"I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't take drugs, but I make movies like I do drugs."
"The great philosophers in industrial art all hit people in the head with movies or revolvers."
Who is the person who can say this in the interview?
I don't want to define a man who calls himself a mystic atheist in the same way as a label.
This person's films often fly a free bird or butterfly, showing death or showing the liberation from the confinement of life
Let's start with Hollywood's infamous "Dune" project (based on Frank Herbert's science fiction blockbuster Dunes).
It's a film that was "implemented" by David Lynch but refused to be directed, a project that was "rebooted" by Dennis Villeneuve but still worrying.
And the reason why this project is "infamous" is mainly because he —
Dune is his eternal pain
That's right, he's Zodlowsky. His regret and resentment toward Dune have made this film that should have been adapted into a Star Wars series long gone.
The storyboard drawing made by Zodlowski for "Dune" is so thick that it is comparable to "Ci Hai"
Anyone who has seen the documentary "Jodulovsky's Dunes" knows that as early as 1974, Zodu, known as the originator of cult films, was full of grotesque ideas and ambitiously gathered a group of "warriors" around the world to start the planning of shooting "Dunes".
Who really wants to, but the unruly Zodu and his warriors have eaten the closed door of Hollywood's scrooge bosses.
After several rejections, something even more bizarre happened.
The bosses of Dune, who rejected Zodu, hired Zodu's "warriors" and developed a series of prophetic science fiction films that spied on the market. Including George Lucas's cross-era film series Star Wars.
Dune had a huge impact on Star Wars, and Star Wars' proud sword fight scene borrows heavily from Dune
This work, which is likely to change the pattern of film history, was dusted by time in an unfinished form, and it also became a difficult knot in the hearts of every "warrior" involved in the planning at that time.
Just when everyone thought that Zodu was devastated by the difficult birth of "Dune", the documentary about "Dune" nearly forty years later showed a vigorous, childlike old man.
Zodoo, who enjoys the joy of the world, is not as worried about the difficulties of "Dune" as people have speculated.
Instead, he sees "that failure" as nothing more than an urge to continue his dream in a different way.
In fact, after "Dune", the science fiction comic "The Incal" has been realized in a sense to belong to Zodu's "Dune".
Nzulovsky and the painter Mobis collaborated on Inkar, which combines all possible elements of politics, religion, spirituality, eroticism, violence, philosophy, and Mobis is also one of the "warriors" in the Zodu Dunes
Zodu was clearly relieved of the dunes when he spoke of Inkar
Unfortunately, Zodu's relief was used by some people as a pretext for the old man's chat to comfort. Some people even began to jokingly refer to this "mage" who pioneered the spiritual healing system as the "cult leader."
However, please do not lose sight of one's inner strength.
What these people don't know is that in his lonely childhood with books, Zodu fatally tore off a "power card" in Tarot's book as a talisman. He had expected to have the ability of the goddess in the card painting to control the lion's bestiality.
He hopes to use his imagination to construct a beautiful and infinite inner universe, as if this is the only way to heal the trauma and loneliness of his childhood.
The tarot card, which represents the power, is the talisman of the little Zodu
In Stanislavski's system of performance, imagination plays a vital role.
In Jodu's inner theater, his father is the playwright and his mother is the actor. The "fusion" of actors and playwrights gave birth to a vivid "new role" - Zodu. Zado's autobiographical film Dance of Reality is thus pervasive with his depictions of imaginary worlds.
In Dance of Reality, Jodulovsky embraces and comforts his childhood self
Poetic film is a form of film that originates from the creator's understanding of lyric poetry. This somewhat obscure concept has undergone several changes.
Originally, "poetic films" could be seen in the French avant-garde of the 1820s. They are also known as "screen poets". At the same time, the works of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Du Furenko and others in the Soviet Union also had the characteristics of prose poetry to varying degrees.
But the person who really made poetic cinema stand out in its own right was Tarkovsky in the '50s.
Tarkovsky and Sadorovsky. These two "sky" not only have a secret connection in the style of their works, but even have a real family relationship.
Zodu was actually a fellow of Tarkovsky.com. His parents immigrated to Chile during the Tsarist Russia period. As a child, Zodu was ridiculed and isolated for his Russian-style eagle groove nose, which was different from that of the locals, and his genitals after circumcision.
Zodu who "changed his head for love" in "The Separated Head"
If the early Zodu was a representative of surrealism, then compared with The Vando and Liz, which has no narrative to speak of, Zodu's subsequent "Blasphemy Trilogy" ("The Mole", "Holy Mountain", "Holy Blood") that is regarded as a cult classic gradually began to make a clear narrative.
