Words cannot adequately describe this scene. While the tatooed lady does not touch him or undress she does move her body in an extremely unconventional manner which may be describe as lewd, but would better be described as perverted and raunchy. Most viewers will find themselves more disgusted and disturbed than aroused. At on point she grasps her ankles and moves her posterior as if it was an elephant. This is important because Jodorowsky seems to use elephants as a symbol of male sexuality throughout this film. After being caught by his wife this leads to a huge confrontation which ends with Orgo seducing his wife by removing his clothes. I would like to mention at this point that Fenix's father is played by Guy Stockwell and one may find oneself screaming, "NO!!! PUT IT BACK ON!!!" at the screen. It is also important to note that Orgo seems to hypnotize his wife with a knife. It is symbolic of the hold he has over her. Orgo and Concha retire to a private location but Fenix sneaks a peak of them having sex (his mother is still wearing the red robe of her sect, or is it sex?). After seeing this, he visits a very sick and dying elephant. The elephant spits blood up through it's trunk and moans woefully. "Please! Don't Die!", Fenix begs the elephant. This is symbolic of the death of something within Fenix which will become clearer as the movie progresses. A very strange funeral is held for the elephant. The circus holds a funeral procession through town in which the performers dress in black mourning versions of their performance clothing; except for Fenix who is dressed in the robes of his mother's sect. The casket of the elephant is hauled to a garbage dump on the back of a flat bed truck. They dump the casket over a cliff into the dump where inhabitants of a nearby shanty town rip it open and pull out huge chunks of elephant meat while cheering (I realize what you are thinking; but a lot of this stuff just has to be seen to be believed). Fenix witnessing all of this is in tears. His father berates him handles him roughly and calls him a woman. He then tells Fenix to come with him so that he can make a man out of Fenix. He brings Fenix to a house where he rips the top of the robe off of Fenix's chest and ties Fenix's hands to a chair. Orgo then proceeds to tatoo Fenix's chest with the exact same tatoo which is on his own chest. The theme of the passage into manhood is very prominent here. In extremely masculine dominated cultures little boys are often seen as feminine and must go through rites to pass into manhood. After giving Fenix the tatoo his father dresses Fenix in a child sized outfit of his own clothes. After Fenix leaves the house he runs into the deaf mute girl who is his freind. She is curious about his new tatoo and clothing; but she does not understand. Fenix has changed; his innocense died with the elephant.

During a performance one night Orgo sneaks off with the tatooed lady. Concha sees this and follows them. Fenix tries to follow his mother but she locks him in a trailer where he cannot act but can see everything. It is a strong representation of the powerlessness of his childhood. Concha catches Orgo right before he is about to have sex with the tatooed lady, and throws acid on his crotch. Concha then laughs in his face and Orgo cuts off his wife's arms which land amongst a bunch of chickens which peck at them. Keep in mind that young Fenix is witnessing all of this. Orgo stumbles away grasping the ruin of his crotch. The union between himself and his wife has led to their castration of each other. He gazes at the circus tent where his circus is performing inside, oblivious to the carnage outside. And slits his throat in front of Alma and some clowns. The tatooed lady runs outside throws Alma into the back of her VW van and takes off. Fenix has seen his entire world destroyed in the course of a few minutes. This is why he is in a mental institution as a man. This ends the first half of the film (the film is only about two hours long). In the second half of the film (which I will not go to far into because I don't want to give away any spoilers) Fenix's mother, Concha, comes to get him out of the mental institution. Fenix now acts as her arms, literally. She wears clothes with arm holes that Fenix sticks his hands through so that she can use them as her arms. Concha uses Fenix's arms to take revenge and kill her sons lovers. there is an interesting take on the virgin/whore theme in this part of the movie. Also Concha makes an interesting figure. Having no arms she is the loss of power of women embodied; but she also is similar to an ancient Greek or Roman statue that has lost it's arms due to the ruins of time.

In Santa Sangre, life is a psychosexual circus (literally)

