Alejandro Jodorowsky ( )
(born February 7, 1929, in Tocopilla
, Chile
, of a Jewish
Ukrainian immigrant family) is a Chilean scholar in
comparative religion, playwright, director, producer, composer,
actor, mime,
comic book writer,
tarot reader, historian and psychotherapist.
Early years
Jodorowsky began his artistic activities at a very young age,
inspired greatly by film and literature. He began publishing his
poetry in Chile when he was 16. At this time, he worked alongside
the Chilean poets
Nicanor Parra and
Enrique Lihn. He developed an interest
in puppetry and mime. He published his first book of poetry when he
was 16. At 17, he debuted as an actor and a year later he created
the pantomime troupe, Teatro Mímico. In 1953, Jodorowsky wrote his
first play,
El minotauro
(
The Minotaur). That same year
he traveled to Paris to study pantomime with
Etienne Decroux, the teacher of
Marcel Marceau. The next year he joined
Marcel Marceau theatre troupe; the performances realized during
this collaboration toured worldwide. In 1955 he attended university
in Santiago, Chile. After performing in Mexico in 1960, Jodorowsky
decided to continue his stay in order to pursue other theatrical
endeavors.
Los Pánicos
In February 1962, in Paris, Jodorowsky, along with
Fernando Arrabal and
Roland Topor, initiated the
Panic Movement, an artistic movement centered
around three basic elements: terror, humor, and simultaneity. These
acts combine layers of physical postures inspired by the
imagination and integrate artistic elements. Acts of this movement
include
Cuentos pánicos,
Teatro pánico,
Fabulas pánicas and
Efímeros pánicos.
Throughout the 60s and 70s, working in Paris and Mexico, Jodorowsky
created over one hundred theatrical productions. He directed works
of his own in addition to those written by
Leonora Carrington,
Samuel Beckett,
Eugen Ionesco,
August Strindberg and others.
El acto
efímero (or "ephemeral performances") was acted out in public
spaces, drawing attention to the quotidian while promoting critical
awareness in both participants and audience. During these ephemeral
acts the public is often unaware that an act of drama is being
performed. Jodorowsky once stated: "the panic man is not, he is
ever
becoming" to reference
Alfred Korzybski's influence on his
thought.
Beginning in 1966, Jodorowsky created comics relating to "El
pánico." These comics were made independently and in collaboration
with illustrators including
Jean "Mœbius"
Giraud. In the course of his comic career, Jodorowsky has
created approximately 21 series including
Fábulas pánicas,
Los ojos del gato and
El incal. All translated
from Spanish into over ten languages.
Jodorowsky's first experience with movies was in 1957 in Paris,
where he adapted
Thomas Mann’s
Las cabezas trocadas
as
La Cravate. He next created
Fando y Lis in Mexico in 1967.
Two years later, Jodorowsky created his most renowned film,
El Topo (aka
The Mole). In the following
years additional films were realized including
The Holy Mountain in
1972.
Psychomagic
Jodorowsky spent over fifteen years reconstructing the original
form of the
Tarot de Marseille.
From this work he moved in to more therapeutic work in three areas:
psychomagic,
psychogenealogy and
initiatic massage. Psychomagic aims to
heal psychological wounds suffered in life. This therapy is based
on the belief that the performance of certain acts can directly act
upon the unconscious mind, releasing it from a series of traumas,
some of which are passed down from generation to generation.
Psychogenealogy includes the studying of the patient’s personality
and family tree in order to best address their specific
sources.
Jodorowsky has several books on his therapeutic methods, including
Psicomagia: La trampa sagrada (
Psychomagic: The Sacred
Trap) and his autobiography
La danza de la realidad
(
The Dance of Reality). To date he has published over 23
novels and philosophical treaties, along with dozens of articles
and interviews. His books are widely read in
Spanish and
French, but are for the most part unknown to
English-speaking audiences.
Throughout his career, Jodorowsky has gained a reputation as a
philosopher and scholar who presents the teachings of
religion,
psychology and
spiritual masters, by molding them into pragmatic and imaginative
endeavors. All of his enterprises integrate an artistic approach.
Currently Jodorowsky dedicates much of his time to lecturing about
his work.
For a
quarter of a century, Jodorowsky held classes and lectures for
free, in cafés and universities all over the city of Paris
.
Typically, such courses or talks would begin on Wednesday evenings
as
tarot divination lessons, and
would culminate in an hour long conference, also free, where at
times hundreds of attendees would be treated to live demonstrations
of a psychological "arbre généalogique" ("tree of genealogy")
involving volunteers from the audience. In these conferences,
Jodorowsky would pave the way to building a strong base of students
of his philosophy, which deals with understanding the
unconscious as the "over-self" which is
composed of many generations of family relatives, living or
deceased, acting on our own
psyche, well into our adult lives, and
causing our
compulsion. It is
important to note that of all his work, Jodorowsky considers these
activities to be the most important of his life. Though such
activities only take place in the insular world of
Parisian cafés, he has devoted thousands
of hours of his life to teaching and helping people "become more
conscious," as he puts it.
Presently, these talks have dwindled to once a month and take place
at the "
Librairie Les Cent
Ciels" in Paris.
Women of Influence
At a young age, Jodorowsky began to search for personal
enlightenment. He was united with Ejo Takata, who taught him the
practice of meditation and introduced him to Zen Buddhism. He then
became associated with a group of women, each of whom was a master
of her own craft.
dona Magdalena:
taught him initiatic/spiritual massage
La Tigresa: a famous
Mexican Actress
Reyna D'Assia: the
daughter of
G.I. Gurdjieff, a spiritual leader
Maria Sabina:
priestess of the sacred mushrooms
Pachita: a mystical
healer
Violeta Parra:
Chilean Singer
Each of these women, although separate from his studies in
Buddhism, greatly influenced Jodorowsky's ability to put into
practice the lessons he had learned from
Ejo
Takata.
Film-making career
He started his film career in Mexico with
Fando y Lis (1968).
The feature-length
film debuted in Acapulco
at the
Film Festival and is famous
for having incited a full scale riot there, requiring that
Jodorowsky be smuggled out in a limousine.
El Topo (1970), a
mystical Western, was his second film and is now considered a
cult classic.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono
helped to arrange the film's release and distribution in the
United
States
through Beatles manager
Allen Klein. It tells the story of
El Topo, a Mexican
gunslinger, in three main story arcs: (1) his
revenge on a gang of bandits for their massacre of a small town's
entire population; (2) his love for a woman, the woman's demands
that El Topo take on four master gunmen who live in the desert, and
El Topo's resulting fall from grace; and (3) El Topo's reawakening
several years later in a colony of deformed people, his endeavor to
release them from a mountain cave in which they are trapped, and
his atonement.
Jodorowsky's third film,
The Holy Mountain (1973),
was entirely financed by
John Lennon and
Yoko Ono through the production office of
Beatles producer
Allen Klein. It has
been suggested that
The Holy Mountain may have been
inspired by
Rene 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. Around the same time (2 November 1973), Jodorowsky
participated in an
isolation tank
experiment conducted by
John
Lilly.
Shortly thereafter, Allen Klein demanded that Jodorowsky create a
film adaptation of
The Story of
O, an erotic novel heavy on
BDSM.
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 over 30 years. Jodorowsky frequently
decried Klein's actions in interviews.
In
December 1974, a French
consortium
led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the
film rights to Dune from Arthur
P. Jacobs. Jodorowsky
was set to direct. In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as
a ten hour feature, in collaboration with
Salvador Dali,
Orson
Welles,
Gloria Swanson,
David Carradine,
Geraldine Chaplin,
Alain Delon,
Hervé Villechaize and
Mick Jagger. The music would be composed by
Peter Gabriel. Jodorowsky set up a
pre-production unit in Paris consisting of
Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers
for science fiction periodicals,
Jean
Giraud , a French illustrator who created and also wrote and
drew for
Metal Hurlant
magazine, and
H. R. Giger. Moebius
began designing creatures and characters for the film, while Foss
was brought in to design the film's space ships and hardware. Giger
began designing the Harkonnen Castle based on Moebius' storyboards,
and Dali was cast as the Emperor with a reported salary of $100,000
an hour. His son Brontis Jodorowsky was to play Paul.
Dan O'Bannon was to head the special effects
department.
Dali and Jodorowsky began quarreling over money, and just as the
storyboards, designs, and script were finished, the financial
backing dried up. Frank Herbert travelled to Europe in 1976 to find
that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent
in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky's script would result in a
14-hour movie ("It was the size of a phonebook", Herbert later
recalled). Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source
material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable
relationship.
The rights for filming were sold once more, this time to Dino de
Laurentiis. Although Jodorowsky was embittered by the experience,
he stated that the Dune project changed his life.
