Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky (Spanish:
[xoðo'?ofski]; born 17 February 1929) is a Chilean and French
avant-garde filmmaker. Best 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".
[1] Born to
Jewish-Ukrainian parents in Chile, Jodorowsky experienced an unhappy and alienated childhood, and so immersed himself in reading and writing poetry. 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 Mimico, 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 huge scandal in Mexico, eventually being banned.
His next film, the
acid western El Topo (1970), 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 (1973), 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.
[1] 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 (1989); 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, which has been described as having a claim to be "the best comic book" ever written.
[2] 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.
[3] His son Cristóbal has followed his teachings on psychoshamanism; this work is captured in the feature documentary
Quantum Men, directed by Carlos Serrano Azcona.
[4]
