March 8, 2018 At Work Buy High, Sell Cheap: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky By Elianna Kan Still from El Topo, written, directed, scored, and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky. For more than half a century, Alejandro Jodorowsky has been revered as a master of the surreal—a puppeteer of grotesque fantasy and psychedelic excess. In 1962, he became one of the founders of the Panic Movement in Paris; an avant-garde art collective inspired by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the group staged extremely violent theatrical “happenings” meant to shock and repel. At the 1968 premiere of Jodorowsky’s first feature-length film, Fando y Lis, a riot broke out. The film was later banned in Mexico for its brutal violence and graphic sexual content. He went on to become a cult figure of American counterculture with his films El topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973), and later, Santa sangre (1989). A falling out with his financial backer resulted in the former two films being embargoed for nearly three decades. Their recirculation, along with the 2013 release of the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune and The Dance of Reality—Jodorowsky’s first film after a twenty-three-year hiatus—restored the filmmaker as a figure of mass worship and fascination. When I encountered Jodorowsky, a wild filmmaker with the mischievous eyes, he seemed more tranquil than I’d expected him to be. I interviewed the now eighty-nine-year-old artist in March of 2015 around the English-language publication of his book Where the Bird Sings Best. The fictionalized autobiography tells the story of his Jewish family’s emigration from Ukraine to Chile and the impact of this history on his own coming-of-age. The book served as the basis for Dance of Reality and his most recent film, Endless Poetry. In both the film and the book, Jodorowsky turns his surrealist wand away from the allegorical figures of his past work toward the members of his own family, spinning them into characters of mythic proportions. They’re over-the-top fairy tales so full of light and sentimentality that they’re almost hard to reconcile with the violent angst of Fando y Lis. We spoke on Skype in Spanish for more than an hour. I was in New York, he was in Paris. I told him my parents were Soviet Jewish refugees and that questions of inherited memory preoccupy me, too, and we talked of how family stories from our past inform our identity, how we reshape and retell those stories. I worried my questions were too personal—more about his own family history and less about the films that had made him a legend—but he responded ecstatically, his voice often rising to a giddy high-pitched tone, and he laughed constantly. About an hour into our conversation, Jodorowsky’s wife, Pascale, interrupted to remind him he had to go soon. He asked if there was anything else I needed to know, anything at all. When we ended our conversation, he forgot to hang up the call. I could hear him walk away and exclaim, with childlike joy, “She was a Jew!” I sat and listened to the rustlings of their domesticity. After about ten minutes, they continued into the next room, and I could no longer hear their voices. The house eventually fell silent. What follows is a translation of our conversation. Read More
March 7, 2018 Arts & Culture On Tania Franco Klein’s “Our Life in the Shadows” By Anna Furman In Tania Franco Klein’s photo series “Our Life in the Shadows”—on display last month at Mexico City’s Material art fair and San Francisco’s Photofairs—women stare blankly at static television screens, mirrored toaster ovens, and hazily lit window curtains. A sense of ennui permeates the images, which depict domestic life in rich cinematic detail. Each subject is cropped so that her face is never fully in view. Often, the women are distorted by a reflection or an obfuscating prop. In The Waiting, one of the fifty images that comprise the series, a bowl of lipstick-marked cigarettes is perched ceremoniously atop a pillow. The living room is saturated with a moody cobalt blue. (Other images are steeped in jewel-toned reds and deep emerald greens.) Unpeopled and static, the photo is, conceivably, a portrait; the alluring mise-en-scène bears only traces of the person out of view. “My main character is emotions,” says the twenty-seven-year-old Mexico City–based photographer, who treats houses, furniture, and human subjects as vessels for those emotions—which range from anxiety and melancholy to existential stress. On February 23, at San Francisco’s Photofairs, three self-portraits from the series were on view. In the photographs, Franco Klein is topless, gazing out at a mattress-littered desert road; lying on a carpeted floor, facing her muddled reflection; and in a kitchen, keeled over in exhaustion. Anxious and rudderless, her characters are ill at ease in their environments. Though Franco Klein envisions each subject, including herself, in what she calls a “private jungle”—bathroom, sofa, train seat—there is invariably a voyeuristic element at play. By looking or even physically turning away from the camera, Franco Klein’s subjects are almost—but never completely—able to evade our gaze. Read More
March 7, 2018 Arts & Culture Too Much / Not Enough: Translating Reed Grachev By Sabrina Jaszi A tram outside the Leningrad metro in 1987. Two years ago, while translating the stories of Reed Grachev, a suppressed Russian writer of the mid twentieth century, I encountered a passage told from the perspective of a bus driver: He observes that the bus is very full, then looks in the mirror at an unnamed someone and wonders why she isn’t giving the “signal.” He starts the bus and sees that some people have been left behind at the stop. Unstated, but self-evident to any Russian reader, is that the unnamed someone is the conductor (in charge of selling tickets), who should have given the driver a “signal” to close the doors when the bus was at capacity. Grachev’s stories are full of public transportation. On trams, buses, trains, and trolleybuses, people are jostling and crowded. The sensory overload of these tight spaces contrasts with the emotional state of his characters, who are, almost without exception, alienated. Each is searching for a connection beyond the physical and is thus, one could say, in transit. The bus driver observes that the bus is packed, and yet not everyone has made it on. This dynamic of “too much / not enough” is omnipresent in Grachev’s work, which poignantly evokes the heightened isolation of individuals within a collectivized system. Read More
March 7, 2018 Bulletin Isabella Hammad Wins 2018 Plimpton Prize; David Sedaris Wins Terry Southern Prize By The Paris Review The Paris Review’s Spring Revel is a month away—tickets are available here—and the editorial committee of our board has chosen the winners of two annual prizes for outstanding contributions to the magazine. It’s with great pleasure that we announce our 2018 honorees, Isabella Hammad and David Sedaris. Read More
March 6, 2018 Redux Redux: Luisa Valenzuela, Gordon Lish, Thomas Healy By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, to celebrate the publication of The Writer’s Chapbook, the second volume from Paris Review Editions, we bring you a sampling of writers on writing. Read More
March 6, 2018 Hue's Hue Marian Blue, the Color of Angels, Virgins, and Other Untouchable Things By Katy Kelleher Still from Lady Shanghai Blue, by David Lynch. In a strip mall, next to a CVS Pharmacy, and tucked behind a Burger King, I learned about my angel. While I waited for a prescription to be filled, I wandered into the only New Age store in this small northeastern city. A woman with long gray hair led me into a back room—I suspect it was a repurposed broom closet—for a fifteen-minute psychic reading. The walls were covered with Turkey-red-calico fabric and faded yellow-ditsy floral tablecloths hanging from a constellation of multicolored thumbtacks. We sat together on a set of metal folding chairs, and she held my cold hands in her warm wrinkled ones. She told me in hushed tones that I had an angel, a ball of light that beamed out from behind my left shoulder. My angel, she said, was with me always, glowing steadily like a frosty star, invisible to everyone but her. She had always been able to see angels, she explained, and they were always the lightest, purest, sweetest baby blue. Read More