One of Us: Corpo-Reality and the Disabled Body in the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

Sloane, Peter (2023) One of Us: Corpo-Reality and the Disabled Body in the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky. In: ReFocus: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowski. ReFocus: The International Directors Series . Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. ISBN Paperback: 9781399505956 Hardback: 9781399505949 eBook: 9781399505963

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Abstract

Often accused of being gratuitously “grotesque” (one contemporary New York Times reviewer of Fando y Lis troublingly describes it as a “selection of freaks”), Jodorowsky composes a series of considered aesthetic and ethical provocations not simply to the sensibility of the cinema audience or the board of censors, but to the mechanical apparatus of the camera itself (1970). If, as he once remarked, “We have the language of the body and we need to do something together”, this enigmatic “something” might take the form of a rehabilitative inclusive project which gives voice, or visibility, to bodies suppressed in mainstream and employed for their transgressive appeal in arthouse or avant-garde film (The Quietus 2015). Taking a disabilities studies approach, this essay reads Fando y Lis, El Topo, Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre, arguing that, like his visionary alter ego El Topo, Jodorowsky strives to dismantle the barriers erected by tradition (or perhaps “good taste”) between the camera and the bodies which have come to be excluded from mainstream cinema and the cultural, social, and public spaces which it both constructs and (re)presents. By parading extraordinary bodies before a piece of technology which voraciously consumes violence, sex, war, famine, but which turns its own and therefore society’s gaze from the actuality of both cognitive and somatic difference, Jodorowsky resituates the disabled body in a more brutal yet paradoxically more humanistic cinematic corpo-reality. Disability narratives often involve the search for a cure, one “which rehabilitates or fixes the deviance”; conversely, for Jodorowsky the disabled body acts as an agent for rather than subject of salvation (Mitchell and Snyder 2011: 53). Part of the strangeness of Jodorowsky’s worlds is that they are not recognizably our worlds, but ideational prototypes for micro-utopian spaces of radical inclusivity which prove, ultimately, to be unsustainable either within or beyond the film frame.

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