Santa Sangre

Alejandro Jodorowsky became famous for his psychedelic epics of the 70s. The Mexican western El Topo and the Beatles funded Holy Mountain have enjoyed something of a renaissance among today’s hipster students, and rightfully so. They belong firmly to a time when it was no rare thing for directors to have absolute creative control over their films, and they are so infused with acid-induced imagery it’s hard nowadays not to treat them with a whimsical nostalgia for a bygone era. Together they surely rank as two of the most subjectively accurate depictions of the 70s as it must have looked in the minds of the non-sober. Shamefully, I have not seen either of them in their entirety, but I don’t think my appreciation for Jodorowsky’s  1989 Santa Sangre suffers as a result.  

People tend to label Santa Sangre a ‘horror’ film. I don’t know why - it’s not particularly horrific. Chilling, maybe, but terrifying? No. It’s certainly surreal, grotesque, haunting, sexual, and violent but also  gentle, romantic, heart-warming, funny, and spectacular. Genres have always seemed to me a consumerist construct, and while they are appropriate for many films, Santa Sangre certainly isn’t one of them. When it came out in 1989 it must have seemed like a throwback to the golden age of auteurs amongst the tired re-hashes of hollywood formulae which the latter half of the 1980s was so drenched in.

It’s story follows the life of a man named Fenix played by Axel Jodorowsky (Alejandro’s son). In the beginning, we see him as a naked man in a mental asylum, and then we follow his childhood through flashback, where his younger self is played by Adan Jodorowsky (also Alejandro’s son). He is the son of two circus performers, and he himself is a child magician. He falls in love with a deaf-mute, before being separated from her when his father’s adulterous affair takes a turn for the worse. The second half of the film focuses on his adult life, and the trying relationship he endures with his mother (she has no arms, and has complete control over his, forcing him to murder numerous women).

With its focus on children’s relationships with their parents (it’s surely no coincidence that Jodorowsky cast two of his sons as the film’s protagonist) there is a lot of Freudian stuff going on here, matched by potent religious symbolism and psychosexual tension. The circus setting provides the occasion for Jodorowsky to flex his visual muscle, and he does so to a staggering degree. One sequence portrays the funeral of an elephant which is marched off in an industrial skip-sized coffin, only to be ‘buried’ in a landfill that borders a slum, and where the starving inhabitants madly rush to it for food. Furthermore, the carnivelseque presents an inverted world, where social norms cease to exist, and what stands in their place is performance, disguise, and manipulation. And those performances and disguises are so perversely captivating that you are sure to willingly submit yourself to Jodorowsky’s masterful manipulation of what seems appropriate in cinema.