Alejandro Jodorowsky visits his hometown and his childhood self (Jeremias Herskovits) in THE DANCE OF REALITY
THE DANCE OF REALITY (LA DANZA DE LA REALIDAD) (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 2013)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, May 23
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.danceofrealitymovie.com
Cult legend Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in twenty-three years is a deeply intimate, visually stunning journey into his childhood, a surreal Amarcord as only he can make it. In the gorgeous The Dance of Reality, the man behind such midnight-movie classics as 1970’s El Topo and 1973’s The Holy Mountain travels back to his hometown, the small coastal village of Tocopilla, Chile, where he relives and reimagines seminal moments in his life. The eighty-four-year-old Jodorowsky is often on-screen, melding past, present, and future, as his younger self (Jeremias Herskovits), sporting a gloriously ridiculous mound of golden curls, wanders among circus performers, amputees, and other oddballs and disenfranchised souls that would make Fellini proud. It’s a dazzling family affair in more ways than one: Jodorowsky’s son Brontis plays his father, Jaime, a Stalinist with a rather strong dislike for Chilean leader Carlos Ibáñez (Bastian Bodenhöfer), while son Adan plays the town anarchist (and composed the score) and son Cristóbal is a mystical theosophist. Jodorowsky’s mother, Sara (Pamela Flores), always wanted to be a singer, so he has the buxom woman deliver all her lines as if she is in an opera. And his wife, painter Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, designed the fantabulous costumes. “You and I have only been memories, never reality,” Jodorowsky says in voice-over. “Something is dreaming us. Give yourself to the illusion. Live!” Indeed, The Dance of Reality is like a dream, bathed in spectacular color and boasting a triumphant spirit even as death beckons.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in twenty-three years is a colorful melding of past, present, and future
Even the publicity for the film is handled with typical Jodorowskian flourish. “I see no difference between poetry and film. I see no difference between stripping the body and the soul naked. I am who I am,” he says in an online video introduction in which he sits completely naked, adding, “In full honesty, undressed boy, undressed soul, in pure poetry.” Jodorowsky (Santa Sangre, Fando y Lis) undresses himself for all to see in The Dance of Reality, a lovingly poetic and personal work of art beautifully shot by Jean-Marie Dreujou. It is Jodorowsky, so it’s also wild and unpredictable, flabbergasting and confusing, mesmerizing and charming. It also marks a new phase in the career of the comic-book writer, philosopher, playwright, and self-described “atheist mystic” who vows not to wait another two decades for his next film (and not just because he is in his mid-eighties) and is currently preparing a MoMA exhibition that might involve him reading tarot cards for museum visitors. “Films should have a purpose, to open our consciousness,” he says in that video introduction. The Dance of Reality is another fascinating stop on Jodorowsky’s continuing voyage of opening people’s consciousness and, perhaps, as he adds, to “begin to change the world.”
It’s a sight New Yorkers see all too often: flyers on the streets and in the subways seeking help in finding a missing man, woman, or child, who is often autistic. Sometimes they have happy endings, like when fourteen-year-old Eliceo Cortez returned to his mother’s arms in Brooklyn. But other times, the search ends in tragedy, as when the remains of fourteen-year-old Avonte Oquendo were discovered in the East River. In his solo narrative feature debut, director Sam Fleischner tells the compelling story of thirteen-year-old Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), a boy with Asperger syndrome who wanders away one day after school, riding the subways while his mother, Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz), desperately but calmly tries to find him. Mariana’s husband, Ricardo Sr. (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), is an illegal immigrant working on a job upstate, so he can’t come down to help, and she is hesitant to deal with the police, for obvious reasons. Meanwhile, her relationship with her teenage daughter, Carla (Azul Zorrilla), is strained because it was Carla’s job to pick up Ricky from a school that believes he would be better off in a special program elsewhere. Fleischner combines elements of his codirecting feature debut, Wah Do Dem, a fish-out-of-water tale about a Brooklyn musician who finds a new life in Jamaica, with Below the Brain, his visually stirring documentary about Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Carnival, in the lovingly rhythmic, poetically paced Stand Clear of the Closing Doors. Fleischner cuts between Mariana’s New York City, where she has to continue to work as a cleaning woman for wealthy families even as her boy is missing, and Ricky’s skewed yet beautiful view of a city, both inviting and frightening, that he is lost in. 
During Yom Kippur and the Passover seder, Jews around the world proclaim that “next year, may we be in Jerusalem.” In David Gaynes’s charming documentary, Next Year Jerusalem, this dream comes true for eight men and women at the Jewish Home for the Elderly in Fairfield, Connecticut. In 2011, JHE president and CEO Andrew Banoff and Rabbi Stephen Shulman arranged for eight of their residents to make a once-in-a-lifetime ten-day trip to Israel; what made this journey different, and very special, is that the group had an average age of ninety-one, ranging from Sandy Levin, eighty-two, to Bill Wein, ninety-seven. With all their infirmities and medications, canes and wheelchairs, they prepare for a great adventure, with Gaynes behind the camera himself as they share stories about their lives, contemplate their deaths, and express their sheer joy as their anticipation grows. Shortly before they leave, Rabbi Shulman has to explain that they have to be ready not only for someone to not be able to make it to Israel but, more critical, one of them not being able to come home, given their ages and health situations. But that isn’t going to stop any of them, especially not ninety-three-year-old Selma Rosenblatt, who isn’t about to let her twisted body get in the way. Meanwhile, eighty-seven-year-old Regine Arouette, who isn’t Jewish, looks forward to visiting several Christian landmarks. (The others on the trip are Helen Downs, ninety-one; Leslie Novis, ninety; Harry Shell, ninety-two; and Bill’s wife, Juna Wein, eighty-nine.) When they all head off to Israel, accompanied by such lovingly involved caretakers as Donnette Banton, thirty-six-year-old Gaynes (Saving Hubble, Keeper of the Kohn) keeps his camera focused on the senior citizens as they visit historic sites, placing their fabulous experience front and center. Next Year Jerusalem is a charming and delightful celebration of life at the end of life, a spirit-lifting film that shows that you’re never too old to say no. “Where are the Israels for which we personally have yet to travel?” Gaynes, who also served as editor and producer, asks in his director’s statement. Next Year Jerusalem opens May 16 at the Quad, with all weekend screenings followed by a Q&A with Gaynes. 
One of the greatest cinematic documents ever made about New York, Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery is playing at Anthology Film Archives on May 17 and 19 as part of “From Mae West to Punk: The Bowery on Film,” a three-day series that includes feature-length works and shorts that take place in and around one of the most famous thoroughfares in the world. The recent, stunning 35mm restoration of On the Bowery offers a new look at this underground classic, which caused a stir upon its release in 1956, winning prizes at the Venice Film Festival while earning criticism at home for daring to portray the grim reality of America’s dark underbelly. After spending six months living with the poor, destitute alcoholics on Skid Row as research, idealistic young filmmaker Rogosin spent the next four months making On the Bowery, a remarkable examination of the forgotten men of New York, ne’er-do-wells who can’t find jobs, sleep on the street, and will do just about anything for another drink. Rogosin centers the film around the true story of Ray Salyer, a journeyman railroad drifter stopping off in New York City seeking temporary employment. Salyer is quickly befriended by Gorman Hendricks, who not only shows Salyer the ropes but also manages to slyly take advantage of him. Although the film follows a general structure scripted by Mark Sufrin, much of it is improvised and shot on the sly, in glorious black-and-white by Richard Bagley. The sections in which Bagley turns his camera on the streets, showing the decrepit neighborhood under the El, set to Charles Mills’s subtle, jazzy score and marvelously edited by Carl Lerner, are pure poetry, yet another reason why On the Bowery is an American treasure. The film is screening with the 1964 short How Do You Like the Bowery?, in which Alan Raymond and Dan Halas pose the title question to Bowery denizens.
