Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky (; born 17 February 1929) is a Chilean and French avant-garde filmmaker and writer. Known for his films El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973) and Santa Sangre (1989), Jodorowsky has been "venerated by cult cinema enthusiasts" for his work which "is filled with violently surreal images and a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation".
Dropping out of college, he became involved in theater and in particular mime, working as a clown before founding his own theater troupe, the Teatro Mímico, in 1947. Moving to Paris in the early 1950s, Jodorowsky studied traditional mime under Étienne Decroux, and put his miming skills to use in the silent film Les têtes interverties (1957), directed with Saul Gilbert and Ruth Michelly. From 1960 onwards he divided his time between Mexico City and Paris, where he co-founded Panic Movement, a surrealist performance art collective that staged violent and shocking theatrical events. In 1966 he created his first comic strip, Anibal 5, and in 1967 he directed his first feature film, the surrealist Fando y Lis, which caused a major scandal in Mexico, eventually being banned.
His next film, the acid western El Topo, became a hit on the midnight movie circuit in the United States, considered the first-ever midnight cult film, and garnered high praise from John Lennon, who convinced former Beatles manager Allen Klein to provide Jodorowsky with $1 million to finance his next film. The result was The Holy Mountain, a surrealist exploration of western esotericism. Disagreements with Klein, however, led to both The Holy Mountain and El Topo failing to gain widespread distribution, although both became classics on the underground film circuit. After a cancelled attempt at filming Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel Dune, Jodorowsky produced five more films: the family film Tusk (1980); the surrealist horror Santa Sangre; the failed blockbuster The Rainbow Thief (1990); and the first two films in a planned five-film autobiographical series The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016).
Jodorowsky is also a comic book writer, most notably penning the science fiction series The Incal throughout the 1980s. Other comic books he has written include The Technopriests and Metabarons. Jodorowsky has also extensively written and lectured about his own spiritual system, which he calls "psychomagic" and "psychoshamanism", which borrows from alchemy, the tarot, Zen Buddhism and shamanism. His son Cristóbal has followed his teachings on psychoshamanism; this work is captured in the feature documentary Quantum Men, directed by Carlos Serrano Azcona.
Early life and education
Early life Alejandro Jodorowsky was born on February 17, 1929, in Tocopilla, Chile to immigrant Ukrainian Jewish parents Jaime Jodorowsky Groismann and Sara Felicidad Prullansky Arcavi from Yekaterinoslav and Elisavetgrad in the Russian Empire. According to Jodorowsky's account, he was conceived as a result of spousal rape, as his father was often abusive. His mother subsequently disliked Jodorowsky, and detested his father. Alejandro also had an elder sister, Raquel Jodorowsky, but believed she was selfish and trying to "expel me from the family so that she could be the centre of attention." Alongside his dislike for his family, he also held contempt for many of the local people who he says disliked the family's immigrant status. Jodorowsky did not have a Bar Mitzvah or celebrate any Jewish holidays as his parents concealed their Jewish identity for much of Jodorowsky's life.
Jodorowsky moved to Santiago at the age of 9, a decision he did not favor, as he liked the local areas of Tocopilla. Growing up, his dislike of the American mining industrialists who worked locally and treated the Chilean people badly later influenced his condemnation of American imperialism and neo-colonialism in Latin America in several of his films.
He immersed himself in reading, and also began writing poetry, having his first poem published when he was sixteen years old. He associated with such Chilean poets as Nicanor Parra, Stella Díaz Varín and Enrique Lihn. Becoming interested in the political ideology of anarchism, Jodorowsky briefly attended the University of Chile, studying psychology and philosophy, but dropped out after two years. After leaving university, he developed an interest in theatre and particularly mime, he took up employment in a circus as a clown, as well as beginning a career as a theatre director. Meanwhile, in 1947 he founded his own theatrical troupe, the Teatro Mimico, which by 1952 had fifty members, and the following year he wrote his first play, El Minotaura (The Minotaur).
Performing arts career and Panic Movement foundation Jodorowsky moved to France as he felt there was little for him left in Chile. He settled in Paris and started to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He also started to study mime with French actor Étienne Decroux and joined the troupe of one of Decroux's students, Marcel Marceau. It was with Marceau's troupe that he went on a world tour, and wrote several routines for the group, including "The Cage" and "The Mask Maker". After this, he returned to theatre directing, working on the music hall comeback of Maurice Chevalier in Paris.
In 1960, Jodorowsky moved to Mexico, where he settled down in Mexico City. He continued to return occasionally to France, on one occasion visiting the Surrealist artist André Breton, but had increasingly felt disillusioned by him as he felt he had become somewhat conservative in his old age. Continuing his interest in surrealism, in 1962 he founded the Panic Movement along with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor. The movement aimed to go beyond conventional surrealist ideas by embracing absurdism. Its members refused to take themselves seriously, while laughing at those critics who did.
