The Spiritual Labyrinth of Magical Realism—On the Poetics of Redemption in <i>Endless Poetry</i>

In Chilean surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s autobiographical film Endless Poetry, the director constructs a poetic world full of psychoanalytic tension with his unique visual grammar. This fusion of autobiographical memory and artistic rhapsody sublimates individual traumatic memories into a universal allegory of artistic redemption through the stacked reorganisation of surreal symbols. The recurring symbolic imagery in the film is both a visual translation of Freudi-an-Lacanian psychoanalytic theories and a creative extension of Latin American magical realism in the medium of film. By deconstructing the linear narrative, Jodorowsky introduces the viewer to the maze of memory. In the process of constructing the memory labyrinth, a brilliant, dramatic exhibition of the Oedipus complex is accomplished. From the complex family relationships in childhood to the inner struggles in the process of growing up, they are all clearly presented in the performance, making the privatised trauma of growing up gain a collective aesthetic redemption.