Thursday September 5
Fighting off a wave of tiredness brought on by the day job, I made my
way to the Factory Theatre in Marrickville on Thursday for the opening
night of the 2013 Sydney Underground Film Festival. This setting is
perfect for a festival such as this. With a wealth of weird, wild indie
features and controversial documentaries, I embraced this challenge and
set out to take full advantage of the opportunity to catch some of the
talk-of-the-town films that screened recently in Melbourne. Drinks and
pizza were supplied and consumed and we made our way into Cinema 1, the
largest, for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s
The Dance of Reality.
REVIEW: The Dance of Reality
As you watch a film like El Topo, one of the many questions you ask
yourself is: what sort of person could have made this film? Well, in The
Dance of Reality, the expectedly bonkers return of veteran Chilean
auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky to the screen for the first time since 1990,
we are privileged to an autobiographical insight (with many an
imaginative, mythological twist) into his childhood and family. While
the crazy genius has remained a mystery for some time, I wonder how much
we really learn about him in this film, and how much has been augmented
to keep up the grand illusion of his life. In the realm of Jodorowsky,
responsible for some of the most searing cinematic images I have ever
seen – his films are an example of gluttonous surrealism, indulgent but
calculated – this is actually pretty accessible. Having said that, he
doesn’t skimp on the strange stuff.
Continue reading this review, and check out reviews from Day 2 (
Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction and
Magic Magic) at
Graffiti With Punctuation.
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