Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Endless Poetry
2016 · Alejandro Jodorowsky · Endless Poetry on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the black-clad stagehands moving furniture during scenes. (staging)
Borrowed from Japanese bunraku puppet theater, these visible operators carry props and set pieces in full view while the actors ignore them completely.
Payoff: Jodorowsky refuses to hide that this is a constructed memory, not a filmed record of one.
Listen for the mother singing every line in full opera. (sound)
Sara delivers her entire dialogue in operatic soprano, turning ordinary domestic exchanges into arias rather than conversation.
Payoff: You cannot talk back to an aria, which tells you something about what it was like to be her son.
Notice how far the colors push past ordinary realism. (camera)
Christopher Doyle's restless, saturated camera pushes hues toward the vivid and the emotionally symbolic, especially whenever dancers and revelers fill the frame.
Payoff: The color is telling you how a moment felt, not just what it looked like. In the reading: affective colour. The reading calls color used to carry feeling rather than realism the colour-image.
Watch for the elderly Jodorowsky walking into his own memories. (staging)
The director, now in his eighties, appears inside scenes of his own youth to console, argue with, and simply stand beside the boy playing his younger self.
Payoff: Two versions of the same man share the frame, and neither one is clearly the real one. In the reading: the crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls a present and its own past sharing one shot, each reflecting the other, a crystal-image.
Once you have seen it
Notice which family member plays which family member. (performance)
Adan Jodorowsky, the director's real son, plays the young Alejandro, while another son, Brontis, plays the authoritarian father Jaime, his own grandfather.
Payoff: The casting turns the film into a real family re-staging its own wound, not actors playing strangers. In the reading: fabulation (legending). The reading calls a family caught legending its own story into something survivable fabulation.
Look at how frontal and symmetrical the crowd scenes stay. (staging)
Costumes and choreography are organized into frieze-like tableaux before Doyle's camera moves in among the dancers, so stillness and swirling motion keep trading places.
Payoff: The rhythm between held poses and sudden movement is the film's own heartbeat.
Notice how the film never shows a present-day frame around the story. (setting)
There is no old man in a chair remembering, from which the film departs and returns. Past and present sit side by side, and the film just walks into one or the other.
Payoff: The past is not behind the film. It is a room the film can enter whenever it wants.
Carry this in: Watch the stagehands. Jodorowsky builds his own youth in front of you instead of pretending to record it.