Jean-Louis Jorge, the missing frame in the Dominican filmstrip
Jean-Louis Jorge (left) and the Colombian Filmmaker Luis Ospina (right).
No exhaustive review of the history of Dominican cinema would be complete without making reference to the work of Jean-Louis Jorge, the Dominican filmmaker, screen-writer, tv producer and theater director. Born in Santiago de los Caballeros to a Dominican father and a French mother in 1947, his movies slid into oblivion for decades, until a recent homage contributed to the rediscovery of his work.
Jean-Louis arrives in Los Angeles, USA, in 1967 to study Naval Architecture at UCLA. His life with cinema starts when he decides to leave these studies behind and joins the Department of Theater, Film and Television. After directing a couple of short films, he embarks on a first feature-lenght movie for his graduation thesis. Shot in Los Angeles, it was released in 1973 under the title Serpents of the Pirate’s Moon. Made on a very low budget, the film was produced, written, directed and edited by Jean-Louis himself. Its aesthetics is reminiscent of the 60’s avant-garde. The themes of prostitution, queerness, love, and day to day life are treated with an ease that one wouldn’t see on mainstream media for decades. It is the kind of film that fits comfortably as a Midnight Movie next to a Jodorowsky’s El Topo screening in New York in the 70’s. The same kind John Lennon and Yoko Ono regularly attended to.
The film was awarded the Grand Prix Cinéma d'Aujourd´hui at the Festival international du jeune cinéma de Hyères, celebrated in Toulon, France. Following this success, he moves to Paris where he releases, in 1976, his second feature-length film Mélodrame. Selected for the Semaine de la Critique of the Cannes Film Festival, the film is based on the on-screen romances of Rudolph Valentino and Pola Negri, two stars of the silent film era of Hollywood. References to this era abound in the movie. Shot in black and white, the film evokes an escheresque feel, blending reality and cinema set in a way that, to the observer, can at some point become disorienting as to discern which is which. His films have that touch that only cinéma d'auteur can, somehow, provide. Every shot feels meticulously planned, as there seems to be a preference for long-takes.
He went on to direct one more feature film, theatre plays and to become a successful tv producer for variety shows in the Dominican Republic. He died in Santo Domingo, on 13th of March 2000, under tragic circumstances. Twenty years later and thanks to the Dominican-Mexican creative duo Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas, his legacy lives on. In 2019 Guzmán and Cardenas released Holy Beasts, a homage-film dedicated to Jean-Louis Jorge. More recently, in June 2021, the Cineteca Nacional in México City presented a retrospective of his work.
We invite you to experience the unique films of Jean-Louis Jorge with this double-feature presentation of Serpents of the Pirate’s Moon and Mélodrame.
