Alejandro Jodorowsky's unrealized version of Frank Herbert's, DUNE

Poster for the unrealized Alejandro Jodorowsky version of Frank Herbert's, DUNE which would have starred Salvador Dali as the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (with a reported salary of $100,000 an hour), Orson Welles as the Baron Harkonnen, Charlotte Rampling as Lady Jessica, and Jodorowski himself as Duke Leto Atreides. Brontis Jodorowsky (his son) would've played Paul Atreides. Other actors would've included Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Alain Delon, Hervé Villechaize and Mick Jagger. Jodorowski organized Harkonnen visualizations by H.R. Giger, costumes by Moebius (Bladerunner, The Abyss, Tron, The Fifth Element), effects by Dan O'Bannon (who later wrote Alien), spaceship designs by Chris Foss and music by Pink Floyd, Magma, Henry Cow and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Dali and Jodorowsky quarreled over money, and just as the storyboards, designs, and script were finished, the financial backing dried up. Frank Herbert travelled to Europe in 1976 to find that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky's script would result in a 14-hour movie ("It was the size of a phonebook", Herbert later recalled). Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship. The rights for filming were sold once more, this time to Dino de Laurentiis. Although Jodorowsky was embittered by the experience, he stated that the Dune project changed his life.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky
and http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky.asp

Tusk (1980) by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Tusk (French title "Poo Lorn L'Elephant") is a 1980 film directed by cult film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky and written by Nicholas Niciphor . It is based on the novel Poo Lorn L'Elephant by Reginald Campbell.

In 1980, Alejandro Jodorowsky premiered his children's fable "Tusk", shot in India. Taken from Reginald Campbell's novel "Poo Lorn of the Elephants," the film explores the soul-mate relationship between a young British woman living in India and a highly prized elephant. The film exhibited little of the director's outlandish visual style and was never given wide release. Jodorowsky has since disowned the film.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusk_%28film%29

TUSK (In French with Spanish subtitles):

La Jetée (1962) by Chris Marker

La jetée (English: The Jetty or The Pier) (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. The film won the Prix Jean Vigo for short film. Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995) was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La jetée.

PLOT (Includes Spoilers): The survivors of a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris in the aftermath of the Third World War live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, but eventually settle upon a male prisoner whose vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time.

He is thrown back to the past again and again to a time before the war, when he had been a child. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman from his memory, who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be instead returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to again find the woman. He is returned and does find her, but an agent of his jailers has followed. The man finds that the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult at the hands of the agent.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e

La Jetee (in French with Spanish subtitles:






A Documentary about Chris Marker:

Giger's Necronomicon (1975) by H.R. Giger and J.J. Wittmer

A very rare documentary on the Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer, Hans Rudolf "Ruedi" Giger (pronounced /ˈɡiːɡər/, born in Chur, Grisons Canton, Switzerland, February 5, 1940. The documentary which features an amazing soundtrack is directed by H.R. Giger and J.J. Wittmer and was produced in 1975 and was released only in Japan. More on Giger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.R._Giger

Philip K. Dick; letter to Jeff Walker regarding the film, Bladerunner (1981)

Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose published work during his lifetime was almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences and addressed the nature of drug abuse, paranoia and schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.

The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. "I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards," Dick wrote of these stories. "In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real." Dick referred to himself as a "fictionalizing philosopher."

In addition to 44 published novels (as of January 2010), Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, nine of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

Blade Runner (1982), based on Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford. A screenplay had been in the works for years before Scott took the helm, with Dick being extremely critical of all versions. Dick was still apprehensive about how his story would be adapted for the film when the project was finally put into motion. Among other things, he refused to do a novelization of the film. But contrary to his initial reactions, when he was given an opportunity to see some of the special effects sequences of Los Angeles 2019, Dick was amazed that the environment was "exactly as how I'd imagined it!", though Ridley Scott has mentioned he had never even read the source material. Following the screening, Dick and Scott had a frank but cordial discussion of Blade Runner's themes and characters, and although they had incredibly differing views, Dick fully backed the film from then on. Dick died from a stroke less than four months before the release of the film.

More on PKD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick

Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830 - 1904) : The Father of Motion Pictures

Eadweard J. Muybridge (pronounced /ˌɛdwərd ˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was an English photographer, known primarily for his important pioneering work, with use of multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip that is used today.
For more on Eadweard J. Muybridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
Muybridge Buffalo Galloping (video): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Muybridge_Buffalo_galloping.gif

Buffalo Dance (1894) by William K. L. Dickson and William Heise

Buffalo Dance is an 1894 American 16-second black and white silent film shot in Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio. The film was made at the same time as Edison's Sioux Ghost Dance. It is one of the earliest films made featuring Native Americans. In this film, produced by William K. L. Dickson with William Heise as cinematographer, three Sioux warriors named Hair Coat, Parts His Hair and Last Horse dance in a circle and two other Native Americans sit behind them and accompany them with drums. According to the Edison catalog, the actors were "genuine Sioux Indians, in full war paint and war costumes." They were also apparently veterans of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Dance_%281894_film%29