Ritual horror and the wounded body. A circus-set psychodrama of trauma, mutilation and identity, the most narratively coherent of Jodorowsky's symbolic films.
Why I keep it. Where The Holy Mountain dispenses with narrative, Santa Sangre keeps a story while holding the same ritual-and-trauma mode: a cult of the armless saint, a son who becomes his mother's hands, violence staged as ceremony. The wounded body as the centre of meaning is the tradition's preoccupation, and Jodorowsky films it with the directness the power-electronics and death-industrial scenes bring to sound.
Made in Italy with Mexican settings, the film is more controlled than Jodorowsky's earlier work but no less transgressive in subject. Its imagery of mutilation, possession and the body marked by trauma rhymes with the tradition's long interest in the abject, the figure damaged and remade. The score is conventional, so I keep for sensibility, not sound.
Jodorowsky belongs to no tradition lineage, but Santa Sangre sits naturally beside the ritual end of the influenced field. It is the narrative companion to The Holy Mountain, the same instinct given a story to carry it.
This film is documented in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene