Under the Skin: Abject Intimacy in Jodorowsky and Other Contemporary Latin American

Filmmakers

Alejandro Jodorowsky in his recent films Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry, made after a long
hiatus, declares an intention to heal. One may think that the filmmaker has come a long way
from the theater of cruelty and its call for an art that scares and confounds, which inspired him in
his younger years. But in many ways, the filmmaker did not change, and remains convinced that
to heal old wounds, true art must inflict its own vicarious wound on the viewers to open their
perception. He also remained faithful to the Surrealists who praised cinema’s ability to grasp
serendipitous, inexplicably strange bits, which they believed revealed a hidden reality. This is
why Jodorowsky’s films remain shockingly frank and emotionally violent voyeuristic spectacles.
His proselytizing drive to tell all his secrets, especially the abject ones, too intimate to be told, is
contagious. This exhibitionist frankness opens a visceral connection between the audience and
characters on the screen. The material, the bodily, and the real are the stuff of his films, which
makes them a powerful, even hallucinatory experience. Prostitutes and Fascists in his films are
real prostitutes and Nazis, scenes that look dangerous are really dangerous for the filmmaker and
the crew, sadness and drunkenness of the people on the screen are real, and so are the locations.
But the story he tells in his two recent autobiographical films reimagine completely what really
happened in his life. Jodorowsky’s tyrannical father becomes a caring father and a heroic
antagonist of a dictator, and his cold and repressed mother becomes a loving and amazing
presence. In this respect, the films are an act of psicomagia, Jodorowsky’s method of healing old
traumas by strange Surrealist acts, which he has been practicing in cafes and bookshops for
decades, for free, for anyone interested. If we set aside the extravagant name of psicomagia, we
will find that Jodorowsky shares with other Latin American filmmakers the aesthetic of utter
physical and emotional nakedness, which aims to erode the physical borders of the viewer and
the person on the screen. This cinematic philosophy calls us to respond to the real, unscripted
vulnerability of the people we see on the screen, and to ask ourselves when, where, and with
whom we may be acting as authors of abuse.

This article is structured as follows. First, I explain how Surrealism and Antonin Artaud’s theater
of cruelty shaped Jodorowsky’s cinematic vision. Second, I examine his vision and filmmaking
strategies in his recent autobiographical films, focusing on the objective of “wounding” and
“healing” the people in the audience. Third, I study Jodorowsky’s insistence that films have real
people, real emotions, and real danger. Finally, I show that Jodorowsky’s bare-all and tell-all
frankness is an artistic technique best explained by Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. We
witness something so intimate that we want to turn away but it pulls in us so powerfully that our
physical personal borders erode. I conclude by showing that abject emotional and physical
nakedness is the cinematic strategy of choice for many contemporary Latin American
filmmakers.

The Art of Cruelty and Jodorowsky’s Early Films

Alejandro Jodorowsky has always been a man of immense ambition and passionate dedication to
art. In his early twenties, he arrived in Paris from Chile at two in the morning, telephoned André
Breton and announced that he came to save surrealism. Breton told him to come in the morning,
but Jodorowsky refused, saying “Now or never!” so the meeting never took place (interview with
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Elbiri). Now, in his eighties, the filmmaker is just as passionate about saving the world. A
multifaceted artist, puppeteer, mime, actor, comic book artist, and writer, Jodorowsky directed
hundreds of plays and several cult films. At the beginning of his filmmaking career, Jodorowsky
found inspiration in the idea that art should shock the audience out of its usual tranquil
complacency. He was influenced by Antonin Artaud, a Surrealist and a self-professed madman,
who proposed the concept of theater of cruelty. This new kind of art, disturbing and shocking
was supposed to save humanity from the “boredom, inertia, and stupidity of everything” (83).
Theater of cruelty was supposed to be an antidote to “the ultimately unsatisfying quest for the
entertaining, the pleasurable, and the picturesque” (115), which Artaud despised, in art and in
life. Today’s frantic sharing of pictures of glammed-up meals, faces, outfits, and travel
destinations comes to mind, as something that Artaud would be crusading against. Unfortunately,
cruelty also has become commodified and ubiquitous, in movies, videogames, and abundant
videos shared and even livestreamed on social media, featuring abuse, executions, acts of
terrorism, etc. Artaud, of course, did not foresee the commodifying of cruelty for entertainment.
He wanted art (theater and later cinema) to be like the plague, destroying everything in the
spectators in order to usher them into the presence of the pure and dark forces (82). He believed
that language is too rational and representational and that artists must seek other means to make a
primarily physical impact on the audience. Like snake charmers who entrance snakes by the
vibrations of the music they play rather than its message, actors must entrance spectators
viscerally, by gestures, movement, and screams. Lighting and sounds also should be used to
inspire fear and anxiety. Jodorowsky felt that these ideas opened his eyes and founded the
Panique movement in 1962 (with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor). The show characteristic
of this period of his career was a four-hour happening during which he slit the throats of two
geese, crucified a chicken, and was whipped. He hacked down a grand piano and was crucified
on it live on Mexican TV. After the screening of his first feature Fando y Lis, Jodorowsky had to
flee from the angry audience, because he told them that the torture endured by the protagonists
and blood were real (El Topo 132).
Jodorowsky brought his next feature, also filmed in Mexico, El Topo (The Mole 1970) to
New York, where it was seen and admired by John Lennon himself. The word spread among the
young hippy audiences and El Topo became one of the first cult movies. The film combined the
spaghetti western genre with Eastern esoteric spirituality. A film of Artaud-inspired cruelty once
again, it was a starting point in Jodorowsky’s coming to terms with fatherhood, because before it
he had no contact with his children. Fatherhood and getting over his own cruel father by means
of artistic imagination will become all-important in Jodorowsky’s later films which I examine in
this article. In El Topo, Jodorowsky stars as a lone mysterious man, clad in black leather,
galloping around in the desert with his little son (played by his first son Brontis). At the
beginning of the film, the hero tells his seven-year-old son that he is now a man, so he must bury
in the sand the only photo of his mother and his only toy. After killing some bandits and freeing
a beautiful woman, El Topo gallops away with that woman. When his little son tries to hold on to
his boot, El Topo kicks him in the mouth and tells him to find him and kill him when he grows
up (fig. 1 shows Brontis bleeding from his mouth but not crying). When they meet again, the first
thing the grown-up son does is point a gun at his father. This violence now seems unnecessary,
because by this point in the film the father underwent a spiritual transformation and looks like a
Buddhist monk. He woke up from a long coma among many deformed people trapped in a cave
for generations. He begins digging a tunnel to free his saviors. To earn money for food while
digging, he performs street comedy in the nearby town. The son is so impatient to kill the dad
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that he does street comedy and digs the tunnel with him. The tunnel is ready and the deformed
rush to the town in jubilation, but the merciless townspeople shoot them dead. The dad shoots the
townspeople dead (moving under the shower of bullets, which we will later see in The
Terminator) and incinerates himself. His resentful son, clad in the father’s old black leather
clothes, rides away to repeat his trajectory of a too-late spiritual enlightenment.

Figure 1

Jodorowsky said that he was still very much a machista when he made El Topo. Traumatized by
his parents and also believing “the idiot of Confucius” that men should have nothing to do with
their children before the age of seven, he only sent for his first son Brontis in order to make the
film (interview with Cobb 273). “I abandoned him in the film, and I abandoned him in real life,”
said Jodorowsky (El Topo 101). After this experience, he asked all the women with whom he had
sons to send them to him, which they did, but he still lived separately from them for a while. He
was so traumatized by his own father and mother that even at the age of forty he had to close his
eyes when asked to talk about his life: “It’s embarrassing for me to answer realistic questions.
That’s why I close my eyes” (El Topo 136). It took him decades to come to terms with the abuse
and lack of love he experienced as a child and to become a better father himself. He lost his third
son Teo and this grief transformed him completely. He began to think that art can be used to heal
people, and that as an artist, he had a moral obligation to do so. For decades he has been giving
free lectures at bookshops every month with people interested in his ideas and giving them
advice on how to solve their problems. He calls his method psicomagia, psychomagic. The
remedies he devises are surrealist performances: to slap a mother who did not love you, to make
a bone knife and stab a hundred times the picture of a father who abused you, to eat honeycomb
and make a heart with the wax to heal the compulsion to abuse people through speech, etc. (La
danza 229)

The Art of Healing: Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry

In 2013, at the age of eighty-two, after a long hiatus, Jodorowsky made an act of psychomagic
for himself, as he put it – a film about his childhood, Dance of Reality (La danza de la realidad
2013), the first in the trilogy he planned. This surrealist colorful tale features clowns, dwarfs, and
miracles. The director transforms his terrifying, abusive real father into a courageous
revolutionary who sets out to liberate Chile from a dictator. At the beginning of the film, the
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father continually shoves, pulls, and insults the boy, supposedly to raise him as a man, not a
faggot (maricón). The father devises terrible tests for the boy, to which the boy eagerly submits
to win his love. For example, he slaps the boy in the face and the boy must say “Harder!” after
each slap until he tumbles to the floor bleeding from his mouth. The proud father takes him to
the dentist to treat his broken tooth. But this is another sadistic test—the boy can win the father’s
true love if he lets the dentist pull out the tooth without anesthesia (fig. 2). Needless to say, going
along with these various tortures quells the father’s raging anger only for a short moment,
because a sadist gets off inflicting pain on others. Jodorowsky appears in the film as his actual
octogenarian self, cradling, rocking, and comforting the abused boy who represents him as a
child.

