According to Alejandro Jodorowsky, the world is a comedy and the universe is God’s laughter. Such are bold statements coming from an artist whose filmography is marked by ultra-stylized violence within deliberately provocative cultural and religious frameworks. Yet anyone who would doubt the validity of such personal claims (Luis Buñuel criticized Jodorowsky as a “commercial surrealist”) need only bear witness to his 1989 carnivalesque masterwork Santa Sangre to see that the filmmaker’s appreciation of the absurd is true, deep, and entirely free of the cynicism that often marks countercultural pop works. Arguably the director’s most personal film, it’s also his most accessible and certainly his most linear, its expectedly gonzo visual extravagance largely contextualized by the circus culture at its axis, a background culled from the director’s own childhood. For Jodorowsky’s sake, let’s hope the literal similarities stop there.
The lingering effects of trauma is Santa Sangre’s spotlight theme, as the young Fenix (Adan Jodorowsky)—son to an embittered circus couple whose fraught marriage ends in limb-hacking, genital-mutilating tragedy—must overcome the psychotic demands of his mother, Concha (Blanca Guerra), in his adulthood quest of sexual enlightenment. The film begins with Fenix, now age 20 (Axel Jodorowsky), perched naked atop a tree stump in a mental institution. Like Gollum, the only food that interests him is raw fish, and it’s from this most tenuous moment of his existence that we enter his rattled psyche, his tragic story elucidated via flashbacks and flash forwards before his perception of reality ultimately begins to peel away. His carnie childhood plants the Oedipal seeds of unrest via the cult-leading Concha; adulterous father, Orgo (Guy Stockwell); and the mute young mime, Alma (Faviola Elenka Tapia), whom he loves. Returning to him in his adulthood, his now-armless mother takes him from the hospital, willing his arms to do her bidding, from the mundane to the grisly. Horrifically, any girl who catches Fenix’s fancy is promptly executed by the cruel Concha.
Santa Sangre bears similarities to the works of Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, and, perhaps incidentally, Tod Browning’s Freaks, but Jodorowsky’s kaleidoscopic aesthetic is distinctly his own. For as random and free-associative as his images strike one as being at any given moment, the consistency with which Santa Sangre doles out madness suggests a most assured and carefully plotted creative process. Jodorowsky’s belief in the humor of all things never translates to exploitation; rather, his shock-treatment approach skewers the accepted normality of the world, revealing the perverse in the quotidian and everyday truths that lie dormant in the strange and bizarre. Santa Sangre dares you to laugh yet never betrays its poker face, a high-wire act that the director refined from his earlier, messier works.
Phallic imagery abounds throughout Santa Sangre, from knives to the bloody trunk of a dying elephant to the anaconda that at one point emerges from an aroused Fenix’s pants, making this a particularly masculine trip down the rabbit hole. But the psycho-sexual angst shared by Fenix and Alma also grounds the film in a universality that transcends gender; in their love they find solace from their past abuses (she was physically tormented and even used for prostitution). From the ever-present Greek chorus of clowns and circus musicians to Fenix’s oddly poetic obsession with James Whale’s The Invisible Man, Santa Sangre is at once disturbingly perverse and devoted to emotional logic; more than a handful of visceral images are likely to burn themselves into your memory banks for good. Like El Topo and The Holy Mountain, it’s an essential work of phantasmagorical cinema.
Image/Sound
We were impressed with Severin’s prior Blu-ray edition of Santa Sangre, but the label’s president, David Gregory, has gone on record saying that he was never particularly pleased with that disc’s presentation, which was supervised by the film’s director of photography, Daniele Nannuzzi, whom he believes drained the film of its vibrant colors. As evidenced by his recent interview on the disc, Alejandro Jodorowsky himself was floored by the possibilities of digital restoration and the process’s ability to extract deeper color than he ever knew possible from the film elements. The nonagenarian director views Severin’s 4K transfer of Santa Sangre as a new film altogether, and even longtime fans will be blown away by the vibrancy of the colors on display. As on the earlier Blu-ray, skin tones are beautifully balanced and there’s nary an instance of print damage to be seen. And in an obvious gesture of “if something isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it,” the earlier home-video release’s modest but well-balanced audio tracks have been ported over, and regardless of which one you choose, that infamous hallucination sequence will very much give your home-entertainment system a workout.
Extras
Severin’s release is available in both two-disc Blu-ray and four-disc Digipack editions, both abundant in enough special features and extras for casual fans and those who simply can’t slake their thirst for more of Santa Sangre’s weird delights. Both versions include absolutely every feature that was present on the 2011 release, including David Gregory’s feature-length documentary Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen on the making of the film, an audio commentary with Jodorowsky and journalist Alan Jones, a documentary on Goyo Cárdenas, the real-life spree-killer who served as inspiration for the project, and so much more. The new material is mostly composed of interviews (refreshingly, all in-person, as they were completed just prior to the Covid pandemic), the most insightful of which features Jodorowsky and producer Claudio Argento, who believes that Santa Sangre is the single greatest work that he had a hand in getting made. Shell out for the beautifully packaged four-disc set and you’ll also get a set of reproduction German lobby cards and a CD of the original soundtrack.
Overall
Supervised by 92-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky himself, Severin’s 4K transfer of Santa Sangre ensures that this is the definitive home-video release of a carnivalesque masterwork.
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