Santa Sangre is a 1989 Mexican/Italian surrealist thriller directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and starring his son Axel as Fenix, an uncommunicative young Christ figure residing in a mental health facility in Mexico City. After introducing the adult Fenix, the story flashes back to his tragic childhood in the traveling "Circus Gringo." Fenix's mother, Concha, is a trapeze artist and the leader of a blood cult whose patron saint is a young girl who was raped and dismembered. As the flashback begins, Concha has been accused of heresy by the Catholic church and her temple is bulldozed to the ground. Meanwhile, back at "Circus Gringo," Concha's husband, Orgo the knife-thrower, is carrying on a very public affair with his assistant, the borderline ludicrously licentious Tattooed Woman. The Tattooed Woman has an adopted daughter, Alma, who strikes up a romance with Fenix when he helps her perfect her high wire skills. Enraged by her husband's infidelity, Concha bursts in on the lovers and burns their genitals with concentrated sulfuric acid, which as we all know can quite often be found lying around in circus tents. Enraged at having his genitals burned with acid, Orgo pins his wife to an American flag motif'd knife-throwing target and lops off her arms before stumbling into the courtyard and slitting his own throat. Enraged at having her genitals burned with acid and her lover driven to suicide, the Tattooed Woman leaves the circus, taking Alma with her. After this operatic juvenalia menstrata, the film returns to the present and the subtlety really kicks into high gear. Fenix escapes from the hospital and together with his now armless mother creates a new stage act called "Concha And Her Magic Hands," in which Fenix acts as her arms as she recounts the story of the creation of Adam and the Fall from Paradise. Yup, nothing weird about that. Fenix, completely in the thrall of his mother's mind control, has also taken to stabbing every woman he runs across, starting with the Tattooed Woman, who has now set up shop pimping her unwilling daughter out to the local constabulary. Santa Sangre is a cavalcade of Jungian archetypes and Catholic sexual ideation which draws heavily from Fellini, Hitchcock, Sergio Leone and Marcel Marceau. Whether you consider it to be a richly profound tapestry or an insufferably pretentious mess will likely be determined by your point of view on sin. The premise of the sex-as-sin school of thought is that we, humanity, have been distorted by sex. Our defiance in the Garden of Eden has turned us into warped, funhouse reflections of what we were intended to be. Like Tod Browning's Freaks, Santa Sangre illustrates this point by showing us a raw, animalistic sexuality that pervades every character, including those who fall outside the biological norm. Jodorowsky is the anti-Cronenberg. Where the existential Cronenberg reduces human complexity to biological destiny, Jodorowsky infuses every living corner of nature with human notions of good and evil. Throughout Santa Sangre we see the cycle of life, sex, reproduction, maturity and death not as being under threat from evil, but constituting it. Consider the funeral of Fenix's elephant friend (warning: graphic). "> The pachyderm's casket is paraded through the town and dumped into a ravine where it is set upon by the poor starving humans who have also been similarly cast away. "> Or this scene where Fenix and a group of hospital residents with Down syndrome take a field trip to see a film about Robinson Crusoe and end up snorting coke and visiting an obese prostitute instead (warning: not kidding.) Sadly, for all this rich symbolism, there is almost no sense of character. Alma is a deaf mute who seems to have no desires or interests of her own and while Fenix can technically hear and speak, he doesn't seem to put those talents to any sort of character-developing use. So burdensome are the wages of sin and so inevitable is the natural world's dominance of the human soul for Jodorowsky, that he allows them to utterly overwhelm everything in the film. Fenix is a latter day Norman Bates, driven to murder and madness by the domineering psychosis of his mother who tells him that he is nothing without her and will never be free of her as long as he lives. He carries her with him the way we all, according to myth, carry the legacy of Adam and Eve. But if we're defined merely by that legacy, then who and what are we besides empty vessels for it? Fenix has about the same perspective on his life that a bug has of a windshield. By contrast Norman Bates, being a good Protestant boy, could at the very least articulate the values, the choices and the personal moral commitments that frame his warped worldview. Calvinists make for more interesting serial killers.

