Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky (born February 17, 1929, Tocopilla, Chile) is a Chilean-born French filmmaker and author known for his surrealistic films, especially El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973).

Early work

Jodorowsky’s parents were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. When he was eight years old, the family moved from Tocopilla to Santiago. He enrolled in the University of Chile in 1947 but dropped out two years later. He began writing plays in 1948 and founded an experimental theatre group in 1950.

In 1953 Jodorowsky moved to Paris, where he worked with French mime Marcel Marceau. He made his first film, the short La Cravate (1957; The Severed Heads), about a young man (played by Jodorowsky) who falls in love with the proprietor of a shop where one can swap out one’s head. In the early 1960s Jodorowsky, Spanish-born French author Fernando Arrabal, and French artist and author Roland Topor formed a loose avant-garde movement, Panique, named after the Greek god Pan and dedicated to the shocking and the surreal. Jodorowsky’s most-noted work in that period was the four-hour-long performance “Mélodrame sacrementel” (1965; “Sacramental Melodrama”), in which he slit the throats of two geese, was whipped, and nailed a cow’s heart to a cross, among other bizarre happenings.

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Jodorowsky divided his time between Paris and Mexico, where he wrote a series of comic books, Anibal 5 (1966), and wrote and drew a weekly comic strip, Fabulas panicas (1967–73; “Panic Fables”). In 1968 he directed his first feature film, Fando y Lis (Fando and Lis), which was based on a play by Arrabal. Fando and his paralyzed lover, Lis, journey across a desert and encounter a gang of transvestites, blood drinkers, and a man playing a burning piano. The film caused a public outcry at its premiere at the Acapulco Film Festival and was banned in Mexico.

El Topo and The Holy Mountain

Jodorowsky’s next film, El Topo (1970; “The Mole”), brought him worldwide notoriety. In a western setting saturated with sex, violence, and religious symbolism, the gunfighter El Topo (Jodorowsky) crosses the desert with his naked son (played by Jodorowsky’s son Brontis) but leaves him behind to go on a quest to kill the four master gunfighters. At the quest’s end, El Topo is left for dead, but he awakes 20 years later in a cave where he is worshipped as a god by dwarves and the physically deformed. El Topo and a dwarf woman, seeking to raise money to build a tunnel out of the cave, climb out to a nearby town, an evil place where slavery is legal and a church service includes Russian roulette.

Because of Fando and Lis’s reception in Mexico, Jodorowsky took El Topo to the United States. American movie-theatre owner Ben Barenholtz saw El Topo at a private screening and booked it to play at midnight at the Elgin Theater in New York City. The film became a word-of-mouth success and was the first “midnight movie.” El Topo divided critics, with some praising it as a masterpiece and others deriding it as a repulsive freak show. John Lennon’s manager, Allen Klein, bought the rights to El Topo on Lennon’s recommendation, distributed it throughout the United States, and immediately engaged Jodorowsky to produce another film.

In The Holy Mountain (1973) a Thief climbs down from a cross and enters a town where tourists film public executions and a circus of toads and chameleons reenacts the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The Thief then encounters the Alchemist (Jodorowsky), who transmutes the Thief’s excrement into gold. The Alchemist, the Thief, and seven wealthy people (thieves in their own way) journey to the Holy Mountain, where they must kill the Nine Masters of the Summit to gain eternal life.

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Later films, comic books, and psychomagic

The Holy Mountain was not a hit like El Topo. Klein then wanted Jodorowsky to do a more commercial film, an adaptation of Pauline Réage’s pornographic novel Story of O. Jodorowsky instead decided to adapt Frank Herbert’s science-fiction novel Dune. (In retaliation, Klein withdrew El Topo and The Holy Mountain from circulation until 2006.) For Dune he assembled a cast that included Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, and David Carradine. Jodorowsky engaged designs from Swiss artist H.R. Giger and French comic-book artist Moebius. Pink Floyd would have composed some of the score. The project was never filmed, but some film historians contend that, through its extensive amount of preproduction design, it influenced later science-fiction movies, most notably Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), for which Giger designed the creature.

Jodorowsky and Moebius collaborated on comic books, beginning with Les Yeux du chat (1978; The Eyes of the Cat) and including most notably L’Incal (1981–88; The Incal), a science-fiction story in which a bumbling private detective comes into possession of the powerful title artifact. Jodorowsky became a prolific and acclaimed author of comic books, many set in the same universe as The Incal.

Tusk (1980) was a children’s film, set in British colonial India, about the attachment between a young English girl and an elephant, both born on the same day. Jodorowsky was dissatisfied with the film’s technical deficiencies and later disowned it.

During his long hiatus from filmmaking in the 1980s, Jodorowsky developed a form of personal therapy that he called “psychomagic,” which combined insights from Jungian psychology and the tarot. (He was an avid tarot reader and for years performed weekly mass readings.) A key aspect of psychomagic is “acts” that one must perform that enact a metaphorical solution to one’s emotional problems. He outlined the therapy in the book Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010) and the documentary Psychomagic, A Healing Art (2019).

In Santa Sangre (1989; Holy Blood), insane-asylum inmate Fenix (Jodorowsky’s son Axel) remembers his childhood growing up in the circus and the horrific event of his father’s cutting off his mother’s arms and then killing himself. Fenix escapes from the institution and reunites with his mother. However, under her influence, Fenix becomes her arms and kills any woman he loves.

Jodorowsky was a director-for-hire on The Rainbow Thief (1990), a gentle fantasy in which a petty thief (Omar Sharif) befriends a prince (Peter O’Toole) and the two live underground in the sewers while waiting for the prince to assume his inheritance. Jodorowsky subsequently disowned the film.

Jodorowsky appeared in Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), a documentary about his ill-fated project. He returned to filmmaking with La danza de la realidad (2013; The Dance of Reality), an account of his childhood in Tocopilla under the harsh influence of his domineering father (Brontis Jodorowsky). His next movie, Poesía sin fin (2016; Endless Poetry), was also autobiographical, chronicling Jodorowsky as a young man.

Controversy over remarks about El Topo

In 1972 Jodorowsky boasted about having raped an actress during the filming of El Topo. Although the comments did not immediately cause a stir, they resurfaced on and off in the ensuing decades. In the late 2010s, amid the #MeToo movement, the statements received greater scrutiny, and in 2019 El Museo del Barrio, an institution in New York City promoting the cultures of Latin Americans, canceled a retrospective of Jodorowsky’s work. Jodorowsky subsequently asserted that he had made the comments only to shock and to gain attention for his film and had never committed the crime. He acknowledged that the statements were troublesome.