Figure 2
The father, a Ukrainian Jew and ardent Stalinist, always wears a military uniform and a huge
mustache, like his idol Stalin, whose enormous portrait welcomes customers at his store. Before
sexually assaulting the mother, he asks her with a terrible face, “Who’s the boss here?” (¿Quién
manda aquí?). Not many cinematic fathers can rival this one in cruelty and machismo, which is
why the transformation he undergoes in the film is all the more amazing. We discover that he is
so tough because he set a mission for himself to kill the Chilean dictator Carlos Ibáñez del
Campo (r. 1927–1931 and 1952–1958). He fails in this mission, and after much tribulation, he
comes back home defeated and falls to his knees before his wife and son, sobbing. The prodigal
father repents and begs for forgiveness, and his son and wife weep with him and embrace him
lovingly. This new father lost his Stalinist mustache and hairstyle in his journey. He now looks
like Jesus with his long hair, light, and emaciated body, and white gown. After that, the mother
unveils three portraits—of Stalin, Ibañez, and the father himself in his old tyrannical hypostasis.
She says, “You found in Ibáñez all you admired in Stalin. You are the same as they are! You
have lived in the guise of a tyrant,” and hands him a gun which appears miraculously in her
hand. The father shoots his own portrait between the eyes and all three images go up in flames
(fig. 3). The father weeps from relief and happiness, embraced and comforted by his wife and
son.

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 Figure 3

While these mustachioed men are burning, would you like to know what really happened? From
Jodorowsky’s autobiography The Dance of Reality (La danza de la realidad 2001), on which the
film is based, we learn that the slapping and other abuse are real, but the father’s conversion and
the heroic mission to kill Chile’s tyrannical ruler never took place. The boy’s mother was also
nothing like the loving presence she became in the film. In reality, she was indifferent and cold
with him and early on told him why: he was the child of rape and she had her tubes tied after he
was born because she no longer wanted to have children with “this beast” of his father (interview
with Veredas). The father’s abuse and the mother’s indifference made the boy depressed and fat.
His only escape was reading all the books at the local library. He began inventing for himself
paths of secret emancipation, “openings to other planes of reality” (La danza 332). At the
celebration of the grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary, he cut ties with his family in a
veritable Surrealist performance. He hacked down the thick lime tree which grew in the
backyard, to the family’s horror at the sacrilege, and was told to never return home. Alejandro
left the paternal home and worked as a circus clown. Then he began making puppets and
founded his theater. At twenty-two, he boarded a boat to go to Paris without knowing a single
word of French, without any contacts there, with a mere hundred dollars in his pocket. He threw
his address book into the sea, and never saw his family again (La danza 183).
If only it were so easy to refashion the cruel father once and for all! The problem is that
he just keeps coming back the way he used to be in real life. The artist must refashion him again
and again. In the sequel to the film, Endless Poetry (Poesía sin fin 2016), the father returns, as
mustachioed and fearsome as before. The final scene must then be a repeat transformation of the
cruel father. The father runs after Alejandro and pulls him by the sleeve, saying he needs a helper
at the store. Alejandro says that he needs a prisoner, not a helper. The father slaps him in the
face, Alejandro slaps him back, and the father, indignant at the sacrilege, tells him he lost his
father. Alejandro responds that he never had one. The father closes his eyes and becomes rigid
and inanimate like a marionette in the young man’s arms. Significantly, Jodorowsky’s father is
played by Jodorowsky’s oldest son Brontis and his youngest son Adán plays him as a young
man. The actual octogenarian Jodorowsky suddenly pops up, like a puppeteer, between his sons

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who are acting out another optimistic refashioning of the drama of his life, a refashioning he
himself scripted and directed (fig. 4). Jodorowsky gives his younger self a hair clipper with
which he will transform the father physically as in the first film, by shaving his Stalin-like hair
and mustache. This completed, the young man says what resembles an incantation to the
inanimate father: “You wanted to be loved, but no one loved you”; thanks him, “You didn’t love
me, and you showed me / the absolute presence of love everywhere”; and forgives him, “I
forgive you, Father. You gave me the strength to endure a world / that lost its poetry long ago.”
The transformed father opens his eyes, from which streams forth absolute love, and kisses his
son. He tells him, “Goodbye, my son. I bless you!”

