Fando y Lis

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“…tragedy and Grand-Guignol, poetry and vulgarity, comedy and melodrama, love and eroticism, happenings and set theory, bad taste and aesthetic refinement, the sacrilegious and the sacred, ritual death and the exaltation of life, the sordid and the sublime…”–Fernando Arrabal‘s recipe for Panic drama

DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky

FEATURING: Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal

PLOT: Sometime after an apocalypse, Fando and the paraplegic Lis leave a ruins to search for the legendary city of Tar, wheeling Lis on a cart along with their only possessions, a phonograph and a drum. They meet many strange characters on the road, including an androgynous Pope and a doctor who drinks Lis’ blood. Finally, Fando gets fed up with carting Lis about and kills her.

BACKGROUND:

• Alejandro Jodorowsky directed the movie without a script, just a one page outline, working from his memory of fellow Panic society member Fernando Arrabal‘s play of the same title (which Jodorowsky had previously directed many times).
• The movie’s premier at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival caused a scandal: viewers rioted, and Mexican director Emilio Fernandez swore he would kill Jodorowsky. After one more screening in Mexico City, the film was banned in Mexico, and had only a few unsuccessful international screenings thereafter.
• Never released on VHS, Fando y Lis remained virtually unknown until ABKCO restored and re-released it in 2009 as part of their major Jodorowsky revival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Fando and Lis painting their names on each others’ half-naked bodies, and then on the bare white walls of their dwelling, before dousing everything in sight (including each other) in buckets of black ink. It’s hippies having a blast, a groovy south-of-the-border happening, Panic-style.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Flaming piano; syringe-using vampire

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If you’ve ever seen a Jodorowsky movie before, you know what to expect. Fando y Lis is a parade of fantastical, shocking imagery, including snakes that penetrate a baby doll and a man who begs for blood (he extracts a donation with a syringe and drinks it from a brandy snifter). It’s not as polished and conceptually grand as later Jodorowosky masterpieces, but the basis of his style and major preoccupations can be seen along the dusty road to Tar.

Restoration trailer for Fando y Lis (1968)

COMMENTS: Fando y Lis is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most Surrealist movie (the black and white cinematography reinforces the connection)—although not necessarily his most surreal movie (there is a difference). The image of a piano player tinkling the ivories while his instrument burns looks like something that could have come straight out of a Salvador Dalí painting. Jodorwosky was briefly a member of the Surrealist circle (a flirtation that may have been limited to a single audience with Andre Breton, the founder of the movement) before deciding that, thirty years after its founding, the movement had grown stale and conservative. Together with playwright (and future director) Fernando Arrabal and painter Roland Topor, Jodorowsky founded the Panic movement. This collective took its name from the pagan god Pan, and was equally influenced by the Surrealists and Antonin Arnaud’s Theater of Cruelty. It also happily happened to jive with the hippie concept of “happenings.” Panic events were mostly live theater and performance art, consisting of shocking events like Jodorowsky slitting the throats of live geese and a giant sculpture of a vagina. Although the events featured plenty of weirdness and dispatches form the unconscious, the main intent was to shock devout sensibilities and to inject life (and more than a little blood) into the moribund Surrealist movement.

Fando y Lis, the first movement’s first theatrical film and perhaps its apex, was full of provocations that seem deliberately designed to ensure the movie would be banned in Catholic Mexico. There’s the ample nudity (including a pregnant woman, and brief full-frontal from the two leads). There’s parade of drag queens, who perform a striptease for Fando, There’s pedophilic rape (thankfully, purely symbolic and not at all explicit). There’s a black dominatrix with a whip. There’s frequent blasphemy (a Pope played by a woman in a fake beard, in a scene recalling the Surrealist classic L’Age d’Or). Fando and Lis play in a cemetery, climbing on the tombstones in an act of desecration. Mourners use scissors to snip flesh off a corpse and devour it in a mockery of the Eucharist. There’s literal, unsimulated  blood drinking. All of it was designed to spit in the eye of conservative, bourgeois Mexicans. According to Jodorowsky, the part Mexicans found most offensive was a scene where three old, white haired women play cards (using peaches as stakes) for the prize of kissing and caressing a boy toy. This was seen as an assault on the revered figure of the mother.

