by Ricardo Acevedo

A defining moment, a work of art so strong that it breaks you out of personal perceptions or gives definition to your demons, such was Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre for me.

Initially I should probably provide some background on how and why this work of visceral surrealist self-consumption so explosively slapped my synapse.

In 1990 while attending the San Francisco Art Instutue, Frisco Magazine put out a call for interns. I applied and was accepted. Of course, I was relegated to the most menial of office tasks, but at the same time, felt as though I had my thumb on the pulse of pop culture. Then in the fall of that year, it fell to me, via a sick writer and everyone else tied-up in mid-assignment, to interview Alejandro Jodorowsky -- "Just ask him these questions we typed out for you, and don't screw it up" -- I was scared witless.

That very spring at the institute, in film/video art class we had just watched Jodorowsky's El Topo, one of the most reviled and exalted films of the early '70s, called by various reviewers "a stilted, mysoginstic gore fest" to "a surreal psycho-western, a Zen affirmation" the truth lying somewhere vacillatingly in between. So when the job of interviewing this cat fell to me, well...to say the least, I was nervous.

I read all the press lit, "Hmmm...wow, this (Santa Sangre) damn thing won the Grand Prize at the Festival de Paris du Film Fantastique and the Palm de Or at Cannes" while lemmingly lined up for the screening, the synopsis read: " Fenix is a young man who was raised in a world of conflicting values...from the sexual debauchery of his father to religious fanaticism of his mother. His childhood is spent at the Circo Gringo, his father's circus. The young boy's father, Orgo, is a vain, brutal man...prone to drunken bouts of violence & cheating on his wife. Fenix's mother, Concha, is a woman driven by an overpowering obsession for her self-anointed "image saint" Santa Sangre; a young woman who was brutally raped by two men who then cut off both her arms & left her to die.

When Concha catches her husband in the arms of the sensual "tattooed lady," she succumbs to her jealous rage and splashes acid on his groin. Orgo, enraged and beyond reasoning, grabs a large knife and cuts off both of Concha's arms. Then, in blind desperation, he slits his own throat. (Hmmm...good family film.)

Traumatized by the horror he witnessed, the 8-year-old Fenix is committed to a mental asylum, where he sleeps in a dog's bed and refuses to eat anything other then raw fish for the next 12 years. At 20 he escapes to his mother arms.

They perform a bizarre yet original nightclub act in which Fenix becomes his mothers arms. This symbiotic relationship permeates Fenix's soul to the extreme; he is trapped in her dark world of demands, and twisted imagination...a world that leads to indescribable pain, madness and murder.

Fenix's salvation reappears in the form of Alma, a young deaf mute who befriended him in childhood. She is determined to rescue him from the stranglehold of his mother...and the torment of his soul."

Gulp...OK. I settled into my seat, in the pitch of the auditorium and subsequently had my psyche dismantled rearranged and ravaged for two hours. I left a changed being. Yes, a great deal of the story line hauntingly mirrored my own upbringing, but I'll leave that to the memoirs. This film was so heavy with modern Jung paradigms, masterful each-shot-a-painting cinematography and grand moral deconstruction that I was left void of my own thoughts. Left to swirl about, I sat still amid the exiting professional journalists 'till I heard, "Are you Ricardo with Frisco?" I managed a nod. "Mr. Jodorowsky will see you now."

What follows are excerpts from that interview.

R: Uh, so do you think humans find redemption?

AJ: I think so. I am completely convinced because I found my own redemption. I was also a killer, a psychological killer, a misogynynist, destroying woman. I was not able to love.

R: And was this film part of the process of finding redemption?

AJ: Yes, on a lot of levels. Also in the relationship with my sons, all of whom appear in the movie, my family -- the whole process, even that of returning to movies. This picture is like a subtle psychoanalysis.

R: Is that why it took so long to write -- six years?

AJ: I was putting a lot of myself into it, I was trying to find a very strong structure because I believe in structure; in order to improvise when I'm shooting, I need a perfect structure.

R: There are a lot of deformed people in your films.

AJ: I love them, I love them all. They're beautiful. To me, normal people are monstrous, because they are so similar. For me difference is what is art, what is life. I don't like some, find it distressing. I don't call it deformity, it's natural imagination. Nature has a big imagination. Maybe to some people they're monsters, but not to me. I find beauty only in "monstrosity." I can't be realistic. Even when I walk down the street, I find monsters. Everywhere I have an exacerbated sensibility toward monstrosity. Whenever I see it, I'm happy. Human flesh is strange.

R: Where did you get the idea of the symbiotic relationship -- the mother with her son's arms?

AJ: From my life with my mother. All my life I felt like that. She lived her life through me. She was a castrate woman by my father and she wanted to live her life through me.

R: Was it difficult to conceal Blanca Guerra's arms in the scenes where Axel is substituting his for her "missing" ones?

AJ: Yes, very difficult. Every shot needs different angles, different positions to disguise them. But it works. Blanca and Axel were a good couple, because she held the sex of my son in her hands all the time. That's why they're doing so well. I approved the technique, it's not so moral, but it's like that! The incest thing worked well like that!

R: Do you enjoy the struggle involved in making such personal cinema?

AJ: Yes, it's always a fight, always pain. But what I really want now is to be my own producer. I can't stand having someone looking over my shoulder with opinions. Like the Americans say, "Everyone has an opinon!" Then they need to follow you, they want approximations of your images, you have to explain everything, they're trembling, trembling...then, they cut your picture! You have to make it for television, for children!

R: Um, what does it feel like to be a legend?

AJ (genuinely suprised): Tell me! I am a legend? I am a human being, but they make interviews, they bring me books...if I am a legend, I'll have to write my autobiography. I will give you a Zen answer: if I am a legend, why don't you take a tea with me?

R: Huh?

AJ (slowly): If I am a legend, then why don't you take a tea with me?

R: Uh, yeah...