ShangOrama.com presents
3 Banned Hell-O-Ween Films:
The Anarchy & Alchemy of Alejandro Jodorowsky!!!
ShangOrama.com's 2nd annual Halloween-night tradition continues. Y'arrr!!!
"And I imagine...with great pleasure...all the horrible stirrings of the non-manifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsions 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." - Alexandro Jodorowsky, 1971
Alexandro Jodorowsky is a director of fascinating
films (El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre...), founder of the "Panique"
movement (his mime projects with Marcel Marceau), performer of provocative
happenings, successful comic strip writer (the Incal, Aleph Tau, The White
Lama...), animator of the "Mystical Cabaret", Tarot card master,
launcher of the "psycho-magic", the list could go on and on. It
is unfortunate that not everyone has heard of him and his art or has had the
experience of viewing his extraordinary films. On May 1st 2007, after spending
many years getting back copyright control of his films (owned by John Lennon's
manager no less), Jodorowsky has personally-supervised the brand-new re-release
of new DVD copies of his directors-cuts for all these listed films.
Almost all previous film prints & DVD copies were incomplete lengths or
badly transferred from bad prints. See these films like they were meant to
be seen, in mint condition!!! Y'arrr!!!
Wednesday, October 31, 2007 - 8pm - 2am (doors open at 7pm) - $5 cover
8:00pm - El Topo ( The Mole: 1970, 125', 35mm (1.33), colour, mono (Klangfilm), Mexico - Spanish w/sub-titles ) - Westerns were never supposed to look like this!!!
Writer/Directer/Production & Costume Design/Music: Alejandro Jodorowsky; Executive Producer: Roberto Viskin; Producers: Juan López Moctezuma, Moshe Rosemberg, Saúl Rosemberg; Original Music: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Nacho Méndez; Cinematography: Rafael Corkidi; Film Editing: Federico Landeros; Art Direction: José Durán; Set Decoration: José Luis Garduño; Assistant Director: José Luis González de León; Sound Effects Engineer: Gonzalo Gavira; Sound Editor: Lilia Lupercio.
CAST: Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo); Brontis Jodorowsky (Son of El Topo, as a boy); Robert John (Son of El Topo, as a man); José Legarreta (Dying Man); Alfonso Arau (Bandit #1); José Luis Fernández (Bandit #2); Alf Junco (Bandit #3); Gerardo Zepeda (Bandit #4); René Barrera (Bandit #5); René Alís (Bandit #6); Federico Gonzáles (Bandit #7); Vicente Lara (Bandit #8); Pablo Leder (Monk #1); Giuliano Girini Sasseroli (Monk #2); Cristian Merkel (Monk #3); Aldo Grumelli (Monk #4); Mara Lorenzio (Mara); David Silva (The Colonel); Ignacio Martínez España (Armless man); Eliseo Gardea Saucedo (Legless man); Héctor Martínez (Master #1); Paula Romo (Woman in black); Bertha Lomelí (Gypsy, Mother of Master #2); Juan José Gurrola (Master #2).
"The movie may seem bewildering, however, because the narrative is overlaid with a clutter of symbols and ideas. Jodorowsky employs anything that can give the audience a charge, even if the charges are drawn from different systems of thought that are -- *as thought* -- incompatible.... Well, of course, you don't need erudition to draw on matters religious and philosophical that way -- any dabbler can do it. All you need is a theatrical instinct and a talent for (a word I once promised myself never to use) frisson. Jodorowsky is... a director for whom ideas are sensuous entities -- sensuous toys, really, to be played with. By piling onto the Western man-with-no-name righteous-avenger form elements from Eastern fables, Catholic symbolism, and so on, Jodorowsky achieves a kind of comic-strip mythology. And when you play with ideas this way, promiscuously -- with thoughts and enigmas and with symbols of human suffering -- the resonances get so thick and confused that the game may seem not just theatre but labyrinthine, 'deep': a masterpiece." - Pauline Kael
10:05pm - The Holy Mountain ( La Montaña sagrada: 1973, 114', 35mm (2.35), colour, mono, Mexico/USA - English-languaged & some Spanish ) - OMee spirituality anyone!!!!!!
