“Endless Poetry”: Interview with Director/Production Designer Alejandro Jodorowsky

Endless Poetry (Poesía Sin Fin) marks director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s third collaboration with his preferred production designer: himself. Like his 1970s cult classics El Topo and The Holy Mountain, which he also styled, this latest extravaganza takes a phatasmagoric deep dive into poetic consciousness. It’s from that fathomless fount that the octogenarian creator reimagines his coming of age. 

The second filmed memoir in a projected series of five, Endless Poetry picks up where 2013’s The Dance of Reality left off, in Chile of the late 1930s. Jeremias Herskovits once again plays the young Alejandrito, an artistic soul who chafes under the brutish, philistine ways of his father (Brontis Jodorowsky, the filmmaker’s eldest son), if not of the entire Jodorowsky clan. Any tenderness lavished on the tweener comes from his mother (Pamela Flores), who sings every line of her dialogue in operatic soprano. 

From the outset Jodorowsky aligns his enterprise with the surreal. For openers, a giant paper train pulls into his hometown of Tocopillo bringing pro-fascist former president Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (Bastian Bodenhofe) back from exile. The visual antics continue as present-day buildings disappear behind life-size drawings of vintage façades. Before long, puppets, masquerades, raw meat and nude bodies of all sizes and shapes will spruce up the works. Welcome to Jodorowskyland, where the climate is nearly always theatrical.