Jodorowsky's Dune (Blu-ray + DVD)

“What is the goal of life? It’s to create yourself a soul.”Trouble at the first words, the quote above refuses humanity to anyone unwilling to put in the effort to “make” a soul. The hidden lie, of course, is: which totalitarian regime judges what work is soulful? And such is needed; something as ad omnibus as the pre-Revolutionary Roman Church which, after all, threw in the soul gratis with the flesh but held a proprietary accompt over how you treated it.I have not seen El Topo or The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky but I will, because I wish to see what his Dune might have been like. That being said, any person who pauses to think should thank their lucky stars that Jodorowsky was stopped before he could make this film and destroy dozens of lives and untold wealth in the desert of Algiers.Simply put: no man who could do what Jodorowsky did to his own son should have any position of authority ever. Those old silent films were not worth running cattle off of cliffs to their deaths; this film would have been no different.Lots of charming stories are told by the would-be crew, most are quite entertaining and informative, painting Jodorowsky as an even more driven Steve Jobs. H.R. Giger sounds like a precocious prepubescent boy with a frog in his throat here; this dashes one’s expectations of a gravel-voiced necromantic cyberneticist but a surprising disconnect between a non-performing artist and his work is hardly new, just as Nicolas Winding Refn’s raging paranoia is not shocking but still unpleasant.Indeed, as quirky as Jodorowsky is, with his expressive hands and onomatopoeia, the most threatening figures in this documentary are the rabid fanboys. Refn quietly seethes over the damage done by Star Wars and the “megabucks blockbuster structure,” ignoring that Jaws started that two years prior. Some blame the same big American film corporations that funded 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, both science fiction films with oddly spiritual takes, as out to destroy higher consciousness once and for all.(Oddly, no one blames Michel Seydoux, who had never produced any film, let alone with a Chilean megalomaniac, before 1973, the year Seydoux distributed The Holy Mountain in Europe and offered, and failed, to fund said maniac’s next.)The fanboys cite Frank Herbert’s spice “melange” as a consciousness-expanding drug, which makes some sense since Jodorowsky’s idea was to recreate ’60s LSD visions as drug-free cinema. But they also compare Arrakis, or Dune, to Afghanistan as a place of supreme geopolitical importance. What else do they get wrong?In story, sandworms exude melange and are only found on Arrakis. Melange offers man life extension, expanded consciousness and awareness, and precognition. Only precognition allows safe use of the faster-than-light Holtzman drive. Thus melange alone creates the entire Galactic economy. The water of life, another sandworm product, offers access to past lives but it too becomes another control battle.For Herbert, the spice of Dune is a hydraulic despotism, a lens to concentrate and examine political power, which is the core of Dune: a comparatively mature contemplation of power, its benefits and costs, its ultimate goals. I say “comparatively” because it is the sin of critics who know nothing of Renaissance England to babble about how William Shakespeare understood power and politics, who knew nothing of the sort. Shakespeare lived not too long after Agincourt, when men at arms did all the fighting as a disorganized mob, when authority end law extended as far as your mailed fist or naked voice could project. (When you read a Shakespearean king and his words suddenly shift into hyperdrive, the tingle up your spine is exactly this projection.)Herbert began Dune as a novel about Liet-Kynes and desert ecologies, but by publication in 1965 (by Chiltons!) the true subject was power and CHOAM, his feo-totalitarian cartel earning most of its profits from spice, was explicitly based on OPEC (prescience indeed). Religion in Dune is taken seriously but never literally, as expression of human will, faith and drive. In Herbert, as in Heinlein, expanded consciousness leads only to philosophy on how and when to use governing force. Hippie visions need not apply.David Lynch’s Dune was quite faithful to the book but inspires hostility from Jodorowsky and others, who come looking for religious ecstasy and get nothing but Machiavellian philosophy (the original maligned Republican). The friend who recommended Herbert’s novel to Jodorowsky may not have known how ill-fit the two minds were. Jodorowsky follows Strindberg, Lynch an American magical realism; Lynch frets the novel’s politics less. (Or perhaps magical naturalism: consider the ear in Blue Velvet: a call to adventure in the hero’s journey to the underworld, where nothing is supernatural at all but the world is still a strange and dangerous place.)The fanboys also natter on how this unmade film influenced others. Some are honest and direct: Dan O’Bannon, post-Jodo, hired Giger to design the Xenomorph for Alien. But how many other films did this affect? They mention the Terminator’s computer readout vision as a legacy of the unmade Dune’s storyboards, but by 1973 we had already seen Westworld through Yul Brynner’s infrared vision. How many people saw Jodo’s storyboard books? How many were made when only two still exist?As I watch, at some point, El Topo, I will not like it. Messianic, religio-political Latin/Catholic visions always leave me cold. But I hope to be fascinated at least once as I was by this documentary.

Our popular culture is steeped in a fascination with the production and marketing of movies that often threatens to eclipse our interest in movies themselves.What we are woefully in the dark about is the preproduction of movies, so much so that even though this documentary was all about Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of my favorite directors of all time, I was skeptical that it could hold my interest, seeing as it was all about a film that was cancelled before a single shot was taken. It seemed that even a best case scenario would only have one pining to see a movie that never could be seen, rather than enjoying the movie one is seeing.My skepticism melted away quickly as I watched this. Jodorowsky, as anyone who's listened to his commentary on El Topo or Holy Mountain knows, is fascinating to listen to as well as to act. His ideas are so grandiose and at the same time so heartfelt, his erudition so inspirational, his spirit so untamed even at age 84, the age when he was filmed for this project. But his Dune is remarkable for how much other top notch talent was brought in. There's HR Giger of Alien fame, Dan O'Bannon who did Dark Star and Alien, Chris Foss, whose illustrations of space ships filled the Terran Trade Authority books that so fascinated me as a child, and of course Mœbius, that incredible French comic book artist who went on to do so many fascinating collaborations with Jodorowksy. And all of them participated in some fantastic work, including a full storyboard by Mœbius, which is brilliantly animated here, sumptuous costume sketches, a full-color painting of a zebra striped, psychedelic hued pirate spaceship hemorrhaging spice by Foss and four stunning airbrush paintings of the Harkonnen castle by Giger, And then at the end, just after the story is told of how Hollywood turned down an opportunity to fund the project to a score of a (measly sounding to today's ears) $15 million, irony of all ironies because they doubted that big budget, special effects laden science fiction epics would be capable of attracting big audiences (and more reasonably because they were afraid that Jodorowsky would make the movie too long and too challenging for American audiences) documentary makers tack on a pretty astounding montage of how many of the Dune ideas have been translated into such memorable films as Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Contact.The film is relatively merciful on David Lynch's Dune, but the minuscule sampling they do have, featuring Sting, of course, makes it hilariously clear that Lynch's version was simply on a much lesser plane than Jodorowsky's. Lynch would bounce back to make the amazing Wild At Heart, which I just watched recently (wow!), but one gets the sense that a part of Jodorowksy never recovered completely from having this project, which could well have been his masterpiece, scuttled so unceremoniously.

Telling the story of cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky's most ambitious, yet ultimately ill-fated project. Jodorowsky granted documentary director Frank Pavich, unprecedented access to his production materials, including his hard-bound book, which has come to be known as the 'Dune Bible', containing his meticulously detailed story boards.Frank Pavich's documentary gives us a spellbinding glimpse into the mind of Jodorowsky and shows the unwavering passion he retains for his aborted project. It explains how one visionary director's ideas have influenced just about every Sci-fi movie from the 70's until today. Jodorowsky spent months with Moebius working on storyboards and concepts. It would seem that every studio who recieved a copy of his hard bound 'Dune Bible' and rejected it, has since rather blatantly borrowed from it! Certainly no fan of the Hollywood system, Jodorowsky is not bitter or angry about any of this.Jodorowskys never completed, DUNE has always been of particular interest to me as an admirer of H.R. Giger, Jean 'Moebius' Giraud, Dan O'Bannon and Chris Foss. The collapse of the project meant that all of those talents moved on to what would become a classic of Science Fiction...ALIEN! It also influenced many other films, including Star Wars.This release is a Blu-Ray + DVD Combo pack.

Everything Perfect. Only drawback: the Blu-ray Disc seemingly will play only on a Region 1 Blu-Ray Player, which I don‘ t Happen to possess.

Engaging insight into the film-maker's preparatory process for a film that was never in the end made (Note that although it is advertised as Blu-ray, it shows a DVD logo on the case image and a DVD disc was in fact included in the case alongside the Blu-ray version, as I had hoped. True at least of my purchase).

Quick delivery to Germany, everything exactly as described. Thanks!

William Gibson wrote a short story in the 80s called "The Gernsback Continuum" in which the main character experiences a retro-futurist America that never existed. Jodorowsky's Dune evokes that same sort of nostalgia-for-that-which-never-was. We have Lynch's vision of Dune, and the imagery in that film is enough that certain images (Guild navigators, for instance) are impossible to avoid when rereading Herbert's books. However: Salvador Dali as the Emperor? Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen?I'd like to live in a world where Jodorowsky created his version of Dune. I'd love to see the film landscape that would have resulted in the mixture of it and Bladerunner. This documentary shares that vision, and for that sense of wistfulness alone, this documentary is well worth it.