Top 25 Favourite Films: #19 Jodorowsky's Dune (Dir. Frank Pavich, 2013)
#19. Jodorowsky's Dune. Directed by Frank Pavich, 2013
For every masterpiece of cinema there is an equally great unmade film, from Kubrick's Napoleon, a meticulously researched masterpiece saved, at least partly in sumpteous book form, to the bizarre Burton-directed, Nic Cage-starring Superman Lives that exists on in the human imagination in faded polaroids of Cage in costume, to the fever dream that is the Nick Cave scripted sequel to Gladiator. But above these all, in scale and notoriety, both due to its crew and cast, and its pure visionary ambition, is the unmade adaption of Frank Herbert's Dune by Franco-Chilean director and king of the midnight movie, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the subject of Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary.
Over two hours including interviews with Jodorowsky and his sons, his collaborators on the film, ranging from HR Giger to producer Michel Seydoux, and his admirers, including Danish director, Nicolas Winding Refn together with stacks of concept art, and animation to attempt to create a glimpse of the work that never was, Pavich attempts to unpick the pre-production of a film that could have included cultural touchstones ranging from Pink Floyd to Orson Welles to Salvador Dali, and could well, despite its colossal 14 hour mooted runtime, have become the ultimate counter-culture film of all time, whose embroyic influence can be seen from Terminator to Star Wars across science fiction.
At the centre of this film, undoubtedly, is Jodorowsky himself-now in his eighties, though the film prefaces his initial appearance with a nearly two minute pan through his impressively invidivualistic house, lingering upon his work, from films to novels, to comic books, and speaking for large sections of this film in his native Spanish, he is still an impressively animated figure, still clearly filled with the excitement of the potential that Dune had, as a postively epoch-defining, mind-opening film, determined, as many of Jodorowsky's work has been before and after, to be part-film, part magical ritual, a concious-expanding film. At points, the interview peels back the years subsequent to his failure, and his excitement and enthuasiam comes through in both English and Spanish.
After this opening, we are introduced to the film's talking heads, and the colossal book that practically forms the sole artifact surviving from this film, with two of the film makers, artist Chris Foss, tasked with the film's spaceship and machine design, and critic Faraci agreeing that Dune may well have not only been ahead of its time, but also singlehandedly would have changed the course of science-fiction cinema, bigger than 2001 and Star Wars. We are then treated to a potted history of Jodoroswky's work prior to Dune, including his theatre work, the arresting Fando y Lis, a film that inspired a riot, and his film making ethos, together with his pioneer spirit. his potted history continues with the "miraculous and terrible" El Topo, the original "midnight movie", which begins to show his range of talents and ability as a film maker. After the making of the even more critically acclaimed The Holy Mountain, a beautiful if bizarre film partly financed by the Beatles and rich with astonishing visual imagery, and a plot that takes influence from alchemy and the tarot.
The stage is now set for Jodoroswky and producer Seydoux to begin work on their next film, and without question, Jodorowsky decides on Frank Herbert's Dune, with Seydoux and Jodorowsky, together with their friends and colleagues giving a cliff-notes version of the story, complete with the first of many uses of the concept art by Foss, french comic book artist and Swiss artist HR Giger (for who this marks the last film appearance before his untimely death in 2014), with Jodorowsky describing the complexity of Herbert's work as close to Proust, with the first 100 pages aalmost completely opaque. We are thus introduced to Jodorowsky's "warriors", from Mobieus, France's most ttalented comic book artist, who Alejandro describes as his "camera", who also drew the storyboards for the film-it is these drawings that are subsequently used for the animated sections.
The ambition of the film begins to become clear, as well as Jodorowsky's love of cinema as a medium with the film's opening shot, in which we traverse the galaxy, past destroyed ships and space battles and through galaxies, passing a spice convoy, to eventually arrive at Dune itself. It is a madly ambitious moment, and undeniably we can see echoes of it in Star Wars, but on a scale unimaginable, and here the special effects genius behind 2001, Douglas Trumbull, is approached-though this fails, the duo approach Dan O'Bannon, another special effects creator, who is represented here by his widow, and archive recordings, who meets Jodoroswky, promptly takes drugs with him, and promptly joins the project, moving to Paris.