The frequent flashbacks, announced by the simple but effective editing technique of oscillating frames between present and past (and in Fando’s case, sparked by staring at a flaming tarantula on a spit), suggest that the journey undertaken here is primarily psychological. They reinforce that fact that Fando and Lis have real personas that persist—despite occasional inconsistencies, like Lis’ ability to walk in the body-painting fantasy—no matter the level of insanity the pair encounter in the “real” world. Fando remembers his father (who prophetically suggests his skin may be used for a drum), then actually encounters a living vision of his deathbed-bound mother on his journey. Another flashback reveals a reluctant and frightened young Fando sent to visit his dying mother, and how she had his father executed after mocking her spouse for impotence (the “black widow mother” is common, and autobiographical, Arrabal motif). Lis, meanwhile, has an extended flashback that (as tastefully as possible) shows her being symbolically molested by three adult men. Later, Fando witnesses a doll having the space between its legs ripped open and stuffed with worms. After becoming offended when Lis instinctively recoils from his intimate touch, Fando invites three random men to rape her. Despite the episodic nature of the main narrative, the characters’ personal histories provide some kind of anchor for the viewer.

Fando and Lis are, at the same time, two unique individuals with independent histories, and lovers so interwoven that they seem two sides of the same personality (or two heads on one body, as an intertitle describes them). Jodorowsky was obsessed with Jung’s theory of animus and anima: whenever you see a woman in a Jodorowsky movie, odds are good that she’s the male protagonist’s anima. Fando and Lis exist in a relationship that we might nowadays call “codependent,” although it’s also a sadomasochistic double helix. Fando goes so far as to play involuntary bondage games with his disabled lover. Although Fando appears fond of Lis most of the time, he frequently becomes irritated at her, treating her as a burden. Lis, for her part, is an eternal victim, literally unable to move about on her own. But from the movie’s perspective, there could not be a Fando without a Lis or a Lis without a Fando; the movie ends when Fando finally, unwisely, performs the ultimate rejection of Lis (just after she has taken the one defiant act of her life). Their journey together may be troubled, but when Jodorowsky shows them together in fantasy sequences—in an ink-splashed frolic, resurrected naked and as innocent as children—they are happy and whole.

After decades of watching Jodorowsky movies, I have concluded that, despite his constant references to esoteric holy texts, he is not a religious man (except, perhaps, for a genuine love for the paradoxical tenets of Zen Buddhism). A secular Jungian at heart, he is really only interested in religion insofar it serves a metaphor to illustrate human psychology. The mystical or religious references in his films are not instructions on reaching spiritual enlightenment, but pointers for achieving self-realization. Besides the purely secular Pyschomagic: A Healing Art, this focus be most obvious in Fando y Lis. It contains a minimum of religious references (outside of sacrilege specific to Christianity, which are a holdover from his Surrealist days). In the end, Fando and Lis’ journey to find the “heavenly” city of Tar is a chimera; all they really need is to find themselves, and to find themselves in each other.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is as if the grotesque of the later Fellini, mostly drained of their (nonartificial) blood, has wandered zombie-like onto a landscape created by a marriage of low budget with literary sources, to take part yet again in the most approved rituals of academic absurdist tradition.”–The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Episode of oddity follows episode of oddity… There are longueurs and moments of bizarre humour and pranksterism… Like a lot of 60s happenings, you had to be there.”–Peter Bradsaw, The Guardian (2020 re-release)

IMDB LINK: Fando and Lis (1968)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

“Legendary Chilean director’s banned film resurrects after years of abandonment” –  Basic background on the film from the student newspaper of Cal State Fullerton

LIST CANDIDATE: FANDO Y LIS (1968) – This site’s original List Candidate review

HOME VIDEO INFO: As mentioned in the background information, Fando y Lis was out of circulation for decades until the Jodorowsky revival of the 2000s. The first salvo was Anchor Bay’s 3-DVD collection including Fando,  El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and the CD soundtracks of the two later films, along with the short film “La Cravate,” a Jodorowksy commentary and a separate interview, and the full-length documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky (buy). A 2 DVD version of Fando and Lis (buy) (details unknown) was released in 2009. In 2021, the film was released in a restored version on a standalone Blu-ray (buy); most of the extras from the Anchor Bay edition were recycled, along with an informative introduction to the film by Columbia professor Richard Peña and the full-length documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky. All of these features and more (including collectible posters) can also be found on Arrow’s Jodorowsky box set (buy), which also includes  El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Psychomagic: A Healing Art (2019). Complete details of that set can be found in this post. Warning: this monster box set is out of print and currently fetches obscene prices. Finally, the film may be purchased or rented on VOD (buy or rent) for a reasonable outlay.

(This movie was originally nominated for review by “Zelenc” who called it a “must see film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Where to watch Fando y Lis