Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Endless Poetry
2016 · Alejandro Jodorowsky · Endless Poetry on Sightlines
Black-clad figures walk into the shot, pick up the furniture, and carry it off. Nobody in the scene turns to look at them. The convention comes from bunraku, the Japanese puppet theater where the operators stand in full view and the audience agrees to watch the puppet instead. Behind the actors, the street of 1940s Santiago is a blown-up period photograph, propped there like a flat in a school play. Ten minutes in, the terms are clear. Jodorowsky is not going to pretend this is a record of his youth. He is going to build his youth in front of you and ask you to take the building as the true part.
Then the other device arrives, and it is stranger. An old man walks into the scene. He is the director, in his mid-eighties, standing in a room he remembers with the young actor playing him. He consoles the boy. He argues with him. Sometimes he just stands there while the boy fails to notice.
Deleuze has a name for what that shot does, and it is not a figure of speech. He calls it the crystal-image. His claim, taken from Bergson, is that every moment splits as it passes: half goes forward as the present, half is filed as past immediately, not later. We don't normally see the second half. Cinema's standard solution, the flashback, is the past made obedient — dated, cued by a dissolve, retrieved on demand. Deleuze called that a recollection-image and thought it the thinnest thing film does with time. The crystal is the other option. The present and its own past-image share one shot, each reflecting the other, with no way to say which is the original. A mirror and the thing in the mirror, minus the information about which is which.
This film's crystal isn't made of glass. It's made of two bodies, and the reflection runs backwards. The old man is the one with a pulse, standing right there; the boy is the ghost, sixty years gone, reconstructed by an actor. Why reach for the vocabulary at all? Because without it the device looks like a charming stunt, an old man's indulgence, and you can wave it off. With it, you can see why the film has no other available form. Jodorowsky's subject is not what happened in Santiago. It's the relation between the person it happened to and the person now holding it. You cannot shoot that relation with a voice-over — voice-over puts the old man safely outside, commenting. He refused the safe version. He walked into the frame. That is his specific invention here, and everything else in the film is arranged to make it survivable.
Deleuze had a term for how such images get started: the seed, the small theatrical entrance around which the crystal forms — somebody steps on, and the scene turns into a show about itself. Fellini is his main witness, and Fellini runs in this film's blood. 8½ founded the shape in which a director's life, fantasies, and creative panic parade past as one self-reflexive procession. Amarcord supplied the carnival version, memory as episodic tableau crowded with grotesques. Endless Poetry moves that furniture to Santiago bohemia and makes the entrance literal.
Notice also what the film doesn't have: a present day. No old man in a chair, remembering, from which we depart and to which we return. The past here isn't behind anything. Deleuze called these sheets of past — regions of time that coexist rather than queue up, so that you leap into one the way you walk into a room. Jodorowsky literalizes the leap. This is why the loose chronology never feels like sloppiness. Sequence isn't the organizing principle. Which sheet you're standing on is.
There's a real cost to this, and the film pays it deliberately. Film's oldest claim on us, the one Bazin built a criticism from, is chemical: light from a real face touched the emulsion, so the image is a kind of death mask of a moment. Photographs don't lie, and films inherited the alibi. Jodorowsky gives it up. The backdrops are frank fakes, the stagehands are in the shot, the mother is an opera. And he shot it digitally — the guarantee was already gone, so he uses the new tools not for invisible realism but for saturation, handheld mobility, painted artifice. Deleuze's phrase for this whole move is the powers of the false: the artist who doesn't report a truth but manufactures one, and whose manufacturing is the truth-bearing act.
Which is precisely what Jodorowsky means by psychomagic. Re-stage the family wound as theater and the wound changes. Deleuze called the sibling operation fabulation — people caught in the act of legending themselves, telling the story that will make them possible. Usually he means a people who are missing; here it's a family of three. And the casting is the proof, not the gimmick. Adan Jodorowsky plays his own father as a young man and wrote the score. Brontis plays Jaime, the authoritarian father — which is to say, Brontis plays his own grandfather, reprising the role from The Dance of Reality. The cure is administered by the people who need it.
The mother sings. Every line Sara speaks, Pamela Flores delivers in operatic soprano, and it ought to be ridiculous. It isn't. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called this a gest: a posture that makes a social relation visible instead of stating it. You cannot converse with an aria. You can only be sung at — which tells you exactly what being this boy's mother consisted of. Then Flores turns up again as Stella Díaz, flame-haired, the poet who initiates him. One body, mother and lover, and the film never explains it, because explaining would break the crystal. Christopher Doyle's camera does the rest: the colors pushed past description into feeling, the frontal friezes suddenly dissolving as the camera goes in among the dancing bodies. Jodorowsky's own El Topo and The Holy Mountain set the ceremonial, procession-based staging and put the author inside his own frame; Santa Sangre started the family casting. Doyle's restlessness is what keeps it from hardening into ritual.
What it leaves behind is a working method more than a style: proof that the aging artist's memoir, the most self-serving genre there is, can be saved by putting the reconciliation in the image instead of the script. Most memoir films inform you that the director forgave his father. This one stages the forgiveness as a meeting between two bodies who have no other way to meet. Watch it again for the stagehands. They never look at the actors either, and they are carrying the past in and out of the room all night. The question the film leaves open is the one it can't settle from inside: when the old man consoles the boy, does the boy receive anything at all — or is the whole apparatus built so that the old man can finally be the one consoled?
Concepts in play
- the crystal-image (hyalosign) — The eighty-something Jodorowsky appears inside scenes of his own youth to console, instruct, and argue with the young Alejandro — the present body and its past-image sharing one frame with no hierarchy between them; doubled again by Pamela Flores playing both the mother Sara and the lover Stella Díaz.
- the crystal-seed (formation) — The aged director's recurring theatrical 'entrance' into the action, plus the visible black-clad bunraku stagehands moving props in frame — each intrusion turns the scene into a show about itself, the seed around which the film's crystal forms (a device the dossier traces to The Holy Mountain and to Fellini's 8½).
- sheets of past (order of time) — There is no present-day framing story to flash back from; the film is loosely chronological but organized by symbolic episode, and the old man enters the past as a coexisting region rather than retrieving a dated memory — the opposite of the recollection-image.
- the powers of the false — Period Santiago evoked with enlarged photographic backdrops instead of location realism, stagehands visible in frame, and digital capture used for frank artifice rather than realism — the film renounces the photographic guarantee and makes fabrication its truth-claim.
- fabulation (legending) — Autobiography as psychomagic and psychogenealogy — re-staging the family past as a curative act, with Adan Jodorowsky playing his own father as a young man and Brontis playing the authoritarian grandfather Jaime, so the subjects legend themselves in the act of performing.
- the gest — Sara delivers all her dialogue in operatic soprano (Pamela Flores), turning domestic exchange into aria — a posture that exposes the maternal relation as something that cannot be answered, only submitted to.
- affective colour — Christopher Doyle's high-saturation handheld cinematography pushes colour toward the 'vivid and emotionally symbolic,' with Stella Díaz's flame hair as the film's charged red — colour carrying the scene's feeling rather than describing its space.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Frontal, symmetrical, frieze-like crowd compositions and carnival processions, with Doyle's camera moving among the bodies of dancers and revelers — ceremonial bodies carrying the film's duration in place of plot.