Jodorowsky’s Trance

• In Event: Sociology of the Trace and the Américas

Abstract

We usually imagine precarity within its negative definition, but can we think through other formulations that regard its potential generative capacity? Thinking about trance states and the meaning and production of alterity, in this paper I analyze Jodorosky’s recent film, Dance of Reality (2014). I particularly situate this text in relation to other filmic spatial imaginaries of the Atacama desert, a site of precarious ecologies, and collective burial after Pinochet’s regime. The desert has often been visualized as the locus of projection, fabulation, imperceptible traces, and psychomagic encounter with the indigenous other, as well as the human uninhabitable. I analyze the cinematic inhabitance of trance states, where Jodorowsky’s visual method functions in-between the real and unreal as a way to play with the rehearsal of the normative. Specifically, I unpack Jodorowsky's use of the transvestite, the circus, and the psyche as central tropes of his visual productions and address the blurring of reality/surreality/and the unreal that are at the heart of his cinematic troubling of time and space. What kinds of worlds does Jodorowsky propose that bend and extend normative accounts of sociological reality? How does the non-literal quality of Jodorosky’s cinematic eye trouble what we mean by exclusion and precarity? What emerges in this cinematic language as an impasse out of the normative into the realm of the elsewhere?

Author

• Macarena Gómez-Barris, University of Southern California