Santa Sangre Review

Santa Sangre Mexico-Italy (1989): Horror/Thriller Roger Ebert Review: 4.0 stars out of 4 118 min, Rated NC-17, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc SANTA SANGRE is a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers had bold individual visions and were not timidly trying to duplicate the latest mass-market formulas. This is a movie like none I have seen before, a wild kaleidoscope of images and outrages, a collision between Freud and Fellini. It contains blood and glory, saints and circuses, and unspeakable secrets of the night. And it is all wrapped up in a flamboyant parade of bold, odd, striking imagery, with Alejandro Jodorowsky as the ringmaster. Those who were going to the movies in the early 1970s will remember the name. Jodorowsky is the perennial artist in exile who made EL TOPO, that gory cult classic that has since disappeared from view, trapped in a legal battle. Then he made THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, another phantasmagoric collection of strange visions, and in recent years he has written a series of fantasy comic books which are best-sellers in France and Mexico. Now he is back with a film that grabs you with its opening frames and shakes you for two hours with the outrageous excesses of his imagination. The film takes place in Mexico, where the hero, Fenix, travels with his father's circus. His father is a tattooed strongman, and his mother is an aerialist who hangs high above the center ring, suspended from the long locks of her hair. She is also a mystic who leads a cult of women who worship a saint without arms - a woman whose arms were severed from her body during an attack by a man. The blood of this saint is santa sangre, holy blood, collected in a pool in a church which the authorities want to bulldoze. The church is pulled down in the opening moments of the movie, while horrendous events take place under the big top. While the mother is suspended from her hair high in the air, she sees her husband sneak out with the tattooed lady - and she tracks them down to their place of sin, kills her, and maims her husband with acid before he cuts off her arms and then kills himself. Or is that what actually happened? The young son, who witnesses these deeds, is discovered years later in an insane asylum, sitting up in a tree, refusing all forms of human communication. Then he receives a visitor - his mother, come to deliver him from his madness. When he re-enters the outer world, he encounters Alma, the deaf-mute girl who was his childhood friend, and who has now grown into a grave, calm young woman. And he embarks on a journey that leads into the most impenetrable thickets of Freudian and Jungian symbology. Fenix's mother, still without arms, makes him her psychological slave. He must always walk and sit behind her, his arms thrust through the sleeves of her dresses, so that his hands do her bidding. Together they perform in a nightclub act - she sitting at the piano, he playing. But is this really happening, or is it his delusion? Jodorowsky hardly pauses to consider such questions, so urgent is his headlong rush to confront us with more spectacle. I will never forget one sequence in the movie, the elephant's burial, where the circus marches in mournful procession behind the grotesquely large coffin of the dead animal. It is tipped over the side into a garbage dump, where the coffin is pounced upon and ripped open by starving scavengers. Another powerful image comes in a graveyard, where the spirits of female victims rise up out of their graves to confront their tormentor. And there is the strange, gentle, almost hallucinatory passage where Fenix joins his fellow inmates in a trip into town; Jodorowsky uses mongoloid children in this sequence, his actors communicating with them with warmth and body contact in a scene that treads delicately between fiction and documentary. If Jodorowsky has influences - in addition to the psychologists he plunders for complexes - they are Fellini and Bu³uel. Federico Fellini, with his love for grotesque and special people and his circuses and parades, and Luis Bu³uel, with his delight in depravity and secret perversion, his conviction that respectability was the disguise of furtive self-indulgence. SANTA SANGRE is a movie in which the inner chambers of the soul are laid bare, in which desires become visible and walk into the room and challenge the yearner to possess them. When I go to the movies, one of my strongest desires is to be shown something new. I want to go to new places, meet new people, have new experiences. When I see Hollywood formulas mindlessly repeated, a little something dies inside of me: I have lost two hours to boors who insist on telling me stories I have heard before. Jodorowsky is not boring. The privilege of making a film is too precious to him, for him to want to make a conventional one. It has been eighteen years since his last work, and all of that time the frustration and inspiration must have been building. Now comes this release, in a rush of energy and creative joy.