From here, Jodorowosky begins to collect together his cast and crew, from David Carradine, who Jodorowsky recounts a story that's as odd as anything in the film. We are promptly introduced to Pink Floyd, and perhaps the most cinematic moment featuring any collaborator on Dune, with Pink Floyd approached eating hamburgers, and promptly insulted by an angry Jodorowsky, who is particularly animated during this sequence. Another animated sequence, and, with Paul's conception, and subsequent background we get a sense of how transcendental and otherworldly Dune could have been, with the director casting his own son, Brontis as Paul, including a bewildering training regime that borders on the mildly abusive, training his son to fight unarmed and with weaponry, with Brontis himself regarding his trainer as merciless. For the first time, we get a true sense of an element of a dark side to the director, his ability to choose the perfect people, but also his fantacism to the idea, regarding Brotis as the first of many young people to have their lives changes and their minds expanded by the film, only added to by Foss and Bannon's recollections, with Foss adding, in one of the single best moments of the film, that he has never read the novel.
We certainly, throughout this film, get a sense of Jodorowsky's respect for his creators, his passion for the film, and clearly shows his need to get the best possible work out of his artists, actors and musicians, including his attempts to get surrealist godfather Salvador Dali to play the emperor, in one of the film's strangest moments, in which Jodorowsky uses a tarot card to invite him to a meeting, leading to a globe-hopping set of meetings, and an increasingly insane number of gifts and requests, including flaming giraffes and helicopters, and an exorbitant salary to come to an agreement, leading to the use of a robot in most of the Emperor's scenes to avoid this. With the introduction of Giger, to provide the art, and the band Magma the music for the villains Harkonens, with Mick Jagger playing Feyd, and Orson Welles the Baron Harkonen, the team is complete, and the film returns to the plot, and one of its most brutal possible scenes, beautifully underscored by discordant rock music, and accompanied by Giger's work, which feels like a practical prototype of his later work on Alien.
With this world beautifully rendered, leading to the truly jawdropping final scene that feels like the most obvious example of Jodorowsky's transcendenteal beliefs, in which he becomes divorced from the physical world, to become a spirit that can inhabit anyone, which practically feels like a manifestation of the Jungian Collective unconcious, becoming the centre of the universe as the planet itself becomes the saviour of the galaxy, leading to the unveilling of the Dune bible, of which only three exist, the surviving element of this lost masterpiece.
It is here however, that the film's optimism reaches hard reality, with everyone from Disney to Warner Bros passing on the film, and we get a sense of Hollywood's folly, at least from the point of view of Jodorowsky and his crew, in not understanding the film, with the film running in at a mammoth fourteen hours, with Winding-Refn noting that Hollywood was scared of the film. It is to Pavich's credit that he also interviews Gary Kurtz, the producer of Star Wars who notes that this oversight should have been tackled, and Jodorowsky's lack of flexibility damaged the film. For the first time, we see Jodorowsky angry at the film's failure, cursing Hollywood then-and honestly today-for its obsession with money over the ability to move hearts and indeed minds through the stories it tells.
A brief section covers Lynch's version of the film, with Jodorowsky's sadness that someome may do his dream better than he can, turning to happiness at its failure, before the attempts to change the "ecology of cinema" lead to his acceptance at its passing, where Dune "is in the world"-even if the film was "killed", it can be seen everywhere, from Star Wars, heavily influenced by the sword fights of Dune, to the visual display of the Terminator, to Alien that practically reunited most of the creative team of the unrealised Dune leaving its visual and narrative fingerprints over hundreds of films across science fiction and beyond, the ripples of Dune's near-miss with cinema felt even today, esspecially in Jodorowsky's subsequent comic with Mobeius, The Incal, and The Metabarons, with Juan Giménez, and even his belief that one day an animated Dune will finally be made.
In a way thus, Dune did, in its jawdropping ambition, truly opened the minds of cinema, and the film ends on a practical manifesto for the director's entire cinematic work. Pavich's film captures that ambition perfectly, and tells the story of one of the greatest unmade films never made. Jodorowsky's Dune is one of those films that, simply put, is as exciting, eyeopening, and, indeed, mind-expanding as any of its subjects works, and is a must-see for anyone with a love for his work, or indeed the science-fiction genre in general.