After 23 years, the autobiographical series of films made by the elderly Jodu not only clearly tells the story, but also puts away his bold and choking deviance in his early years.
In its place is the charm of poetry that can only be fermented by the experience of time.
The Mole, the Holy Mountain, and the Holy Blood are three of Zodrowski's most famous works
This "poetic rhyme" is clearly not the personal flow of time that Tarkovsky emphasizes in his poetic films. Zodu uses images that are very different from Tarkovsky's films to convey his personal feelings about movement and the passage of time in the lens.
Perhaps this brings Zodrowsky's poems closer to a philosophy.
In his two autobiographical films, you can often see the silver-haired old Zodu himself appearing on camera, intervening in the absurdity of the plot.
He often tells the confused Little Jodo what to do as a prophet (Jeremias Herskovits, who plays the young Zodu's Adan Jodorowsky), or as a director, directly "educates" the father in the play (Brontis Jodorowsky, who plays the father, is actually Zodo's son), or as a narrator, or directly occupies the camera, lamenting the comparison between the past and the present. Even as a staff member, handing the people in the play a prop...
Zodu haunts his memories and guides his childhood self like a mage
The sudden appearance of the future self in the movie, or the mysterious playmate, is actually derived from Zodu's real childhood experience.
Zodu's father's family has a history of schizophrenia, and Zodu's grandfather committed suicide because of this. His father fantasized for years about a maid named Rebbe accompanying Zodu.
And the equally crazy Jodu not only has his father's fantasies as a companion, but also often communicates with his future self. Rebbe and the future Zodu became Zodu's prophets, exhorting Zodu, who was often in pain, to "thank you for every experience, for they shape every future you."
In his childhood, Zodu walked through the group portraits of the characters in his memories and completed a growth
You could also say that Zodu is detaching himself from the pain of reality with the illusion of self-deception, but Nietzsche says that this is the state of genius's knowledge of the eternal nature of art.
He is like the magic painting in the fairy story, able to magically roll his eyes and contemplate himself. At this time, it is both a subject and an object; both a poet and an actor who is creating, and an audience that gazes at it.
Zodu shows a strong sense of himself in his memories, and his presence is more real in his memories
As presented in the film, Jodo corresponds to the state described by Nietzsche.
He sees himself in different situations in a state of withdrawal, as if he were both an empathetic subject and an object of compassion and relief.
This is also reflected in the "Dance of Reality" and "The Poetry Without End" picture - the Zodu, who may appear at any time, is both the singing self of the film, the actor who plays the self, and the bystander who is outside the matter.
To see is to believe? No, all you see is the dance of reality
At the beginning of the movie "Dance of Reality", Zodu appears in the rain of gold coins and recites a rhetorical poem about money:
"Money inspires those who use it to open the flowers of the world,
Curse those who confuse their souls with those who worship the rich. ”
This seems to imply Zodu's response to Hollywood.
This was not only because of the stranding of the Dune project, but also because of his feud with Allen Klein.
The latter is a famous agent who has won the Beatles and holds the rights to "Mole" and "Holy Mountain".
Klein had asked Zodu to make a midnight movie of SM's subject, and the two fell out, and Klein, who held the copyright, also sealed Zodu's film for 30 years.
Feel Zodu's anger
Not only that, but Zodu also used the movie to complain about his father Jamie.
Jamie was a physically fit acrobat. Probably because of his good health, Zodu was in particular pain every time he was beaten. In the film, the scene where Zodu and his son appear also begins in the circus.
In this scene, Jamie is ridiculed by her former peers, the confident Jamie thinks she can fully control the high ropes, and her peers are deeply skeptical. They also said, "Let's see what we see is believe, the dance of reality."
The film's early point here is simply impatient to reveal the relationship between "seeing is believing" and "dance of reality":
What you see is not necessarily what you call reality, but only the reality you can't see and the figure dancing when you frolic.
Film is often referred to as the art of "seeing is believing". But in fact, the images we see are often confused with "real".
In his films, Zodu has tried more than once to break this visual cult of "seeing is believing".
In the final scene of The Holy Mountain, Jodo asks directly into the camera, "Is this real life?" No, it's just movies."
Then, with a wave of his hand, he told the cameraman, "The camera is pulled back." Along with this command, the camera really slowly recedes, revealing the entire crew's shot.
The audience seemed to wake up as if from a dream. We know that movies are not reality, but when we watch them, we often forget that images are just imagination.
