Alejandro Jodorowsky Is Crying Out To You With Endless Poetry

An angel and devil in one, Alejandro Jodorowsky offers advice and encouragement throughout his own movie, Endless Poetry, materializing behind his younger self, Alejandro, played by his real-world son, Adan Jodorowsky. Alejandro butts heads with his father, Jaime, played by Jodorowsky’s older son, Brontis Jodorowsky. Jaime doesn’t want Alejandro to become a poet, but Alejandro leaves home to do just that.

In real life the two struggled to find peace. But though Endless Poetry is loosely based on Jodorowsky’s experience living in Santiago during his twenties — creating with a community of avant-garde dancers, musicians and painters before leaving for France to join the Surrealists — this is art, where a human life can be brought to its full bloom, events can be rewritten and love can be enthroned at the world’s center once more. So Jodorowsky rewrites the past and gifts himself and Jaime the purgation they never found in life, inventing a final farewell to his father and staging it with his two sons, the younger cradling the older in his arms like a child. To reach this moment, Endless Poetry creates a sacred space where art is lauded in itself and human interactions are elevated to a place of holiness.

Rarely is a filmmaker more perfectly matched to a subject. For not only is Endless Poetry autobiographical (sequel to 2013’s The Dance of Reality and the second in a proposed five-movie series), but it’s about an artist creating himself. And few filmmakers are as self-consciously artists as Jodorowsky, who, since the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, has been almost as well-known for his irrepressible enthusiasms as movies like El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre.

Being an artist means the ongoing construction of experiences, as the artist uses the material of his or her life to amplify and share beauty, picking it out even from life’s worst moments, like Alejandro picking through the rubble of his burnt-down family home to celebrate his mother’s liberation from domesticity. In Endless Poetry, Jodorowsky’s artistic impulses find a perfect marriage in the story’s form — his surrealism and symbolism find their emotional counterpoint in Alejandro’s artistic maturation. Obtrusive stagehands, cardboard cut-out sets, masked hordes, parents frozen in time and gathering dust… Endless Poetry’s freewheeling inventiveness enfolds us in a world defined by art and its artists. Jodorowsky’s essential weirdness hasn’t dimmed, but instead attaches itself to otherwise mundane or expected movie story beats, like the myth-making and metaphor he loads into his first love: the tattooed and hard-partying Stella (Pamela Flores), who whoops “beware the avenging vagina!” as she throws herself into bar brawls.

Endless Poetry overflows with the personality of the artist, unlike the near-silent voyagers of the psychomagical 70s quest films that first defined Jodorowsky’s cinematic language of revelation. Instead of a symbolic search, Alejandro’s enlightenment comes through grand flourishes, self-conscious artiness, partying and poetic provocation that imposes the new upon the old and ossified, like throwing raw meat and eggs on the comfortable poets basking in the plaudits and rewards of elite culture. Adan is a better actor than his father ever was, embodying Jodorowsky’s energy and eccentricities without losing the self-concern typical of blowhards and great artists alike, recreating the same tangle of torment and cockiness that give rise to fascinating film documentaries like Hearts of Darkness (Francis Coppola and Apocalypse Now) and Burden of Dreams (Werner Herzog and Fitzcarraldo).

Unlike those movies (and almost in defiance of the solitary genius narrative through which he’s increasingly scrutinized), Endless Poetry is just as much about the community of art and its slow, painful efforts to remake the world in the image of our collective best selves. One smilingly simple scene is about Alejandro first discovering a best friend, as he teams up with Chilean poet Enrique Lihn (Leandro Taub) to “walk poetically,” advancing straight forward as if the city no longer exists, stopping only to politely ask clearance to continue on through windows and over beds. Alejandro teams up with an outrageous squad of “poly-painters,” “ultra-pianists” and “symbiotic dancers,” united under the roof of the painting and acting Cereceda sisters. Alejandro’s poetry both emerges from an inner wellspring and is nurtured by mentors, gurus and teachers, including real-life artists like playwright García Lorca and poet Nicanor Parra.

But try as they might to “turn this real city into an invisible city,” freeing humans of their workaday chains and opening hearts to the magic Alejandro relentlessly uncovers in human affairs, he and his friends find themselves powerless against Chile’s rising fascism. As celebratory as Endless Poetry is, climaxing with a parade of angels and demons, there’s a core of fear. Not necessarily of death — for Alejandro learns to embrace death — but that love won’t triumph in time. Perhaps that’s why Alejandro Jodorowsky seems to be in the midst of a renaissance (23 years passed between his previous film and The Dance of Reality). Endless Poetry feels like a master filmmaker holding nothing back, determined to see art win over the viciousness of our complacency, screaming at us, like he does at his fictional self, “Live! Live!”

Endless Poetry is out in theaters now.