For every masterpiece of cinema there is an equally great unmade film, from Kubrick's Napoleon, a meticulously researched masterpiece saved, at least partly in sumpteous book form, to the bizarre Burton-directed, Nic Cage-starring Superman Lives that exists on in the human imagination in faded polaroids of Cage in costume, to the fever dream that is the Nick Cave scripted sequel to Gladiator. But above these all, in scale and notoriety, both due to its crew and cast, and its pure visionary ambition, is the unmade adaption of Frank Herbert's Dune by Franco-Chilean director and king of the midnight movie, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the subject of Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary.
Over two hours including interviews with Jodorowsky and his sons, his collaborators on the film, ranging from HR Giger to producer Michel Seydoux, and his admirers, including Danish director, Nicolas Winding Refn together with stacks of concept art, and animation to attempt to create a glimpse of the work that never was, Pavich attempts to unpick the pre-production of a film that could have included cultural touchstones ranging from Pink Floyd to Orson Welles to Salvador Dali, and could well, despite its colossal 14 hour mooted runtime, have become the ultimate counter-culture film of all time, whose embroyic influence can be seen from Terminator to Star Wars across science fiction.
At the centre of this film, undoubtedly, is Jodorowsky himself-now in his eighties, though the film prefaces his initial appearance with a nearly two minute pan through his impressively invidivualistic house, lingering upon his work, from films to novels, to comic books, and speaking for large sections of this film in his native Spanish, he is still an impressively animated figure, still clearly filled with the excitement of the potential that Dune had, as a postively epoch-defining, mind-opening film, determined, as many of Jodorowsky's work has been before and after, to be part-film, part magical ritual, a concious-expanding film. At points, the interview peels back the years subsequent to his failure, and his excitement and enthuasiam comes through in both English and Spanish.
After this opening, we are introduced to the film's talking heads, and the colossal book that practically forms the sole artifact surviving from this film, with two of the film makers, artist Chris Foss, tasked with the film's spaceship and machine design, and critic Faraci agreeing that Dune may well have not only been ahead of its time, but also singlehandedly would have changed the course of science-fiction cinema, bigger than 2001 and Star Wars. We are then treated to a potted history of Jodoroswky's work prior to Dune, including his theatre work, the arresting Fando y Lis, a film that inspired a riot, and his film making ethos, together with his pioneer spirit. his potted history continues with the "miraculous and terrible" El Topo, the original "midnight movie", which begins to show his range of talents and ability as a film maker. After the making of the even more critically acclaimed The Holy Mountain, a beautiful if bizarre film partly financed by the Beatles and rich with astonishing visual imagery, and a plot that takes influence from alchemy and the tarot.
The stage is now set for Jodoroswky and producer Seydoux to begin work on their next film, and without question, Jodorowsky decides on Frank Herbert's Dune, with Seydoux and Jodorowsky, together with their friends and colleagues giving a cliff-notes version of the story, complete with the first of many uses of the concept art by Foss, french comic book artist and Swiss artist HR Giger (for who this marks the last film appearance before his untimely death in 2014), with Jodorowsky describing the complexity of Herbert's work as close to Proust, with the first 100 pages aalmost completely opaque. We are thus introduced to Jodorowsky's "warriors", from Mobieus, France's most ttalented comic book artist, who Alejandro describes as his "camera", who also drew the storyboards for the film-it is these drawings that are subsequently used for the animated sections.
The ambition of the film begins to become clear, as well as Jodorowsky's love of cinema as a medium with the film's opening shot, in which we traverse the galaxy, past destroyed ships and space battles and through galaxies, passing a spice convoy, to eventually arrive at Dune itself. It is a madly ambitious moment, and undeniably we can see echoes of it in Star Wars, but on a scale unimaginable, and here the special effects genius behind 2001, Douglas Trumbull, is approached-though this fails, the duo approach Dan O'Bannon, another special effects creator, who is represented here by his widow, and archive recordings, who meets Jodoroswky, promptly takes drugs with him, and promptly joins the project, moving to Paris.
