John Boorman’s “The Emerald Forest (1985)”

Watching “The Emerald Forest”, continuing John Boorman Marathon. I showed ’Exorcist II” to my son. He described it as “dessociative” which made me realize that the early Boorman films also share the same quality with the juxtapositions of seemingly disjoined scenes and the lack of traditional continuity in storytelling may be the reason why some people describe his films as boring. He “dissociative” narrative has mesmerizing effect to some viewers. It is dream-like, hallucinogenic and holistic. Though traditional storytelling is always linear since each scene needs to be presented in a sequence, when you recall a story, the remembrance is presented all at once. The dissociative storytelling inherently maintains the unconscious associations between the scenes.

P.S. watching “The Emerald Forest” after almost 40 years, I found that it was not as dissociative as Exorcist II except for the scenes that they travel as an eagle under the influence of psychotropic substances.