"Jodorowsky's Dune": the mad epic of a cursed film

From the missed appointments of Orson Welles to the abandonments of Stanley Kubrick, unfinished films permeate our imagination on the fringes of official history. Like the pharaonic adaptation of the novel "Dune" by Frank Herbert, started in 1975 by Alejandro Jodorowsky and thrown to the nettles two years later for lack of funding. The documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune" retraces the crazy epic of this cursed film, the embodiment of all shattered cinema dreams.

This article was originally published in March 2016.

What happens when a film fails? In most cases, it sinks into oblivion, crumpling a few careers, ending its trajectory in a closet that the industry hastens to seal. But from time to time, a feature film in the making is so talked about that it persists as an object of fantasy after its scrapping, constituting a salience in the collective imagination.

The particularity of these "quasi-works" is that they are those of recognized authors who, tackling subjects close to their hearts, outline the promise of grandiose performances in which their know-how would find a new form of achievement. Thus, Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick both broke their teeth on Napoleon, developing an obsession and an ambition commensurate with the character (Kubrick announced that he was holding the "greatest film ever made").

Orson Welles has many aborted projects under his belt, including the iconic The Other Side of the Wind, which was stalled by endless procedures, which contributes to his legend as an unmanageable (or abused) director [update: the project was taken over by actor Peter Bogdanovich, and a montage was released in 2018 on Netflix, editor's note]. Closer to home, we can cite Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis [updated: Coppola would have found a source of financing and a distributor, editor's note], whose provisional budget made the studios back down, Ronnie Rocket, which David Lynch had developed without success for years, or Tim Burton's Superman Lives, with Nicolas Cage in the main role, which made geeks fantasize to the point of crushing adaptations by Bryan Singer and Zach Snyder with its shadow.

Not only do these ghost films mark our imagination, but they often have very real effects on the filmography of their creators, and even on the history of the seventh art. Thus, Stanley Kubrick abandoned The Aryan Papers, because Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, released at the same time, dealt with a similar subject. The astonishing bond of the two filmmakers does not stop there, since Spielberg realizes in 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, another aborted project of Kubrick.

Certain cursed works also become the subject of films, such as The Man Who Killed Don Quixote by Terry Gilliam, immortalized by the dazzling making of Lost in La Mancha, or The Inferno by Henri-Georges Clouzot, re-examined in 2009 in a documentary by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea. In any case, the corpus of anecdotes linked to the preparation or the shooting (often catastrophic) generates a surge of fantasy and permeates our (pop) culture as surely as the masterpieces of their authors.

PRINT LEGEND

Among these fantasy films, there is one that surpasses all the others in its cult aura, thanks to the incredible stories that surround its conception and the gigantism of its ambitions: Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune. It was therefore logical and almost necessary for a film to focus on printing its legend.

“If my 'Dune' had gone all the way, I would have become a kind of Spielberg. »Alejandro Jodorowsky

For Jodorowsky’s Dune, director Frank Pavich brought together the protagonists and assembled as many archives as possible, in order to reconstruct the adventure and probe its repercussions. And it is of course Jodorowsky himself, an octogenarian overflowing with youthful energy, who stands out as the hero of this documentary to the glory of thwarted dreams. It was in 1975 that the Mexican artist began his adaptation of Dune, the cornerstone of SF literature by Frank Herbert.

His previous film, The Sacred Mountain, had some success in Europe despite its furious madness, and its producer Michel Seydoux decided to give him carte blanche. It was enough to release the megalomania of Jodo who then wishes to "create a prophet to change the young minds of the whole world" and goes in search of an army of "spiritual warriors" to give substance to his vision.

The documentary recounts in detail the series of improbable encounters that shape the cast of Dune, from the greatest graphic artists (Moebius, Chris Foss, H.R.Giger) to the most improbable actors (Udo Kier, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles or Salvador Dalí, who asks to be paid 100,000 dollars per minute), passing by some great rock groups of the time, such as Pink Floyd and Magma. Each testimony attests to the frightening fascination exerted by the guru Jodorowsky, who hypnotizes (literally) the special effects specialist Dan O'Bannon and subjects his own son Brontis to inhuman training (six hours of martial arts a day, seven days a week, for two years) so that he can become the young hero of the film.

REINCARNATIONS

After two years of development, the film is materialized in the form of a huge book, a kind of mega storyboard detailing each shot, each place and each character, which is given to the Hollywood majors in order to bring together the 5 million missing dollars. And that's where everything collapses, in the confrontation between an intractable artist (who planned a film of twelve or even twenty hours!) and the calculating financiers of the "dream factory". You have to see this stunning sequence in which Jodorowsky, pulling a large wad of cash from his pocket, rails against this soulless god who makes the world go round.

If the documentary lacks a bit of critical reverse shot, it goes beyond the simple opposition between artist/system (or dream/realism) by describing how this imaginary monument has had a lasting influence on the aesthetics of science fiction and the representation of mysticism in cinema, from Alien to Prometheus via Contact or Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It also shows that this shipwreck is the starting point of the many comic strips written by Jodorowsky, which were to brand generations of readers. "If my Dune had gone all the way, I would have become a kind of Spielberg, and my comic strip The Incal would not have existed", confided to us the filmmaker at Cannes in 2013. But the great strength of Jodorowsky's Dune holds especially in its way of revealing an analogy between the script of the film and the history of its production. Indeed, this revisited Dune told the story of a hero who ends up with his head cut off, but whose soul survives by reincarnating across the entire galaxy. Either the precise reflection of the fate that awaited the film.

As if Alejandro Jodorowsky, inhabited by an extralucid vision, had himself prepared the destruction of his dream and its messianic diffusion in the contemporary unconscious. This is why Jodorowsky's Dune is the only fantasy film capable of containing all the others, the one in which each aspect validates a magical ascendancy of the imaginary over reality. If the cinema does not have the power to change the world, a dream of cinema thus seems to have already succeeded.