Figure 4

How ironic it is that Brontis, who only met once his fearsome grandfather whom he had to play
in these films because his father never spoke to him again, confessed that he actually played
Alejandro such as he was when he just met him for the first time when he was seven, when
filming El Topo – a mean and distant father. “One is a different father with the first son than with
the third and the fourth,” Brontis mused philosophically. Playing his grandfather helped him
understand what his father went through, he said (Brontis Jodorowsky). Jodorowsky’s youngest
son Adán was also impacted by his involvement in the films He wrote an open letter to
Jodorowsky, to “show that love between a father and a son can exist,” referring to and rewriting
Kafka’s letter to his sadistic father which the latter did not even care to open. In his letter, Adán
thanks Alejandro for sharing with him books and intellectual discoveries, teaching him to believe
in art and be joyful, listening and talking to him (Adán Jodorowsky). The filmmaker said that for
him these films were also therapy. His parents “hated each other to death,” but in the films he
made them into who they always wanted to be, a revolutionary and an opera singer, and made
them love each other. Telling himself that he has no family did him no good, because “without a
father one does not know who one is.” Worse, the emotional unavailability of many fathers
ultimately draws people to strongmen, according to Jodorowsky. He said that Chile is a country
of the absent father, because it is normal for men to abandon their families for another woman,
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and “this is why we had Ibáñez, this is why he had Pinochet” (interview with Naranjo). Over the
years, he learned to be a loving father, and he also invented a loving father for himself and for
the contemporary audiences as an antidote to authoritarianism.
This does not mean that these films are nicey-nicey. On the contrary, they are full of
scary, abject, and transgressive visuals, and this is exactly where their hallucinatory power lies.
In Dance of Reality, the poor slice off a piece of meat from the neck of a live donkey on which
the father brought water for them. During the slapping test, when the boy must say “Harder!”
after each slap, his cheeks get redder and redder, and it hurts to see his earnest eagerness to
please the sadistic father. When the boy realizes his mortality during a funeral procession, the
people watching change into skulls (fig.5). After that, the boy is shown sharing a tomb full of
white moving maggots with a charred corpse, who talks to him in a sepulchral voice. When the
father contracts the plague, the mother cures him by urinating on him in the explicit “golden
shower” practice of XXX films. Another memorable scene is when the mother covers the boy
head to toe in black shoe polish to heal him from the fear of the dark, then takes of her own
clothes, “to dissolve in the dark,” explains the narrator, but the explanation does not make scene
less transgressive. Maimed people (former miners disabled by explosions), without arms and legs
are kicked and thrown into the bed of a truck. These transgressive bodies, body fluids, and
application of unusual substances to skin (shoe polish) erase the barrier between the viewers and
what they see on the screen.