Santa Sangre Mexico-Italy (1989): Horror/Thriller CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Review: 3.0 stars out of 5 118 min, Rated NC-17, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc Admittedly, director Alejandro Jodorowsky's first film in 10 years and only his third since his notorious 1971 debut, the surrealist western EL TOPO, SANTA SANGRE is nearly a decade out of step. Although obviously not for every taste, SANTA SANGRE is, however, a film that no adventurous moviegoer can afford to miss. Despite the film's surrealist trappings, parody is at the heart of this effort. Unfortunately, Jodorowsky chooses to parody oedipal slasher films, which long ago slipped into the realm of self-parody (especially the latter installments in the series that began with FRIDAY THE 13TH, 1980), if, indeed, they were ever intended to be taken seriously. Synopsis Sanitarium patient. SANTA SANGRE begins with a brief scene involving a Christ-like nude perched on a tree limb in what appears to be the cell of a sanitarium. A doctor and nurses arrive with food: a conventional dinner and a plate of raw fish. It's the fish, of course, that brings the man down from his perch. While the doctor and nurses coax him into overalls, an elaborate tattoo of an eagle is revealed on the young man's chest. The film promptly flashes back to tell the story behind the tattoo as well as the story behind the young man's present state. Childhood revealed: As a youngster, Fenix (played as a child by Jodorowsky's son Adan Jodorowsky, then as an adult by his elder son, Axel) is billed as the world's youngest magician. He performs his act for the Circus del Gringo, run by his womanizing father, Orgo (Guy Stockwell), and his mother, Concha (Blanca Guerra), a crazed religious fanatic. Fenix is assisted in his act by an ethereal deaf-mute girl, who always wears white-face makeup, and with whom he is falling in puppy love. To initiate Fenix into manhood his father painstakingly (and painfully) carves the eagle tattoo into the boy's chest. But Fenix's life takes an even more traumatic turn when Concha, enraged by her husband's latest infidelity (with the circus's curvaceous tattooed lady, the deaf-mute's mother), interrupts the adulterers in bed, and attacks Orgo's genitals with acid. Orgo, a knife thrower, retaliates with the tools of his trade, slicing off Concha's arms before slitting his own throat. Having been locked in his trailer by Concha, Fenix must then watch helplessly as the tattooed lady and her daughter disappear into the night following the bloodbath. Vengeful adult: Back in the present, Fenix, on a field trip with his fellow patients, spots the tattooed lady, now a drunken prostitute, and is consumed with rage. Coaxed into escaping from the sanitarium by the armless Concha, Fenix becomes her vengeful "hands," both in a bizarre nightclub act and in an orgy of murder that only begins with his skewering of the tattooed lady. Fenix's later victims include a hardened, drug-addicted stripper who becomes a virginal, coquettish schoolgirl onstage, and a wrestler, the "world's strongest woman," who fights off a small army of male wrestlers in her act. Difficult decision: The film's climax is brought about by the reappearance of the deaf-mute girl, now grown up (played by deaf actress Sabrina Dennison). Fenix is stirred to revolt when Concha orders him to kill this beautiful young woman, his former love, just as he has killed all the other women who have brought confusion into his life. Critique--Mixed success: SANTA SANGRE could hardly be described as boring. Moreover, gorgeously photographed and crammed with the startling imagery for which Jodorowsky is justly famed, the film is never less than visually beautiful . It also boasts a splendidly effective cast, even if Axel Jodorowsky is a dead ringer, both in looks and acting style, for Bronson Pinchot. Yet the film can't help but remain stubbornly earthbound because of its derivative, pedestrian scenario, too-obviously bearing the influence of its producer, Claudio Argento, the younger brother of splashy Italian horror specialist Dario Argento. Whether SANTA SANGRE would have been a better film had it been more purely Jodorowsky's work is debatable. The surrealist interludes here recall Bu³uel, but never attain an identity of their own. If anything, they come across as calculated and intellectualized in a way that is almost the antithesis of Bu³uel's instinctual approach. Still, if Jodorowsky is not yet worthy of inclusion in the pantheon with Bu³uel and Hitchcock (the latter can be either credited with or blamed for starting the oedipal-slasher trend with PSYCHO, 1960), he is, nonetheless, in a class by himself.

Title: Santa Sangre (1989) Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky Writers: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Claudio Argento, Roberto Leoni Cast: Axel Jodorowsky, Adan Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Teo Jodorowsky Review: Horror films are made by many different kinds of filmmakers, sometimes a horror film is made by an unknown director whom we’ll never here from again. Sometimes, they are made by a director who has chosen to make horror films his specialty. Guys like John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper come to mind. But sometimes, horror films are made by directors who don’t normally make horror films. Sometimes they make that one horror movie and never revisit the genre ever again, but hey, they took at stab at horro, and they did it well. Sometimes these directors who never make horror films end up making the most interesting horror movies because they shy away from horror film clichés, and more then likely infuse the horror film they are making with their own unique style and flavor.

For example Stanley Kubrick, made The Shinning (1980), an amazing horror film; yet Kubrick never made another horror film again. And it is a film that is very distinctively Kubrickian. It contains many of the elements that make a Kubrick film great. Scorcese is another good example, he normally makes Gangster movies, or period pieces, yet he made two horror films in his life Cape Fear (1991) and Shutter Island (2010), both great horror films in my book. Alejandro Jodorowsky -the director I’ll be talking about in this review- usually makes surrealistic films filled with symbolisms and visual poetry. He is not the kind of director you’d imagine making a horror film. Yet here we are discussing Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky’s first and only horror film to date. How did Jodorowsky end up making a horror film?

When a director like Jodorowsky wants to make a film, it is never an easy thing. He is the kind of director that most producers will probably run away from because his films aren’t easy sells. His films are always a strong departure from what we call a commercial film. In other words, if you are a producer, making back the money you invested in producing a Jodorowsky film, is never a sure thing. The same can be said of some American directors like David Lynch for example. Lynch is respected and admired by many a film buff, but trust me, producers are not knocking at his door dying to produce his next feature, which is probably the reason why we haven’t seen a Lynch movie in a while. Right now, the only way Lynch can make a film is if it’s a very low budget independent affair like Inland Empire (2006). But directors like Lynch and Jodorowsky love working with little money because it means they will have more creative control over whatever film they will be making. These type of directors are artists, surrealists and visual poets, they’d rather make a film with little money, but more creative control.