Writer/Directer/Producer/Production & Costume Design/Music: Alejandro Jodorowsky; Executive Producer: Robert Taicher; co-Producers: Allen Klein, Roberto Viskin (uncredited); Original Music: Don Cherry, Ronald Frangipane, Alejandro Jodorowsky; Cinematography: Rafael Corkidi; Film Editing: Federico Landeros; Costume Design: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Nicky Nichols; Makeup Artist (uncredited): María Eugenia Luna; Assistant Director: Rafael Villaseñor Kuri; Painter/Sculptor/Set Designer: Alejandro Jodorowsky; Post-Production Manager: Roger Rodewald.
CAST: Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Alchemist); Horácio Salinas (The Thief); Zamira Saunders (The Written Woman); Juan Ferrara (Fon, He whose planet is Venus); Adriana Page (Isla, She whose planet is Mars); Burt Kleiner (Klen, He whose planet is Jupiter); Valerie Jodorowsky (Sel, She whose planet is Saturn); Nicky Nichols (Berg, He whose planet is Uranus); Richard Rutowski (Axon, He whose planet is Neptune); Luis Lomeli (Lut, He whose planet is Pluto); Ana De Sade (The Prostitute); Chucho-Chucho (The Chimpanzee); Letícia Robles (Bald Woman 1); Connie De La Mora (Bald Woman 2); David Kapralik (Tourist); Jacqueline Voltaire (Tourist Wife); Pablo Leder (Circus Barker); Héctor Ortega (Drug Master); Robert Taicher (Poet).
"A Christlike figure wanders through bizarre, grotesque scenarios filled with religious and sacrilegious imagery. He meets a mystical guide who introduces him to seven wealthy and powerful individuals, each representing a planet in the solar system. These seven, along with the protagonist, the guide and the guide's assistant, divest themselves of their worldly goods and form a group of nine who will seek out the Holy Mountain, in order to displace the gods who live there and become immortal." - Marty Cassady {@vt.edu}
12:00am - Santa Sangre ( Holy Blood: 1989, 123', 35mm (1.85), colour, Dolby-stereo, Mexico/Italy: English-languaged ) - WOW!!!
Writer/Directer/Producer: Alejandro Jodorowsky; Thanks: Marcel Marceau (inspiration: "The Creation of the World" sequence); Story: Alejandro Jodorowsky; Adaptation: Roberto Leoni; Screenplay: Alejandro Jodorowsk & Roberto Leoni & Claudio Argento (Dario Argento's brother); Executive Producers: René Cardona Jr., Angelo Jacono; co-Producer: Claudio Argento ; Line Producer: Anuar Badin; Original Music: Simon Boswell; Cinematography; Daniele Nannuzzi; Film Editing: Mauro Bonanni; Casting: Pablo Leder; Production Design: Alejandro Luna; Set Decoration: Enrique Estévez; Costume Design: Tolita Figueroa.
CAST: Axel Jodorowsky (Fenix); Blanca Guerra (Concha); Guy Stockwell (Orgo); Thelma Tixou (The Tattooed Woman); Sabrina Dennison (Alma); Adan Jodorowsky (Young Fenix); Faviola Elenka Tapia (Young Alma); Teo Jodorowsky (Pimp); María de Jesús Aranzabal (Fat Prostitute); Jesús Juárez (Aladin); Sergio Bustamante (Monsignor); Gloria Contreras (Rubi); S. Rodriguez (The Saint); Zonia Rangel Mora (Trini); Joaquín García Vargas (Box-office Attendant [as Borolas]); Teo Tapia (Businessman); Edgar E. Jiménez Nava (Monsignor's Chauffeur); Jacobo Lieberman (Monsignor's Secretary); Héctor Ortega (Doctor); Brontis Jodorowsky (Orderly 1); Valérie Crouzet (Orderly 2); Óscar Serafín Álvarez (Soldier 1); Billy Motton (Soldier 2); Hilario 'Popitekus' Vargas (Wrestler 1); Guadalupe 'TNT' Aguilar (Wrestler 2); Arturo 'Rinoceronte' Contreras (Wrestler 3); Gustavo Aguilar Tejada (Beggar); Roger Fayard Arroyo (Beggar).