After the collapse of the Dune project, Jodorowsky completely
changed course and, in 1980, premiered his children's fable
"
Tusk", shot in India. Taken from
Reginald Campbell's novel "Poo
Lorn of the Elephants," the film explores the
soul-mate relationship between a young British
woman living in India and a highly prized elephant. The film
exhibited little of the director's outlandish visual style and was
never given wide release. Jodorowsky has since disowned the
film.
In 1989, Jodorowsky completed Mexican-Italian production
Santa sangre (
Holy Blood). The film received limited
theatrical distribution, putting Jodorowsky back on the cultural
map despite its mixed critical reviews.
Santa Sangre was a
surrealist film with a plot similar to
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. It featured a protagonist
who, as a child, saw his mother lose both her arms, and as an adult
let his own arms act as hers, and so was forced to commit murders
at her whim. Several of Jodorowsky's sons were recruited as
actors.
He followed in 1990 with a very different film,
The Rainbow Thief. Though it gave
Jodorowsky a chance to work with actual "movie stars"
Peter O'Toole and
Omar
Sharif, the producer effectively curtailed most of Jodorowsky's
artistic inclinations, threatening to fire him on the spot if
anything in the script was changed.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Jodorowsky attempted to make
a sequel to El Topo, called at
different times
The Sons of El Topo and
Abelcain,
but could not find investors for the project.
In 2000, Jodorowsky won the
Jack Smith Lifetime
Achievement Award from the
Chicago Underground Film
Festival (CUFF). He attended the festival and his films were
shown, including
El Topo and
The Holy Mountain,
which at the time had grey legal status. According to festival
director
Bryan Wendorf, it was an open
question of whether CUFF would be allowed to show both films, or
whether the police would show up and shut the festival down.
Until 2007,
Fando y Lis and
Santa sangre were the
only Jodorowsky's works available on
DVD.
Neither
El Topo nor The Holy Mountain were available on
videocassette or DVD in the United States or the United Kingdom
, due to ownership disputes with distributor
Allen Klein. After the dispute's
settlement in 2004, however, plans to re-release Jodorowsky's films
were announced by
ABKCO Films. On January 19, 2007, the website
announced that on May 1, 2007,
Anchor Bay released a box set
including
El Topo,
The Holy Mountain, and
Fando y Lis. A limited edition of the set includes both
the
El Topo and
The Holy Mountain soundtracks.
And, in early February 2007,
Tartan Video announced its May 14, 2007,
release date for the UK
PAL DVD editions of
El
Topo,
The Holy Mountain and the 6-disc box set which,
alongside with the aforementioned feature films, includes the 2
soundtrack CDs, as well as separate DVD editions of Jodorowsky's
1968 debut feature
Fando y Lis (with his 1957 short
La
cravate aka
Les têtes interverties, included as an
extra) and the 1994 feature-length documentary
La constellation
Jodorowsky. Notably,
Fando y Lis and
La
cravate were extensively digitally restored and remastered in
London during late 2006, thus providing the perfect complement to
the quality restoration work undertaken on
El Topo and
The Holy Mountain in the States by Abkco, and ensuring
that the presentation of
Fando y Lis is a significant
improvement over the 2001 Fantoma DVD edition. Prior to the
availability of these legitimate releases, only inferior quality,
optically censored
bootleg copies
of both
El Topo and
The Holy Mountain have been
circulated on the Internet and on DVD.
In an interview with
Premiere
Magazine, Jodorowsky said his next project will be a
gangster film called
King Shot.
Marilyn Manson will play a
300-year-old pope, he said, and
Nick
Nolte has also expressed interest in working with the director.
Both are also listed as executive producers for the film, which has
a projected release date of 2009 .
David
Lynch is also rumored to be a producer. In the interview,
Jodorowsky also said he wanted to make a sequel to
El
Topo, but couldn't raise the funds. In a recent interview by
Viceland, he also indicated that financing for King Shot was
proving to be difficult.
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper in November 2009,
Jodorowsky revealed that he was unable to find the funds to make
King Shot, and would instead be
entering preparations on
Son of El
Topo, for which he claimed to have signed a contract with
"some Russian producers".
The book
Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro
Jodorowsky is the first major English language study on the
cinema of Jodorowsky.
