Overview

Known as the father of the ""midnight cult movie"" and co-founder of the avant-garde Panic movement in France, Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky defies all basic categorization. He is known as a provocateur, a performance artist, a visionary filmmaker, a controversial playwright, a philosopher, and a tarot reader, among other disparate classifications. These varied dimensions of artist and filmmaker converge seamlessly into his practice. He is recognized by audiences as a creator of controversial and mesmerizing films characterized by visual delirium, the injection of radical politics and mystical philosophy, and a post-surrealist aesthetics. ReFocus: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky pursues an interdisciplinary approach to analyze and contextualize Jodorowsky's films according to a variety of conceptual modalities: from occult and mystical orientations, to the political and decolonial aspects of his major films. This collection examines the formative metaphysical elaborations involved in Jodorowsky's earliest films, his pioneering of a truly unique independent film practice in Mexico, and his emergence and development as a visionary international filmmaker.

Full Product Details

Author:   Michael Newell Witte (Lecturer, California State University, Northridge)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399505949

ISBN 10:   1399505947
Pages:   256
Publication Date:   14 September 2023
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky - Michael Newell Witte 2. Two Tales of Transposed Heads: ""La Cravate"" and ""Org"" - Jesse Lerner 3. The Panic and/or Freak Aesthetic - Jorge Ayala Blanco (trans. Amy Sara Carroll) 4. One of Us: Corpo-Reality and the Disabled Body in the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky - Peter Sloane 5. Prophets and Sinners in the 1970s Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky - Naomi Lindstrom 6. H. P. Blavatsky and Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and Theosophy on Psychomagic in El Topo and The Holy Mountain - Peter Scott Lederer 7. Dionysus Resuscitated: Alejandro Jodorowsky and the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Florian Zappe 8. The Music in The Holy Mountain: A Jodorowskian Sound Machine - Daniel Escoto 9. Outlaw Artists and Esoteric Media: International Copyright and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Illicit Media Practice - Andrew Ventimiglia 10. Resistance in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre - Alessandra Santos 11. Inherit and Repair: Self-erasure and Allegoric Montage in Jodorowsky’s The Caste of Metabarons - Francisco Javier Fresneda-Casado 12. Alejandro Jodorowksy, The Unmade, and The Sons of El Topo - Matthew Melia 13. Jodorowsky, Psychomagic, and Subjective Destitution - William Egginton 14. Talmudist & Kabbalist Practices in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic, a Healing Art - Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoang

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Author Information

Michael Newell Witte is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of San Diego. His research explores neo-avant-garde art and theory, dissident and ethnographic surrealism, and global contemporary art and film. He is the editor of ReFocus: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (2023) and co-author of the exhibition catalogue Todo está perdido: Juan José Gurrola (2023).

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