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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the stagehands. Jodorowsky builds his own youth in front of you instead of pretending to record it.