Comic books
Jodorowsky started his comic career in Mexico with the creation of
Anibal 5 series in the mid 1966 with
illustrations by
Manuel Moro, and had
his turn in drawing his own comic strip in the weekly series
Fabulas pánicas that appeared in the Mexican newspaper
El Heraldo de
México. He also wrote original stories for at least two or
three other comic books in Mexico during those days:
Los insoportables Borbolla
was one of them. After his fourth film,
Tusk, he started
The Incal, with
Jean
Giraud (Mœbius). This graphic novel has its roots deep in the
tarot and its symbols, e.g., the protagonist of
The Incal,
John Difool, is linked to the
Fool card.
The Incal (which would
branch off into a
prequel and
sequel) forms the first in a sequence of several
science fiction comic book series,
all set in the same
space opera Jodoverse (or "Metabarons Universe") published by
Humanoids Publishing.
Comic books set in this milieu are Incal (trilogy:
Before the Incal/
Incal/
After the
Incal),
Metabarons (trilogy:
Dayal de Castaka/
The Caste of the Metabarons/
The Dreamshifters) and
The Technopriests and also a
RPG adaptation,
The Metabarons Roleplaying Game.
Many ideas and concepts derived from Jodorowsky's planned
adaptation of
Dune (which he
would have only loosely based upon
Frank
Herbert's original
novel) are featured in
this universe.
Mœbius and Jodorowsky sued
Luc Besson,
director of
The Fifth
Element, claiming that the 1997 film borrowed graphic and
story elements from
The Incal,
but lost their case. The suit was plagued by ambiguity since Mœbius
himself had willingly participated in the creation of the film,
having been hired by Besson as a contributing artist, but had done
so without gaining the approval of Incal co-creator Jodorowsky,
whose services Besson did not call upon. For over a decade,
Jodorowsky pressured his publisher
Les Humanoïdes Associés to
sue Luc Besson for the flagrant act of
plagiarism, but the said publisher refused,
rightfully fearing the inevitability of the final outcome.
In a 2002
interview with the Danish
comic book
magazine Strip!, Jodorowsky actually claimed that he
considered it an honour that somebody stole his ideas, which is not
surprising, as Jodorowsky believes that authors do not create the
stories they tell as much as they make personal interpretations of
myths universal to the collective human subconsciousness.
Privately, however, Jodorowsky has used harsh words in his
retelling of how the plagiarizing of the Incal was supported by the
courts, and often deplored the bias typically shown by French
courts toward large industrial entities, to the detriment of comic
book artists and writers. He has expressed great comfort, however,
at the fact that anyone actually familiar with his creation has
agreed that the work was obviously plagiarized by Besson.
Other action comics by Jodorowsky outside the genre of
science fiction include the
historically-based
Bouncer illustrated by
Francois Boucq,
Juan Solo (
Son
of the Gun) and
Le Lama blanc (
The White
Lama), both illustrated by
Georges
Bess.
Le Cœur couronné (
The Crowned Heart, translated
into English as
The Madwoman of the Sacred Heart), a racy
satire on religion set in contemporary times,
won Jodorowsky and his collaborator,
Jean
Giraud, the 2001
Haxtur Award for
Best Long Strip. He is currently working on a new graphic novel for
the US market.
Jodorowsky's comic book work also appears in
Taboo volume 4 (ed.
Stephen Thrower), which features an
interview with the director, designs for his version of Frank
Herbert's
Dune, comic storyboards for
El Topo,
and a collaboration with Moebius with the illustrated
Eyes of
the Cat.
He collaborated with
Milo Manara in
Borgia (2006), a graphic novel about
the history of the
House of
Borgia.
Comics bibliography
- La caste des méta-barons,
artwork by Juan Giménez, Les Humanoïdes Associés
- 1 Othon le
Trisaïeul, 1992
- 2 Honorata la
Trisaïeule, 1993
- 3 Aghnar le
Bisaïeul, 1995
- 4 Oda la
Bisaïeule, 1997
- 5 Tête d'Acier
l'Aïeul, 1998
- 6 Doña Vicenta
Gabriela de Rokha l'Aïeule, 1999
- 7 Aghora le
Père-mère, 2002
- 8 Sans nom,
le dernier méta-baron, 2004
- Hors série La maison
des ancêtres, 2000
- Int La caste des
méta-barons - L'intégrale, 2003
- Mégalex, artwork by Fred
Beltran, Les Humanoïdes Associés
- 1 L'anomalie, 1999
- 2 L'ange Bossu, 2002
- 3 Le cœur de Kavatah, 2008
- Le Cœur couronné, artwork by Moebius, Les Humanoïdes Associés
- 1 La Folle du Sacré Cœur, 1992
- 2 Le Piège de l'irrationnel, 1993
- 3 Le Fou de la Sorbonne, 1998
Plays (incomplete)
- Zaratustra (Mexico, 1970)
- El ensueño
- La ópera del orden
- El Gorila
- Las sillas
- Penélope
- El diario de un loco
- El juego que todos jugamos (Mexico, 1976)
- Lucrecia Borgia" (Mexico, 1977)
- Opera panique
- El Sueno sin fin (Mexico, 2008)**Opening night April
15
Other work
He weekly comments "good news" for the nightly "author newsreport"
of his friend
Fernando
Sánchez-Dragó in
Telemadrid.