Figure 5

FILM AS A “PILL”: SURREALISM IN JODOROWSKY

Striking, surrealist symbols are Jodorowsky’s trademark. In these two autobiographical films, he
condensed his childhood experiences “into a symbol, made into a myth” (interview with Vega).
Symbols make manifest dreams and the unconscious, and as a Surrealist artist, he believes that
“the unconscious is what makes things happen” (interview with Bernal). Symbols are universal
and there lies their evocative power, he says: “I know the meaning of every symbol there is. So
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do you, because the meaning of every symbol is recorded in your brain cells” (El Topo 164). His
films work like engrossing dreams, or as he puts it, “I taught our island of rationality how to
speak the language of the unconscious, to conceive of reality as if it were a dream, to enter the
dream spitting out not words but butterflies” (interview with Morse). Like other Surrealist artists,
he says that he directs in a trance-like state: “When people ask me how I directed a child, I don’t
know” (interview with Naranjo); “When I shoot, I try not to see anyone. I’m like a monk, I don’t
have sex or eat meat. I don’t drink alcohol, I dedicate myself to making the film, that’s all. The
only thing that exists is what I’m shooting, that’s all I can say” (interview with Reyo).
Jodorowsky said he may be the last Surrealist filmmaker, except that he no longer wants
to shock and scare for the sake of shocking and scaring. In the early days of cinema, the
Surrealists hoped it would “divine our deep fears and dreams and reveal the hidden, unstructured
reality better than any other art” (Jean Ferry 163). Close ups, slow and fast motion, and
unscripted gratuitous shots can reveal the mysterious and uncanny nature of the most banal
objects (Aragon 52, Kyrou 131). A child looking in fascination at the river of milk that boiled
over and his grandmother putting toy houses along the river, a girl wafting a raw fish under the
nose of a sleeping man she is interested in – Surrealists hunted for such surreal, inexplicable bits
as glimpses into oneiric, hidden reality (Kyrou 139, Mitrani 147). They claimed that the worst
films have as many of these visionary bits as the best ones. They even suggested to extract these
precious bits and put them together into new films. Instead of telling stories, cinema should
entrance and hypnotize in order to transfigure and liberate the viewer.
These appeals only seem nostalgic but they are actually just as urgent now, in our times
of cinema so commercial and formulaic that it fails to attract the teenage audiences it targets (in a
recent survey, only 10% of Gen Zers said they would prefer to watch a movie or a show in their
free time, Faughnder). Jodorowsky said, “I quit Hollywood. I will not make movies to make
money. I will make movies to lose money. That is my revolution” (interview with Buder). In
fact, the director has over six million followers on his social networks and they donated money
for his films when he asked them. There are people, and many people, who are surfeited with
generic content and yearn for authentic and transformative cinematic experiences. And this is
exactly what Jodorowsky wants to provide. As he puts it, “Young people are not idiots. Young
people want fun, but also art to give them some new way of living, to show them that life is not
ugly” (interview with Buder). He says he occasionally finds a commercial film entertaining but
after two hours, he already forgets it because “nothing changed within me” (interview with
Buder). “Me, I like [Hollywood] films. I like them and then I forget. But a good artistic film you
see only once, and remember all your life. It can change you. It shows you must be free”
(interview with Files). Jodorowsky, like a true Surrealist, wants to transform the viewer, “tell the
things that are true, make you go to happiness. Not an idiotic happiness, not Disneyland,” but
make the viewer “happy to be alive” (interview with Wilkins). We recognize the scorn of the
Surrealists for the “odious and stupid” in commercial cinema, made to “skillfully and
purposefully anesthetize the public” (Péret 59). Like the Surrealists, heirs of the Romantics, who
planned “an inspired salvage operation” from “disenchantment,” from “mass culture industry,”
and impoverishing, alienating “rationalism” (Hammond 4), Jodorowsky too wants to save the
world. “What did I do for the world?” he asks himself. “I can’t change it, but I can begin to
change it, I can do my bit” (interview with Lerman). “Like a medicine,” art “can open the mind. I
see a world that is sick. The planet is ill. We need to make an art that will kill that. We need to
find a way. You can be a destroy artist” (interview with Cobb 270). “Killing,” “destroying”
would sound strange coming from this soft-spoken old man who wants to heal the world, but
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they return us to the times when artists believed they had a mission and could influence large
masses of people.
Jodorowsky wants to make hallucinatory, or “pill” films, as he calls them (Fleming 120).
To capture the raw hidden reality the Surrealists hungered for, Jodorowsky uses non-actors, their
real experiences, abject bodies and body fluids, and real locations. The goal is to ensure that
there is “no alienation between the creator, the actor, and the film itself” (El Topo 136). When
shooting El Topo, he told the photographer before each scene that their whole lives were at stake
(El Topo 135). Now he has a new technique: he tells his camerawoman to stop shooting, she
presses a button but goes on shooting, tricking people so they stop “acting.” He uses real
locations and real people: “In movies, in a century of fake feelings, I am making real feelings. In
a culture full of drugs, I am putting in a real hallucination” (interview with Wilkins). In Fando y
Lis (his first feature film), “the rich person was a rich person, the Nazi was a Nazi, the prostitute
was a prostitute. I take the person to use them as they are.” In Santa Sangre, one of the actors
was a heavy drinker, so Jodorowsky made him drink three bottles of tequila before shooting the
scene of his suicide, musing, “If he dies… he dies” (interview with Cobb 274). To accompany
this scene, he recorded an old drunk street woman singing, incorporating real, unscripted sadness
(interview with Wilkins). “There are real sentiments, because all those people I found were not
actors. Every person I showed had the problem I show in the picture. Real people I used, real
tiger! I’m not a Hollywood company making fake everything” (interview with Wilkins). For the
film to have a hallucinatory effect, it must expose real unscripted vulnerability. “I take the reality
that is there. I take the reality of what I find. It depends on the actor. I have a friend who wants to
imitate Van Gogh and cut his ear away. He came to show me his ear. I thought, fantastic…. And
then I make it into a scene [in Santa Sangre]. For me it is the best I ever did but I don’t
understand the meaning. Still today… I do not know” (interview with Cobb 274). He shot Dance
of Reality in his native town of Tocopilla in Northern Chile, which he said remained as it was
when he left seventy years ago. “Every place you see in the picture is the real place where the
scene happened [in my life]. I traveled to Chile in order to go to the street I was suffering and
living on. My father’s store, the house in the street I lived on—everything’s real,” said the
director (interview with Buder). He almost fainted to see the Japanese barber of his childhood
and then learned it was that barber’s grandson (interview with Vega).

Telling It All: Abject Intimacy

Jodorowsky’s films and writings are incredibly frank, containing details almost too intimate for
someone to tell and for us to know. For example, in his autobiography he described how as a
child he crept into the bedroom of his sleeping parents. He was amazed to see that his father’s
penis was smaller than his own, and understood with jubilation the reason of the constant
screaming, pulling, and shoving. In another scene, he described how he healed the relationship
with his second son Cristóbal, from whom he used to withdraw all affectionate physical contact,
like his own father who believed that it was for faggots (although he did not spare slaps and
punches). Jodorowsky imagined meeting his father in a dream, approached him, embraced,
stroked, and rocked him in his arms like a child, despite the father’s initial resistance. This
helped him so much that he asked his son Cristóbal to do the same to him (La danza 232). These
stories draw us in with transgressive earnestness and vulnerability. As film critic Roger Ebert
wrote about Jodorowsky’s film Santa Sangre: “the inner chambers of the soul are laid bare, in
which desires become visible and walk into the room and challenge the yearner to possess them”