"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 http://www.creationbooks.com/frameset.asp?p=nf-cinema.html 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." - Roger Ebert Review: 4.0 stars out of 4.
For more info, interviews, and articles on Alexandro Jodorowsky, visit: The Symbol Grows: Alejandro Jodorowsky.
See you here @MAJLIS: 163 Walnut Ave.
---MAJLIS is between Richmond & Adeliade; 1-bk W. Niagara [2-Little Lights W. Bathurst]---[[[View Map]]]
Remember, our Shanger & Daughter Cafe is just here for some of your shangin' comfort needs. OK? Shang! Shang! Shangers!!!
We are now CABLE-READY!!! (((...A streaming-sever is next on our agenda...))) Stay tuned folks Y'arrr!!!
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ANARCHY and ALCHEMY: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky by Ben Cobb (Persistence of Vision #6):
Holy Mountain 
El Topo
Alejandro Jodorowsky remains one of cinema’s most controversial and influential film-makers. In 1968 his scandalous debut FANDO & LIS caused a riot in Mexico, forcing the Chilean-born director into exile in France. The following year his weird and violent underground smash hit EL TOPO dragged the hippy generation into the 70s, single-handedly invented the American Midnight Movie phenomenon and transformed its creator into a counter-culture icon championed by the likes of John Lennon and, latterly, Marilyn Manson.
ANARCHY AND ALCHEMY features exclusive interview material, rare images, and exhaustive chapters on all Jodorowsky’s films including the mesmerising cine-trip THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, the award-winning Oedipal circus show SANTA SANGRE, and the aborted DUNE project with Salvador Dali, Pink Floyd and H R Giger. With further texts on Jodorowsky’s 60s terror-theatre outfit The Panic Movement, his mime projects with Marcel Marceau and his graphic novel collaborations with Moebius, and illustrated throughout, ANARCHY AND ALCHEMY is the first and definitive study of this enigmatic, elusive yet illuminating artist.
"People always ask me what my films are about.
I say 'I don't know'. I read this book, now I know. If you have questions,
it has the answers. I learnt a lot about Jodorowsky."
– Alejandro
Jodorowsky
Browse our EVENTS archives:
#11- "3 Banned Hell-O-Ween Films: The Anarchy & Alchemy of Alejandro Jodorowsky" (Wed, Oct 31, 2007)
#10 - "First-Anniversary Randamonium" (Sat, Oct 13 & Wed, Oct 24, 2007) - Come celebrate our first anniversary!!! Y'arrr!!! (& Held-over by popular demand!)
#9 - "Ontario Provincial Election Night Open House" (Wed, Oct 10, 2007) - We are now cable-ready folks. Yeh!!! (((...Streaming server is next on our agenda...)))
jwcurry's - "Messagio Galore: a jwcurry quartet #4" (Sat, Oct 6, 2007)
#8 - "Kubrick's 2001 Trilogy" (Sat, Sept 15, 2007)
#7 - "Death House: dee Class of '93" (Mon, Sept 10, 2007)
#6 - "MC Shanger's 'Rushes Trilogy'" (Sat, Sept 29, 2007)
#5 - "Dario Argento's Goblin Trilogy" (Sat, Aug 25, 2007)
#4 - "a 20-hr Mario Bava mini-me Movie Marathon" (Fri&Sat, Aug 17&18, 2007)
#3 - "Remember Our Fallen Filmmakers Night!!!" (Sat, Nov 11, 2006)
#2 - "2 Banned Hell-o-ween Films" (Tues, Oct 31, 2006)
#1 - "12-hr 'Friday dee 13th' Movie Marathon" (Fri dee 13th of Oct, 2006)
Future events (date & details TBA soon):
"Frederick Wiseman: Master Documenteur"
"Ed's Night Out!!!"
"Remember Our fallen Filmmakers Night II" (Sun, Nov 11/007)
"Audience Randamonium #2"
"Icelandic Cinema"
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Shang-O-Rama.com came on-line & was beamed-out from Toronto at precisely: 10:10am (10/11/06)
Can't wait for dee next Halloween - ACO & The Droogs gang rules that night!!! Viddy well Droogies...
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