Jodorowsky also released a 12" vinyl with the Original Soundtrack
of Zarathustra (Discos Tizoc, Mexico, 1970)
Filmography
Bibliography
- Cuentos Panicos (1963) illustrations by Roland
Topor
- Teatro Pánico (1965)
- Juegos Pánicos (1965)
- El Topo, fábula pánica con imágenes (1970) screenplay
from the film El Topo
- Fábulas Pánicas (1977) reprints from some strips of
el Heraldo de Mexico
- Las ansias carnívoras de la nada (1991)
- Donde mejor canta un pájaro (1992)
- Psychomagie/Approches d´une thérapie panique (1995)
ISBN 968-6941-04-5
- Griffes D´Ange (1996) illustrations by Jean
Giraud
- Antología Pánica (1996) with Daniel
González-Dueñas
- Los Evangelios para sanar (1997) ISBN
968-27-0701-3
- La Sagesse des blagues;Le doigt et la lune;Les histoires de
Mulla Nasrudin (1997) illustrations by George Bess
- El niño del jueves negro (1999)
- Albina y los hombres-perro (2000)
- La Trampa Sagrada (2000)
- No basta decir (2000)
- La danza de la realidad (2001) Jodorowksy's
autobiography ISBN 987-566-067-1
- El loro de las siete lenguas (2001)
- El Paso del ganso (2001)
- Ópera Panique,ou l`éloge de la quotidenneté (2001)
play
- El tesoro de la sombra (2003)
- Fábulas Pánicas (2003) reprints of all strips of
el Heraldo de México
- El dedo y la luna (2004)
- Piedras del camino (2004)
- La voie du Tarot (2004)
- Yo, el tarot (2004)
- El Maestro y las Magas (2006)
Theater
- La fantasma cosquillosa (farsa iniciática) (1948)
- La princesa Araña (asquerosa opereta surrealista para niños
mutantes, escrita con Leonora Carrington) (1958)
- Melodrama sacramental (1965)
- Zaratustra (aventura metafísica) (1970)
- El túnel que se come por la cola (auto sacramental
pánico) (1970)
- El mirón convertido (tragedia pánica) (1971)
- Pedrolino (mimodrama ballet) (1998)
- Ópera pánica (cabaret trágico) (2001)
- Escuela de ventrílocuos (comedia absurda) (2002)
- Las tres viejas (melodrama grotesco) (2003)
- Hipermercado (paporreta infame) (2004)
- El sueño sin fin (drama sublime) (2006)
- Sangre real (drama antiguo) (2007).
- Teatro sin fin (tragedias, comedias y mimodramas)
(Madrid, 2007).
Other information
In 2005, Jodorowsky officiated at the wedding of
Marilyn Manson and
Dita Von Teese.
Fans included musicians
Luke
Steele and
Nick Littlemore (of
the pop-duo
Empire of the
Sun).
Sources
- Footnotes
- Jodorowsky, Alejandro. The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro
Jodorowsky The Creator of El Topo. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street
Press, 2005.
- Jodorowsky's audio commentary on the Anchor Bay DVD of The
Holy Mountain.
- John C.
Lilly, The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank
Isolation Technique, Simon & Schuster (1977), pp.
220-221.
- Premiere - Q&A: Alejandro Jodorowsky
- Trance Mutations on the Holy Mountain
- The
Digital Bits - Celebrating Film in the Digital Age
- King Shot (2009)
-
http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2009/10/01/naked-bloody-corpses-charros-shrooms-and-those-who-made-them-monsters/
- 'Lennon, Manson and me: the psychedelic cinema of
Alejandro Jodorowsky' | Interviews | Guardian Film
- Sánchez Dragó asegura que "Diario de la noche" será
"ecuánime, veraz y neutral", Telemadrid
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