ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY
(Film director. b. 1929)
"The apocalypse is now! Americans know this, that the only hope is the flying saucers. Do you know how I see the world? Like a person who is dying. It's a worm who is dying to make a butterfly. We must not stop the worm from dying, we must help the worm to die to help the butterfly to be born. We need to dance with death. This world is dying, but very well. We will make a big, big enormous butterfly. You and I will be the first movements in the wings of the butterfly because we are speaking like this." ~ ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky
"The revered underground film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky once stated, "I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs." Born in 1930 in Iquique, Chile, Jodorowsky had an enigmatic childhood before travelling to Paris in 1953 to study mime with Marcel Marceau. During the 1960s, Jodorowsky experimented with mimes and cartooning (his 'Fabulas Panicas Weekly' comic strip enjoyed a long run in Mexico), staging avant-garde performance art such as 'Sacramental Melodrama' (1964), a four hour play which combined religious themes and violence (later to become Jodorowsky themes). Together with French surrealists Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, he formed the 'Theater of Panic' (1962) which staged happenings and caused general mayhem.
In 1968, Jodorowsky made his directorial debut with the film 'Fando Y Lis', which reflected the psychological dislocation and socio-political upheaval enveloping Mexico.
However, it was 'El Topo' (1971) which catapulted Jodorowsky to cult status. Hailed by John Lennon as a masterpiece, 'El Topo' revealed Jodorowsky to be the cinematic heir to Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel. The dreamlike imagery of 'El Topo' also suggested Jodorowsky's proximity to avant-garde film-makers such as Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren (it can be best described as a 'psychedelic western'). Jodorowsky wrote the script and soundtrack, handled direction, and starred in 'El Topo', adding to his notoriety.
His followup 'The Holy Mountain' (1974) continued an uncompromising exploration of primal atavisms and deeply spiritual imagery, often transgressive. Hollywood beckoned."
Here's the origianl trailor for The Holy Mountain
Please fasten your seatbelts...
"And then the hyperbolic weirdness erupted. There are many conflicting stories about Jodorowsky's ill-fated attempts to bring Frank Herbert's novel 'Dune' (1965) to the screen, but the cast of collaborators was incredible. Pink Floyd offered to write the score at the peak of their creativity. Salvador Dali, Gloria Swanson, and Orson Welles were cast. Dan O'Bannon was hired to supervize special effects; illustrator Chris Foss to design spacecraft; H.R. Giger to design the world of Geidi Prime and the Harkonnens; artist Jean 'Moebius' Giraud drew thousands of sketches. The project eventually collapsed in 1977, subsequently being passed onto Ridley Scott, and then to David Lynch, whose film (1983) was panned by audience and critics alike. Could Jodorowsky - master of profound mythological themes - have outdone George Lucas?
Jodorowsky's next film 'TUSK' (1978) languished in obscurity, and he spent six years developing the scenario for what eventually became 'Santa Sangre' (1989), a fiercely personal exploration of family dynamics, murder, and obsession. Critically well-received, 'Santa Sangre' led to a resurgence of interest in Jodorowsky's ouvre.
'The Rainbow Thief' (1990) is probably the most commercial project that Jodorowsky has done, although he hated working with Peter O'Toole. 'Viaje a Tul™n' (1994) and 'Abelcaim' (1999) show a welcome return to form. Jodorowsky has also published many novels and comic books, and his Vision continues to influence many artists who today explore the psyche's inner cartography, most notably Marilyn Manson. Love or loathe him, Jodorowsky is truly Underground Cinema's enigmatic 'lost' auteur." - Hot Wired
Showing posts with label surrealism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label surrealism. Show all posts
Saturday, 25 August 2007
Wednesday, 15 August 2007
From the Guts of Bin Bags Pt. 2
Continuing my series on books found in five bin bags left in front of a relatively famous poet's flat in Glasgow is this little number:
GERHARD RUHM - ADELAIDES LOCKEN (Edition Hundertmark, 1979. A book with 48 pages, offset print, 14 illustrations and a epilog to a poem by Johann Heinrich Füssli, including an instruction by Dr. E.Ricke)
"Gerhard Rühm (born in Vienna, 1930) is a radical experimenter, a restless explorer of traditions and genres, atomizing their elements in order to recompose them with conceptual precision and a multiplicity of compositional techniques. He has worked with music and visual art, but basically the world is language for Rühm, the dictionary its body, and the alphabet its backbone.
