kagablog

Directed by Martin Scorsese

screenplay by Carlos Castaneda

soundtrack by Robert Fripp

starring Micheal Crighton, Alexandro Jodorowsky, Omar Sharif, John Cassavetes and Louise Fletcher as La Gorda

Martin Scorsese originally intended to direct Jack Nicholson in Hunter.S.Thompson’s FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS in 1976. But after failing to aquire the rights, Scorsese instead turned his attentions to the ‘unfilmable’ Carlos Castaneda books. The result is the classic which we have come to know as JOURNEY TO IXTLAN. Here, at the height of his visual acuity, Scorsese’s mis en scene’s of ‘modern sorcery’ in the sun stripped squares of Oxaca, Mexico City and the brutal magnificence of the Sonora desert capture the ethos of the entire decade. It is interesting to note that Micheal Crighton, the director of COMA and author of such blockbuster fiction as JURASSIC PARK, was once the original choice of director Nicholas Roeg for the lead in his opus THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. The seven-foot Crighton foreshadows all his fictions in his cold portrayal of the elusive Carlos Castaneda. Scripted by the elusive Castaneda himself [Whom Scorsese never even met! All negotiations were done through the publisher and a mysterious intermediary group called Cleargreen.] The screenplay rapidly sheds its obvious psychedelic overtones and grapples with the jugular of magical reality itself. Shot in lush, panoramic realism, under the photographic direction of a young Dante Spinotti, the film captures the timeless cycles and expanses of the desert in which its protagonist grapples with magic and spiritual identity under the mercurial tutelage of the feather-hatted Don Juan [played by a ruthless and yet maniacally hilarious Jodorowsky]. Omar Sharif creates a startling and terrifying character in Don Genaro, don Juan’s aide de Camp. Together this duo make a Jungian Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, rainbow-tripping their way through the wreckage of sixties motif’s toward the Everyman-like uncertain future of the Castaneda protagonist. The nihilism of the piece is captured by Louise Fletcher’s cameo. In her poignant monologue, after a fatal psychic defeat at the hands of Castaneda, she describes, without any emotion whatsoever, how she was forced to stalk her own son and seek his death in her quest for spiritual freedom. This brutal, yet compelling pathology lies at the heart of the heartless seventies, captured ruthlessly by Scorsese, a decade which began with the doves of peace and ended with the corporate uprisings and soul-veneer of the eighties. A lush soundtrack by Robert Fripp underscores all of this, lending a bittersweet clarity to this post-modern quest for freedom. [Brian Eno plays guitar during the jaguar hunting scene!]

the recent re-release of this classic masterpiece on dvd is a worthy addition to any psychedelic-enhanced week-end…