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(Ebert). To “challenge” is the right word, because some of these secrets are as true as they are
repulsive, so some viewers might turn away.
This vulnerability, utter “nakedness” of the artist, the need to tell all and more than all, is
best explained by Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. The goal of Jodorowsky’s imaginative
baring of the soul can be understood as eroding the barrier between the artistic object and the
audience (Kristeva 136). The abject object (a living person or a dead body) does not have a
border. Kristeva’s example is the French writer Céline, too eager to lay bare his pessimistic view
of the human condition and anti-Semitism. I would like to illustrate the abject by the darling of
the Surrealists, the Little Tramp persona created by Charlie Chaplin. The Little Tramp is
endearing in his complete exposure to policemen, hunger (he most cheerfully eats his shoe in
Gold Rush), homelessness, inclement weather, and love – on screen, because he almost always
gets the pretty girl he attaches himself to, but also and off screen. The Little Tramp became the
first internationally known movie character and a cult figure with mass audiences, discriminating
critics, and legendary filmmakers such as Fellini and Buñuel. His precarious life hangs by a
thread, which is made manifest in every film by a nonchalant balancing act on the edge of a
precipice. He is beset by danger on all sides, even from his friends: one wants to eat him in Gold
Rush; another, a millionaire he saved from suicide, hugs and kisses him when drunk and pushes
him away when sober in City Lights; his coworkers attack and hit him in Modern Times. His total
exposure to the elements, cruelty, and affection is shown by a permanent wardrobe malfunction.
His pants keep falling down or have a hole right in the behind – in City Lights a mean boy pulls
out a piece of his underpants sticking out of that hole (note that Chaplin blows his nose in it and
puts it in his suit pocket square – this can only be done to expose his persona even further). In
Gold Rush, after the Little Tramp eats his shoe, he walks around for the rest of the film in the
snow with his foot tied in a piece of cloth, and at one point it catches fire. We know that
Chaplin’s childhood in the end- of-the-nineteenth-century London was one of poverty and
hardship. He was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine and was housed at schools for
paupers. His mother was committed to a mental asylum, and he went to live with his father, a
severe alcoholic, who died from cirrhosis two years after. At fourteen, Chaplin spent several
days on the street, hungry and alone (Weissman 9). The Little Tramp persona he created is too
real in its nakedness, because, well, it is real. The abject nakedness of such a persona erodes our
own border as a subject, “the border between inside and outside,” and collapses the defenses of
our subjectivity (Kristeva 53, 135). The initial panicky bewilderment, “How can I be without
border?” as Kristeva puts it (4), gradually becomes a “hallucination,” a “fascination” (45). The
abject “beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (4).
The abject is “what flows from the other’s ‘innermost being’” – that is to say, blood and
other body fluids (Kristeva 54). Jodorowsky and the characters he creates bare their emotions,
their skin, and even beneath the skin, down to body fluids and internal organs. Jodorowsky likes
to surprise interviewers with this nakedness. He said, for example, “My liver is the best liver in
Creation.” “Your liver?” repeated the interviewer, baffled. “Yes. My work comes not from
critical thoughts but from myself,” said the director and explained that the goal of his art is to
show “the beauty of the other. To open up consciousness” (interview with Ivan-Zadeh). I put
“the beauty of the other” in italics to show that the goal of the aesthetic of abject intimacy is
precisely to suspend for a moment the defenses of our subjectivity, our need to keep the others
away, described by Sartre as “Hell is other people.”
And yet, this nakedness has more than one layer. That is to say, it is actually often
performative, theatrical – Jodorowsky exaggerates his raw openness. The posters of his first film
10
declared that all torture suffered by the actors was real, and no fake blood was used. After he
released El Topo, he said the rape scene was real. Later he said that he penetrated the actress with
her consent, and recently, he said he made up these claims entirely, as a Surrealist publicity to
break out from obscurity and felt very sorry for it (interview with Ivan-Zadeh). When he made
his son bury his first toy and the picture of his mother in El Topo, he said that “it is really the
first toy and the photo is really a picture of his mother” – it was all real because in order to
change viewers, movies must change everyone who takes part in them (El Topo 139). Later he
said that it upset his son Brontis so much that they went to dig out the photo and the toy, and that
he came to feel remorse for subjecting his son to this experience which he did not feel before
(interview with Ivan-Zadeh). It is all the more amusing to read Brontis’s take on this: “everybody
said, ‘Oh you must be so affected by that, poor Brontis, it must have been terrible.’ … for me
it’s funny because it’s not really my toy and it’s not my mother in the picture” (Brontis
Jodorowsky). These contradictory testimonies tells us that abject nakedness is also a
performance, an aesthetic, a desire to make us feel by eroding borders between the viewer and
the person viewed. In another confession, Jodorowsky explains his aversion for borders: “Human
society has dense borders, economic, religious, and cultural, inculcated from an early age,” and
artists exist to “break” them (interview with Anton Bitel). He lives wondering how to cross these
borders to the other – see how he came up with a way to touch a stranger, knowing that it is a
small transgression:
These days I have been wondering: what would happen if I touch a stranger? Recently I
was in Nice with my wife. In front of me there was a man was walking with his wife. As
he was crossing the street, he put his hand behind him and I took it, so he crossed the
street thinking that I was his wife. When he saw me, we both laughed. I touched a
stranger, I did it! Normally this cannot be done, touching is prohibited in our society.
(interview with Vega)

