It’s a great time for lovers of surrealist cinema, what with the recent release of Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch and Flying Lotus’s Kuso, screening as part of the Rooftop Films Summer Series tonight. The trippiest news of all: The master of the midnight movie, Alejandro Jodorwosky, is set to release his new one, Endless Poetry, and the 88-year-old Chilean auteur, who currently lives in Paris, is making some rare NYC appearances to promote it.
The bad news is: A conversation with MoMA PS1 honcho Klaus Biesenbach is sold out (though tickets have popped up on Craigslist). The good news: Sunshine Cinema just announced that Jodo will be in the house for some screenings on opening weekend, Friday and Saturday, July 14 and 15. As of press time, there were still tickets left.
Jodorowsky’s new one revisits his years as an aspiring poet and tarot reader in Chile. His 20-year-old self is played by his son, Adan Jodorowsky. As you can see from the trailer and clip above, it’s just what you’d expect from the guy who depicted a “sanctuary of 1,000 testicles” in The Holy Mountain. Sure, Jodorowsky has directed other cult classics (El Topo, Santa Sangre, etc.), but after four decades, it’s his 1973 masterpiece that appears to build more counterculture cachet by the hour. Maybe you saw these recent posts by absurdist comedian Eric Andre, who, after visiting Jodorowksy, has clearly become a practitioner of psychomagic.
We’ll have more about Endless Poetry in the coming days, but in the meantime, you might want to snag tickets to the Sunshine screening before they disappear. It’s uncertain whether Jodorowsky will do a public tarot card reading, as he will at MoMA, but we can tell you this much: Unlike the MoMA event, the price of admission to Sunshine includes a screening of the film.