This week the Music Box is showing the new documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which details Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowksy’s failed attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune. The film shows us the production materials designed by Jodorowksy that illustrate his (suitably ridiculous) vision for the film. Film history is duly marked by the form’s major accomplishments, but, really, you could argue that film history has been shaped by the films that didn’t make it to screen too. Such storied examples as Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, Orson Welles’s adaptation of Hearts of Darkness (initially primed as his debut feature), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope have as much to say about each filmmaker’s impact and influence as the films they actually made. And the examples don’t end there. Here are five failed films I’d most like to see.
- Robert Bresson’s Genesis Bresson had a few intriguing projects go unrealized—a docudrama about Saint Ignatius of Loyola and a collaboration with Albert Camus on an adaptation of La Princesse de Clèves—but this one strikes me as the one with the most promise. Bresson envisioned the film as a stripped-down telling of the first book of the Bible, and he was set to make it in 1963 with producer Dino De Laurentiis, but reportedly abandoned the idea during a series of test shoots when he couldn’t get his animal actors to behave the way he wanted. He flirted with the idea again in 1985, but decided against it; had it come to pass, Genesis likely would have been his last film, a truly poetic paradox, suitable given Bresson’s religious practices both in life and onscreen.
