BY MONIQUE QUINTANA

For years, I have been too frightened to watch Alejandro Jodorowsky's film Santa Sangre. I suppose I was afraid that I would not understand it, that it would be too avant-garde for me, that I wouldn’t appreciate it or that I would think it was what some of my family members call ridiculous bendejo art. I watched the film two nights ago, and I am still reeling from the immense beauty of it. I find it grotesquely beautiful. I was visually and emotionally gutted. The film is about a young boy, Fenix, who grows up in a Mexican circus and is institutionalized after he endures his mother's dismemberment at the hands of his father and his father’s public suicide by self-mutilation.

The three most developed female characters in the film are a trinity of feminine beauty, and their aesthetics speak to the way men perceive female bodies and the female body politic. The main character’s mother, Concha, is a trapeze and aerial artist and cult leader who is dismembered by her own husband, whom she is very much in love with. Her armless body is the echo of the patron saint that she idolizes and also conjures the dismembered body Lavinia of Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus. At the core of all these crimes is sex. Concha is triggered when she sees her husband having sex with another woman, and her idol, Santa Sangre, had been raped by two men in the street. When their arms are severed, they are literally marked bodies.

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