He began by studying composition and Oriental music, but came to devote most of his energy to literature, esp. concrete poetry. Concrete poetry, as it has come to be called, involves an exploration of language where the "material" of the poem is privileged above all else. The "material" for the concrete poet involves the sonic quality via phonemes and syllables, as well as the visual and optic via letters. Through a direct exploitation of typography, white space, shapes, sound and the visual landscape of the page, concrete poets attempt to evoke sensations, concepts, and ideas, while also rejecting poetry of expression and subjectivity.
In the 1950’s Ruhm became one of the founding members of an avant-garde collective know as "The Vienna Group," a group of poets, musicians and artists who experimented with visual and phonetic forms. The work of Rühm, who has experimented with a variety of forms--constellations and ideograms, phonetic and counting poems, montage, photographic and other types of visual texts--is the most widely known. Rühm has been most concerned with maintaining an organic relationship between the visual and the conceptual as can be clearly seen in his graphic text "bleiben" ("to stay"). The act of writing the word by hand beside a fine white line on a solid black page conveys the message "stick with it" far more profoundly than any number of ordinary sermons on the subject of following your own little beam of light. In "und zerbrechen" ("and something breaks"), the breaking apart of the word after a series of monotonous "unds" creates an ideogram with psychological, sociological and formal implications. "I have avoided being purely illustrative in the graphic presentation of concepts," Rühm states. "Rather I try to establish a tension relationship between both dimensions (the graphic and the conceptual), so that one dimension does not simply support the other but completes it, or the optical form fixes a definite aspect of the concept." – compiled from Burning Deck, Electronic Poetry Review and Concrete Poetry – A World View.
LISTEN TO THE MAN!
Gerhard Ruhm - Hymne an Lesbierinnen (1956) MP3
Gerhard Ruhm - Blatter (1965-73) MP3
Gerhard Ruhm - The Bird of Paradise (1975) MP3
GERHARD RUHM - ADELAIDES LOCKEN (Edition Hundertmark, 1979. A book with 48 pages, offset print, 14 illustrations and a epilog to a poem by Johann Heinrich Füssli, including an instruction by Dr. E.Ricke)
"Gerhard Rühm (born in Vienna, 1930) is a radical experimenter, a restless explorer of traditions and genres, atomizing their elements in order to recompose them with conceptual precision and a multiplicity of compositional techniques. He has worked with music and visual art, but basically the world is language for Rühm, the dictionary its body, and the alphabet its backbone.
He began by studying composition and Oriental music, but came to devote most of his energy to literature, esp. concrete poetry. Concrete poetry, as it has come to be called, involves an exploration of language where the "material" of the poem is privileged above all else. The "material" for the concrete poet involves the sonic quality via phonemes and syllables, as well as the visual and optic via letters. Through a direct exploitation of typography, white space, shapes, sound and the visual landscape of the page, concrete poets attempt to evoke sensations, concepts, and ideas, while also rejecting poetry of expression and subjectivity.
In the 1950’s Ruhm became one of the founding members of an avant-garde collective know as "The Vienna Group," a group of poets, musicians and artists who experimented with visual and phonetic forms. The work of Rühm, who has experimented with a variety of forms--constellations and ideograms, phonetic and counting poems, montage, photographic and other types of visual texts--is the most widely known. Rühm has been most concerned with maintaining an organic relationship between the visual and the conceptual as can be clearly seen in his graphic text "bleiben" ("to stay"). The act of writing the word by hand beside a fine white line on a solid black page conveys the message "stick with it" far more profoundly than any number of ordinary sermons on the subject of following your own little beam of light. In "und zerbrechen" ("and something breaks"), the breaking apart of the word after a series of monotonous "unds" creates an ideogram with psychological, sociological and formal implications. "I have avoided being purely illustrative in the graphic presentation of concepts," Rühm states. "Rather I try to establish a tension relationship between both dimensions (the graphic and the conceptual), so that one dimension does not simply support the other but completes it, or the optical form fixes a definite aspect of the concept." – compiled from Burning Deck, Electronic Poetry Review and Concrete Poetry – A World View.
LISTEN TO THE MAN!
Gerhard Ruhm - Hymne an Lesbierinnen (1956) MP3
Gerhard Ruhm - Blatter (1965-73) MP3
Gerhard Ruhm - The Bird of Paradise (1975) MP3
These tracks are taken from the 1978 compilation LP Futura Poesia Sonora (Cramps Records, Milan) . The most comprehensive anthology focused on past and contemporary sound poetry currents ever produced! Other artists featured on the LP include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Kurt Schwitters, Antonin Artaud, Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, Isidore Isou and many more.
The following image is from the found book and is one of 14 illustrations by Ruhm.
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