Sometimes, artistic directors like Jodorowsky haven’t made a film in a while, and when the itch to make a film comes, they sometimes make compromises. In the case of Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky was offered the chance to make a horror film. Dario Argento’s brother, Claudio Argento offered to produce a film for Jodorowsky, but the conditions were set: it has to be a horror film. Jodorowsky agreed, but if you know Jodorowsky, then you know he was going to make a horror film, sure, but he was going to make a horror film that was very much his own. This is exactly what happened with Santa Sangre.

Santa Sangre is a film about a young boy named Fenix. His father (an American named Orgo) runs a circus in Mexico, the circus is called “The Circus of the Gringo”. Fenix’s mother, named Concha, is the religious leader in a church that worships an armless saint. One day, Concha catches Orgo when he is about to be unfaithful to her with a tattooed woman who has just joined the circus. In a fit of jealousy, Concha poors acid on Orgo’s genitals! This angers Orgo so much that he takes two knives and proceeds to cut Concha’s arms off with one swoop! Concha falls to the floor, apparently bleeding to death! Fenix, their son, watches this whole event taking place. It affects him so much that he ends up institutionalized for the rest of his childhood and adolescence. Once he is a grown man, he decides to break out of the mental institution to reunite with his armless mother, who has apparently survived Orgo’s vengeful attack. Now, Fenix is under his mother’s command once again! And his mother wants revenge!

What makes this film a very Jodorowsky horror film is all the surreal moments that it has spread through out. If you’ve seen a Jodorowsky film before (El Topo, Fando and Lis, The Holy Mountain) then you know that Jodorowsky is fond of speaking in visual metaphors. Often times his films won’t have that much dialog because his visuals do most of the talking. Jodorowsky’s style of filmmaking feels as if a mute had suddenly decided to make a film, communicating only through moments, actions, and situations. This is an interesting contradiction about Jodorowsky’s films; dialogue is scarce, yet his films say a whole lot. Whole sequences may be silent, but the images speak none the less, they say everything they have to say through symbolism. This, in my opinion is the best way to watch a Jodorowsky film. You can try and watch it like any other film, but to me, the best way to watch them is by trying to decipher what he is trying to say with his visual metaphors, which are constant.

Santa Sangre may appear to be another crazy Jodorowsky flick, filled with freaks and oddities and symbolisms (and it is) but strange as it may sound, it is also a film that has its roots in real life events. You see, Santa Sangre is loosely based on the life of Mexico’s most famous serial killer; one Gregorio Cardenas Hernandez also known as ‘The Tacuba Strangler’. Gregorio a.k.a. “Goyo” was a serial killer who managed to strangle four prostitutes before he was caught. Now, I know what most of you are thinking, killing four people is not exactly enough to make him so famous, at least not when compared to other serial killers in history. But actually, what makes Goyo’s story interesting is not that he had strangled four women. What makes his case interesting is what happened after that. He became a writer, a painter, he studied psychology, chemistry. His paintings became famous and where sold for high prices! The guy even got married while in jail! After many years in a mental institution, he was released and considered completely rehabilitated! Stage plays, documentaries and films were made based on his life story. Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre is one of them. It is a film that’s loosely based on Goyo’s life. I say loosely because it’s a film that takes Goyo’s story as a starting point and then goes its own crazy, surreal, Jodorowsky way with it. It’s an artistic interpretation of what happened to Goyo rather then a film that is strictly based on his story.

Goyo was a child that was very repressed by his mother, who was very domineering. In the film, Feni’x mother gets her arms cut off by her husband Orgo. So when Fenix reunites with his mother, she is armless. She ends up controlling Fenix’s arms and hands to do her bidding. She does everything through his hands, to the point where he can no longer control them himself! Santa Sangre reminded me of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in this sense. The mother doesn’t let the child be, she makes him murder women whenever they try to make a connection with him. It is a story about a mother who is jealous of her own son. This is where the horror element of the film kicks in because the mother wants to kill any woman who wants to get close to her son on an emotional or physical level. The question arises: Will Fenix ever regain control of his life? The element of circus life adds a Felliniesque air to the proceedings as well. Finally, I’d say that Santa Sangre isn’t a horror film in the strictest since of the word. It’s more of a surreal film, with horror elements in it. It’s dreamlike, it’s symbolic, it’s trippy, it’s disturbing, it’s a Jodorowsky film every step of the way. Santa Sangre is a unique experience you wont soon forget. Rating: 5 out of 5