ABJECT INTIMACY IN LATIN AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA

I will conclude by showing that Jodorowsky shares the aesthetic of abject nakedness, the need to
erode borders, with other Latin American filmmakers. The characters live in abject submission to
an abusive man, and are equally exposed to both his blows and caresses. They come to like it and
defend it – as Kristeva explains, “so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not
its submissive and willing ones” (8). People line up to kiss the hand of corrupt and powerful man
(The Perfect Dictatorship, Hell, The Crime of Father Amaro), women defiantly prefer violent
men to men who love them (Tony Manero, Amores perros, Tear This Life Out, The Crime of
Father Amaro), a maid gets rid of other maids to preserve her servitude intact (The Maid),
children try to win the approval of a sadistic parent (Madeinusa, The Clan) or boast of having
robbed and killed (City of God). There is an abundance of abject bodies – dead bodies (Post
Mortem, Milk of Sorrow), maimed bodies (Amores perros, The Crime of Father Amaro), old and
out of shape bodies (The Maid). There is an abundance of body fluids – saliva (a three-way kiss
with condensed milk in Machuca), vomit (an incestuous father is covered in it after his daughter
feeds him soup laced with rat poison in Madeinusa), semen (a maid complains about a teen boy’s
soiled sheets to his mother in The Maid), vaginal fluid (Amores perros), and excreta (a man
defecates on the white stage costume of his rival in Tony Manero, the wife urinates on husband
in Dance of Reality, a boy dreams he is urinating in a toilet in the middle of a forest in the
presence of a girl he is in love with in Clandestine Childhood). These images from underneath
the skin erode the viewers’ physical barriers and involve them viscerally into the film.
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 Like Jodorowsky, contemporary Latin American filmmakers insist that what they show
us is raw, unscripted reality. For Walter Salles, this “necessity to grab what is going on in our
streets and transfer that in a raw manner to the screen” is “really the common denominator of this
new Latin American cinema” (112). Karim Ainouz marvels how “when you open the newspaper
every day and read the daily section, it’s almost fiction. I feel there’s a mirroring of that in our
cinema… There’s definitely a curiosity here about reality,” “an out-of-control quality here and it
leaks into the films” (193). José Padilha says, “Everything you see in the movie… happened. It’s
all fact” (177). Pablo Trapero made his film about his father’s workshop because when he
watched films about the working class, he felt that “Life is not like that. People don’t talk like
that” (193).
To grasp this raw reality, Walter Salles incorporates spontaneous events which happen
during filming, so “the viewers wonder whether they are watching fiction or documentary” (61).
He mixes actors with non-actors and looks for “visceral quality of acting, everything coming
from within,” “total giving” (91). He met his lead for Central Station when a shoe-shine boy
approached him to ask for money for a sandwich (the director was wearing sneakers and he
could not clean his shoes). When the director asked him to do a screen test, the boy initially
refused, saying, “I can’t, because I’ve never been to the movies before” (69). Claudia Llosa met
her lead for Madeinusa (Magaly Soller, now a famous actress and singer) in much the same way,
in a girl who sold street food in her rural village and did not know much about films (Llosa 383).
“I just want something that feels real, not acted… I want people to have the impression that they
are seeing something that is real, somehow, life the way it is. I’m really upset when I’m directing
a scene and I can see the actor is using a trick, a mannerism,” says Karim Ainouz (219). “I can’t
do anything with an actor. I hate actors! They are poison! ‘Oh, I need a close-up not from this
side, but from this side. I can’t say this line…’” fumes Jodorowsky (interview with Elbiri). “I
had former drug-dealers coaching actors and non-actors who would play drug dealers; former
regular cops coaching actors who would play regular cops; and former BOPE cops coaching
actors who would play BOPE cops. I didn’t need anyone to coach the students, because I was a
student myself,” proudly says José Padilha (181). Lisandro Alonso feels more comfortable
working with people “who don’t even have a TV. So they don’t know, are not aware, as we
are… they don’t care because they have never been to a cinema” (307). Fernando Meireilles in
the City of God worked with illiterate favela boys to whom he suggested scenes to improvise,
then he suggested the lines the boys improvised to the scriptwriter, and then he suggested them
back to the boys. All the while, the boys “did not know I was testing for the scenes” (150). With
his cameraman, Meirelles decided to film in the following way: “Let’s just let them do their
thing and we will follow them with a camera, as if it is a documentary, as if we’re shooting the
real thing” (Meirelles 159). Pablo Trapero cast family friends and family in Mundo grua about a
working-class man because professional actors usually come from the upper class, and it would
have been too costly and ineffective to train them (Trapero 69). Sérgio Machado imposed
physical exercises on his cast to capture the reality of emotions: before a sexual scene the two
male actors did kundalini pelvic tilts and had spontaneous orgasms; the female actress was
pinned face down to the floor for fifteen minutes by a jiu-jitsu fighter without being able to move
a finger, after which “she was really agitated, and totally primed for the scene” (Machado 218).
Like Jodorowsky, contemporary Latin American filmmakers seek to involve everyone on
the set viscerally. The cameraman on the set of the City of God “was literally in the middle of