From here, Jodorowosky begins to collect together his cast and crew, from David Carradine, who Jodorowsky recounts a story that's as odd as anything in the film. We are promptly introduced to Pink Floyd, and perhaps the most cinematic moment featuring any collaborator on Dune, with Pink Floyd approached eating hamburgers, and promptly insulted by an angry Jodorowsky, who is particularly animated during this sequence. Another animated sequence, and, with Paul's conception, and subsequent background we get a sense of how transcendental and otherworldly Dune could have been, with the director casting his own son, Brontis as Paul, including a bewildering training regime that borders on the mildly abusive, training his son to fight unarmed and with weaponry, with Brontis himself regarding his trainer as merciless. For the first time, we get a true sense of an element of a dark side to the director, his ability to choose the perfect people, but also his fantacism to the idea, regarding Brotis as the first of many young people to have their lives changes and their minds expanded by the film, only added to by Foss and Bannon's recollections, with Foss adding, in one of the single best moments of the film, that he has never read the novel.
We certainly, throughout this film, get a sense of Jodorowsky's respect for his creators, his passion for the film, and clearly shows his need to get the best possible work out of his artists, actors and musicians, including his attempts to get surrealist godfather Salvador Dali to play the emperor, in one of the film's strangest moments, in which Jodorowsky uses a tarot card to invite him to a meeting, leading to a globe-hopping set of meetings, and an increasingly insane number of gifts and requests, including flaming giraffes and helicopters, and an exorbitant salary to come to an agreement, leading to the use of a robot in most of the Emperor's scenes to avoid this. With the introduction of Giger, to provide the art, and the band Magma the music for the villains Harkonens, with Mick Jagger playing Feyd, and Orson Welles the Baron Harkonen, the team is complete, and the film returns to the plot, and one of its most brutal possible scenes, beautifully underscored by discordant rock music, and accompanied by Giger's work, which feels like a practical prototype of his later work on Alien.
With this world beautifully rendered, leading to the truly jawdropping final scene that feels like the most obvious example of Jodorowsky's transcendenteal beliefs, in which he becomes divorced from the physical world, to become a spirit that can inhabit anyone, which practically feels like a manifestation of the Jungian Collective unconcious, becoming the centre of the universe as the planet itself becomes the saviour of the galaxy, leading to the unveilling of the Dune bible, of which only three exist, the surviving element of this lost masterpiece.
It is here however, that the film's optimism reaches hard reality, with everyone from Disney to Warner Bros passing on the film, and we get a sense of Hollywood's folly, at least from the point of view of Jodorowsky and his crew, in not understanding the film, with the film running in at a mammoth fourteen hours, with Winding-Refn noting that Hollywood was scared of the film. It is to Pavich's credit that he also interviews Gary Kurtz, the producer of Star Wars who notes that this oversight should have been tackled, and Jodorowsky's lack of flexibility damaged the film. For the first time, we see Jodorowsky angry at the film's failure, cursing Hollywood then-and honestly today-for its obsession with money over the ability to move hearts and indeed minds through the stories it tells.
A brief section covers Lynch's version of the film, with Jodorowsky's sadness that someome may do his dream better than he can, turning to happiness at its failure, before the attempts to change the "ecology of cinema" lead to his acceptance at its passing, where Dune "is in the world"-even if the film was "killed", it can be seen everywhere, from Star Wars, heavily influenced by the sword fights of Dune, to the visual display of the Terminator, to Alien that practically reunited most of the creative team of the unrealised Dune leaving its visual and narrative fingerprints over hundreds of films across science fiction and beyond, the ripples of Dune's near-miss with cinema felt even today, esspecially in Jodorowsky's subsequent comic with Mobeius, The Incal, and The Metabarons, with Juan Giménez, and even his belief that one day an animated Dune will finally be made.
In a way thus, Dune did, in its jawdropping ambition, truly opened the minds of cinema, and the film ends on a practical manifesto for the director's entire cinematic work. Pavich's film captures that ambition perfectly, and tells the story of one of the greatest unmade films never made. Jodorowsky's Dune is one of those films that, simply put, is as exciting, eyeopening, and, indeed, mind-expanding as any of its subjects works, and is a must-see for anyone with a love for his work, or indeed the science-fiction genre in general.
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