In Mexico City he encountered (1928–1997), a Zen Buddhist monk. Takata had studied at the Horyu-ji and Shofuku-ji monasteries in Japan before traveling to Mexico via the U.S. in 1967 to spread Zen. Jodorowsky became a disciple of Takata and offered his own house to be turned into a Zendō. Subsequently, Takata attracted other disciples, who spent their time in meditation and the study of koans. Eventually, Takata instructed Jodorowsky to learn more about his feminine side, and so he went and befriended the English surrealist Leonora Carrington, who had recently moved to Mexico.
Film career
Early comics and films In 1957, while Jodorowsky was in Paris studying mime, he created Les têtes interverties (The Severed Heads), a 20-minute adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella. It consisted almost entirely of mime and told the surreal story of a head-swapping merchant who helps a young man find courtship success. Jodorowsky played the lead role. The director Jean Cocteau admired the film and wrote an introduction for it. It was considered lost until a print of the film was discovered in 2006.
In 1966, he produced his first comic strip, Anibal 5, which was related to the Panic Movement. The following year he created a new feature film, Fando y Lis, loosely based on a play written by Fernando Arrabal, who was working with Jodorowsky on performance art at the time. Fando y Lis premiered at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival, where it instigated a riot amongst those objecting to the film's content,Rosenbaum, 1992. p. 92 and was subsequently banned in Mexico.Rosenbaum, 1992. p. 93
El Topo and The Holy Mountain (1970–1974) In 1970, Jodorowsky released the film El Topo, which sometimes is known in English as The Mole, which he had both directed and starred in. An acid western, El Topo tells the story of a wandering Mexican bandit and gunslinger, El Topo (played by Jodorowsky), who is on a search for spiritual enlightenment, taking his young son along with him. Along the way, he violently confronts a number of other individuals, before finally being killed and being resurrected to live within a community of deformed people who are trapped inside a mountain cave. Describing the work, he stated that "I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs. The difference being that when one creates a psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the visions of a person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill." Knowing how Fando y Lis had caused such a scandal in Mexico, Jodorowsky decided not to release El Topo there, instead focusing on its release in other countries across the world, including Mexico's northern neighbour, the United States. It was in New York City where the film would play as a "midnight movie" for several months at Ben Barenholtz's Elgin Theater. It attracted the attention of rock musician and countercultural figure John Lennon, who thought very highly of it, and convinced the president of The Beatles' company Apple Corps, Allen Klein, to distribute it in the United States.
Klein agreed to give Jodorowsky $1 million to go toward creating his next film. The result was The Holy Mountain, released in 1973. It has been suggested that The Holy Mountain may have been inspired by René Daumal's Surrealist novel Mount Analogue. The Holy Mountain was another complex, multi-part story that featured a man credited as "The Thief" and equated with Jesus Christ, a mystical alchemist played by Jodorowsky, seven powerful business people representing seven of the planets (Venus and the six planets from Mars to Pluto), a religious training regimen of spiritual rebirth, and a quest to the top of a holy mountain for the secret of immortality. During the completion of The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky received spiritual training from Oscar Ichazo of the Arica School, who encouraged him to take LSD and guided him through the subsequent psychedelic experience.Jodorowsky's audio commentary on the Anchor Bay DVD of The Holy Mountain. Around the same time (2 November 1973), Jodorowsky participated in an isolation tank experiment conducted by John Lilly.John C. Lilly, The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique, Simon & Schuster (1977), pp. 220–221.
Shortly thereafter, Allen Klein demanded that Jodorowsky create a film adaptation of Pauline Réage's classic novel of female masochism, Story of O. Klein had promised this adaptation to various investors. Jodorowsky, who had discovered feminism during the filming of The Holy Mountain, refused to make the film, going so far as to leave the country to escape directing duties. In retaliation, Allen Klein made El Topo and The Holy Mountain, to which he held the rights, completely unavailable to the public for more than 30 years. Jodorowsky frequently decried Klein's actions in interviews.Premiere – Q&A: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Soon after the release of The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky gave a talk at the Teatro Julio Castillo, University of Mexico on the subject of koans (despite the fact that he initially had been booked on the condition that his talk would be about cinematography), at which Ejo Takata appeared. After the talk, Takata gave Jodorowsky his kyosaku, believing that his former student had mastered the art of understanding koans.Jodorowsky, Alejandro (2005). The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. pp. 194–216.
Dune and Tusk (1975–1980)