lots of the scenes, almost as if he was an actor himself, but with the camera on his shoulder,
filming” (Meirelles 158). Karim Ainouz made the cast live in the same house for three months to
12
make them believe they were a family: “I basically induced the crew and the cast to believe that
was reality” (207). Sérgio Machado made the entire crew watch the physical exercises to which
he subjected the actors, and “somehow it made sacred the act of shooting, because the whole
crew would feel the way they were feeling” (218). Walter Salles said that on the set of
Motorcycle Diaries there were lectures on the political history of the countries in which they
filmed. Everyone in the crew attended the lectures, and they worked with total abandonment,
understanding “that we would either survive collectively or the film would collapse. This
specific film required that everyone would help each other. If you limited your work to what you
were actually supposed to do, we wouldn’t reach the end” (106).
Like Jodorowsky, filmmakers capture reality with real locations. “Locations have smells,
history, life, and I wanted to convey this fetid, musty aspect, which is hard to get in a studio,”
says Karim Ainouz (200). Sebastián Silva filmed the prisonlike existence of his family nanny-
maid in his actual family house (after watching the film, the maid quit and moved out to build
her own life). The director “went really deep” and used his family’s actual clothes, bed covers
and sheets, and even his nanny-maid’s photo album with photos retouched to the likeness of the
actress who played her. During filming, the director found himself overwhelmed and gasping for
breath, thinking, “‘Whoa, I’m at home. And I’m filming my family!’ It was stressful, and there
were points with the stress that I would go to a bathroom, lock myself in and pant in front of the
mirror, like, ‘Fuck, what’s going on, what’s going on?’” (Silva). Fernando Meirelles had to pay
the policemen and the drug dealers to let him shoot in the City of God favela. Once the police
arrested a dealer and the other dealers told the crew they could not leave until he is released. The
crew gave all their cash to release the man, but it was not enough for the policemen. The crew
could not leave until four in the mourning, many people were crying and wanted to quit. The
director recounts: “We were surrounded by people with guns. But they were really friendly.
‘Hey, what are you shooting, what’s the story? Give me some lines to say.’ You know that you
can’t leave and he knows that he won’t let you, but there’s no prejudice, it’s a good spirit.
Making jokes. Would they have killed us? I don’t know” (Meirelles 154). The emotion and
confusion or danger are palpable in these films. Filmmakers go to great lengths to achieve the
visceral, naked, and real quality to make viewers lower their defenses and experience the story
viscerally.
Matheou Demetrios who interviewed many of these directors sums up this aesthetic as
an “immediacy [which] almost defies description – we feel that we are eavesdropping on its
characters in a way that a documentary can’t even approach” (260). That is to say, the tell-all
fictional nakedness lets us experience the otherwise inaccessible, hidden reality of abuse, love,
submission, sadness, hope etc. To me, this aesthetic of abject nakedness feels like witnessing a
vivisection. We come so close to that character’s desires, shame, fear, and confusion and yet, I
argue, we cannot really identify with them, because one cannot become one with the abject. Yes,
the borders between the viewer and the character collapse, and yet there cannot be oneness, there
cannot be embodiment. Witnessing this vivisection of the abject character on the screen becomes
a radical ethical experience. First, we can wonder if the abject person’s way of total giving in,
their via crucis, can be the way in some situations. In Jodorowsky’s Dance of Reality the father
plunges into the abject: he recovers his memory and learns he lived with dogs in a slum with a
dwarfed woman who used him to beg on the streets, and this realization changes him. The
director said he too went through the abject stage and it helped him to overcome his narcissism:
“I used to be a navel-gazer, I thought my navel was the center of the world. … I am thankful for
everything that happened to me, because to live in the ‘I,’ in ‘Ego’ causes great suffering”
13
(interview with Naranjo). Second, we can begin to recognize ways to take people in the situation
of abjection off the cross. As they look at us from the screen, in their “nakedness and destitution,
extreme exposure, defenselessness, vulnerability,” as Levinas says, we feel called to offer our
help and resources to the other in need, we become “someone irreplaceable and unique, someone
chosen” (181). But unlike Levinas, I do not think that the encounter with the abject should be
“guiltless,” that I should not concern myself with “what I may or may not have done to the Other
or whatever acts I may or may not have committed” (Levinas 83), because this may diminish my
desire to help (Lingis 2010: 93). No, I think that the hallucinatory encounter with the cinematic
abject is also an exorcism of sorts. It forces us to take a long and hard look at ourselves, to
recognize in what way we are contributing to someone’s via crucis, in what way we are agents of
cruelty with children, parents, partners, friends, subordinates, and strangers.

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Padilha, José. Interview with Matheou Demetrios. The Faber Book of New Latin American
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Figure captions

Figure 1. The bleeding son in El Topo

Figure 2. The bleeding son in Dance of Reality
Figure 3. Portraits of father, Stalin, and Ibañez (left) burning in Dance of Reality
Figure 4. Jodorowsky and his sons, Brontis and Adán in Endless Poetry
Figure 5. People become skulls in Dance of Reality

16