Endless Poetry (15)

Endless Poetry (15)

Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Picturehouse, Liverpool
6th – 12th January 2017

Reviewed by Colin Serjent

This is the second segment – the first being The Dance Of Reality – planned five-part filmic autobiography by veteran Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who is also a poet and novelist.

As in the first film this also includes a host of carnival, circus (notably the use of dwarfs) and surrealism-like features. One critic called it ‘slapstick surrealism, a term which I would not disagree with.

Endless Poetry portrays Alejandro, first as a boy (Jeremias Herskovits), aged about ten-years-old, and then as 16 plus teenager (the director’s real-life son Adan Jodorowsky).

An intriguing aspect is when the director appears in the film with his son, playing his younger self.

In short, Jodorowsky, as the older boy, is disdainful of the advice of his father Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky) to study as a doctor of medicine, and instead fled his parents abode to join an artistic commune (‘a den of of degenerates and faggots’, as his father described it), a decision that will highly influence the rest of his life, personally, professionally and politically.

A beguiling aspect of Endless Poetry is that it is shot in the original Santiago locations with coloured panelled representations of the 1940s overlaying the new buildings.

Another novel touch is the use of face masks on people who attend political rallies. Faceless fascists, you might say.

The film will not be to everyone’s taste, with the director’s singular vision, but that is why it is such an idiosyncratic and imposing watch.

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