News

Part infomercial, part surrealist performance art, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s newest documentary Psychomagic, a Healing Art is a messy exploration of the filmmaker’s own psycho-analytic technique, one which takes individual trauma and recontextualizes it within the space of performance art. Well, in truth, that’s kind of what Jodorowsky is pitching. Much like his previous filmography, Jodorowsky’s method, and the subsequent film based on this ideology, exists between the profound and the vapid, depending on one’s taste. Perhaps intended for the already converted, and the Jodorowsky completists (if such a sub-category exists), Psychomagic is a dense, ridiculous, sublime, problematic exploration of what Jodorowsky pitches as the antithesis of Freudian psychoanalysis.

The filmmaker, as he is wont to do, casts himself as a mythic shaman, explaining directly to the camera in the opening frames what “psychomagic” exactly is. Unlike Freudian analysis, psychomagic doesn’t use words to work through personal trauma.

Photo: Abkco Movie: El Topo Release Year: 1970 Studio: MGM Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky Starring: Alejandro Jodorowsky as El Topo, Brontis Jodorowsky as young son of El Topo, Mara Lorenzio as Mara, David Silva as The Colonel, Bertha Lomeli as Gypsy, Mother of Master #2, Juan Jose Gurrola as Master #2, Victor Fosado as Master #3, Agustin Isunza as Master #4, Jacqueline Luis as Small woman and Robert John as elder son of El Topo Cinematographer: Rafael Corkidi (The Holy Mountain) Photo: Abkco Photo: Abkco Photo: Abkco Photo: Abkco This is one of my favorite shots in the entire film.Photo: Abkco Photo: Abkco I'd never seen any of Jodorowsky's films before El Topo, but the clear influence his films have had on a number of filmmakers from Nicolas Winding Refn to David Lynch are visible, but one I hadn't heard many discuss was Tarsem Singh (The Fall). Singh's The Fall seems like it's almost a...