Zodu said, "We are images, dreams and photographs." This tortures visual reality. In Abbas's films, there is a self-deconstruction similar to this.
In your life, who are the photographers and who are the manipulators?
Zodu's actions at the end of "The Holy Mountain" shatter all the preparations for the previous plot, and the audience who is busy deciphering the meaning of the story may feel empowered at this time
It is not difficult to find that the image of the father Jamie in "Dance of Reality" occupies the main space. Always singing in the mother Sara in real life, it does sound like music. She succumbed to the helpless fate and authority of Jamie, who, like his idol Stalin, strongly spurned Zodu's fragility and softness, and often physically punished him for it.
- Zodu's father and mother -
However, Jamie's physical defects were discovered, and his majestic image collapsed.
The film uses Jamie's series of surreal experiences to save the poor as a metaphor for the disintegration of the father figure in real life. These unreal images have a strong psychological healing color.
Jamie initially believed in Stalin and hated Ibanez, and then "shot" Stalin, Ibanez, and his own portraits—in the subversion of the image, the meaning of authority was destroyed.
Poetry and art are not only language, but also lifestyles.
In "Dance of Reality", Zodu Jr. originally had a long curly blond hair, which Jamie angrily rebuked and forcibly cut Zodu's long hair.
Little Zodu wept bitterly about this, but not because he loved beauty, but because he found that his mother Sara loved this long curly hair more than himself, so cutting his hair meant the loss of his mother's love.
Sara's father, who died prematurely, also had such long curly blonde hair, so she considered Little Zodu the reincarnation of her father. It is said that this grandfather is also a crazy character.
As a dancer, he climbed into the oil barrel to light the lamp after getting drunk, only to be burned alive by the oil barrel that suddenly burst.
What is even more bizarre is that before he died, instead of screaming hysterically, he was still chanting verses. Maybe that's where Zodu's poetic genes come from.
A childhood Zodu with long curly hair, like a delicate little girl
Compared with "Dance of Reality", "Poetry Without End" presents Zodu's pursuit of poet identity in an extremely absurd way. Zodu, who has been under the pressure of his father for many years, secretly writes poems every day and then burns them to chat for comfort.
Perhaps this is the poet's innocent groan, but Zodu's questioning of language with the poet's confidant Lihn in the film is an intellectual reflection that removes the halo of romanticism.
In the dialogue, Zodoo and Lihn unanimously criticize the distortions that language causes in everyday life to real ideas. According to Heidegger, the purest form of the "saying" of language is not the darling of the traditional view of language, the "statement", but the most conformative "poem".
Since there is a gap between the traditional language norms and the so-called truth, the ambiguous and chaotic poetic language comes into being and becomes an art close to the real.
In Endless Poetry, Zodu and the poet Lihn decide on a whim to just go in a straight line
In addition, Zodu and Lihn believe that poetry has not only poetic language, but also poetic behavior. They "carried out" such poetic acts in a game of straight roads and no turns. At the end of the film, Zodu's dedicated pantomime performance is also clearly practicing poetry.
After studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, Zodu developed the Surrealism that followed Breton' s surrealist Movement.
With this in mind, he made films, held psychotherapeutic meetings, collected cases like Freud, wrote a series of research monographs, and pioneered his own system of psychotherapy.
It can be said that he has always been the executor of poetic acts.
To this day, he is actively raising funds to try to make the Paris final chapter of his autobiographical trilogy.
Zodu and Lihn act in a puppet show together
Whether in early cult films or in recent autobiographical films, Zodë often tells us through the mouth of others or directly that he knows nothingness about the essence of life.
Nietzsche said that this understanding tends to lead people to two extremes.
One is abstinence and world-weariness. In this case, people exhibit psychological characteristics similar to those of Indian Buddhists. This is also the tendency revealed by Zodu in the early days.
The other is extreme secularization.
Such people are prone to impulsiveness in political affairs and to indulge in functional pleasures. The Romans of the Imperial period exhibited this characteristic. This is also a true portrayal of the environment in which Zodu grew up. At that time, Chile, which was rich in natural resources and protected from the devastation of World War II, attracted gold diggers from all over the world. At night, people drink and laugh in the Chilean city, and become the prototype of the grotesque characters in Zodu's films.
And Zodu? He walked out of his early obsession with religion and hovered "between India and Rome."
Zodu, like ordinary people, was torn apart by the two and had to make a choice, and like the ancient Greeks, he invented the "third way" in "a classical purity"—art.
That is, Zodu's overcoming of nothingness. Life is meaningless, but he still has to live, to live, because this is poetry, it is art, it is his choice of life.