Santa Sangre · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A naked man crouches at the top of a painted tree inside his cell, knees drawn up, a fixed bird where a son used to be. Fenix has stopped being a man because being a man — his man's arms, his man's appetites — became unbearable. Start there, because the whole of Santa Sangre is the story of how those arms get taken, lent, possessed, and finally reclaimed, and because Jodorowsky has hidden a precise idea about cinema inside one of its most lurid images.

Deleuze had a name for films that run on raw drive rather than on reasoned action: the impulse-image. It sits between feeling and doing. Where the action-image gives you a hero who sizes up a situation and acts to change it, the impulse-image gives you a body in the grip of an appetite it cannot govern — hunger, lust, cruelty, compulsion — sliding down a slope toward exhaustion and death. Santa Sangre is almost a textbook of it. Orgo the knife-thrower swaggers through the circus on pure machismo, brands his son, beds the Tattooed Woman, and the engine of the tragedy is set turning by nothing but drive against drive. The acid, the amputation, the suicide, and then the chain of murders Fenix commits at his mother's command — none of these are decisions. They are symptoms. The film stages act after act as the discharge of a force underneath the person.

Deleuze called the territory of this kind of cinema naturalism, and gave it a topography: a recognizable place (the derived milieu) that turns out to be the thin crust over a savage originary world of pure impulse. Jodorowsky inherits this directly — the dossier names Los Olvidados among his ancestors, and that is exactly right, because Buñuel is the master of letting the originary world erupt through the Mexico City pavement. Here the circus, the church built around its pool of holy blood, the slum where Fenix wanders after the asylum — these are the derived milieu. Beneath them runs the originary world, a place of devouring will and severed limbs, and everything onscreen is its surface. Watch how the camera shoots a murder with the same lush devotional attention it gives the congregation at worship: sacred and profane collapse because, at the level of drive, they are the same heat.

What keeps this from being mere shock is the line of slope — Deleuze's term for the irreversible downward gradient an impulse-world rides. Santa Sangre never climbs. From the elephant's funeral, its vast coffin tipped into a ravine and torn apart by the poor, the film descends: degradation, mutilation, repetition-compulsion, the body wearing itself toward death. The giallo Claudio Argento helped finance supplies the murders; Jodorowsky supplies the gravity that pulls them all one way.

Now the arms. When Concha stands behind her armless body and Fenix's arms slide into her sleeves so that the two of them move as one deranged organism, Jodorowsky has invented something Deleuze would call a gest — a posture that lays bare a hidden relation. This is the cinema of the body at its purest: not a feeling explained in dialogue but a relation made into physical theater. Maternal possession stops being a metaphor and becomes choreography. And in those scenes Fenix goes strangely still while the will moves through him — what Deleuze named the movement of the world, the dancer absorbed into the dance. Fenix doesn't act; he is acted. His arms do, and they are not his.

There is also the matter of who the mother is. The film's deepest debt, the dossier tells us, is to Psycho — the dominating mother revealed as a delusion, the killings the son's own. For long stretches Fenix cannot tell the living woman from the voice and image he carries inside him, and neither can we; present and hallucination fuse into a single indiscernible thing. Deleuze called such an image a crystal, where the real and its phantom double can no longer be pried apart. Jodorowsky dresses Hitchcock's skeleton in surreal flesh, but the bone is this undecidability, and the redemptive ending is its shattering: Alma's love lets Fenix see that the mother is not real, and he raises his arms — in surrender, and in repossession of his own body — reclaiming them at last.

Watch, too, the faces: the kohl-lined clowns, the painted performers, immobile masks each holding a single quality. These are affection-images, close-ups offering a feeling that never discharges into action — the still pole around which all that impulse churns.

So what did Jodorowsky do? He took the oldest engines in the medium — Oedipal melodrama, the Psycho twist, the Fellini procession (the elephant funeral descends straight from La Dolce Vita), the dignified community of Freaks, the dream-cut of Un Chien Andalou — and wired them all to pure drive, giving the disreputable giallo a genuinely sacred dimension. He proved you could build operatic, transgressive art-horror that was also, beneath the blood, narratively legible and emotionally true. Next time, watch the arms. Watch when they are his, when they are hers, and the exact moment a man stops being possessed and starts to move himself.