Alejandro Jodorowsky, We Salute You

“I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.”

Is it any wonder this man is one of my favorite directors?  This has been a policy of mine for years—I’m not interested in a movie that’s not at least as weird as my own dreams. I do not watch films to see the subtleties of real-life relationships writ large, or to witness the human drama get re-interpreted....I want huge, insane and beautiful vistas that could only exist in cinema.  (For now.) Alejandro Jodorowsky not only agrees with me, he probably thinks I’m a sissy for not making even bigger and crazier demands.

A few years ago, Jodorowsky basically didn’t exist here on the Internets—thankfully, that’s changed quickly.  Best of all, he’s even working on a new movie, rumored to be funded by none other than Marilyn Manson.  Like any worthwhile human, Jodorowsky is way more complex than we could possibly give him credit for—but we’re going to give it a shot just the same.  Director, actor, magician, occultist, therapist, artist and comic book creator—and that’s just the first couple layers.  Say hello to Alejandro Jodorowsky.

A Most Promising Beginning

The first film Jodorowsky ever made was called “Fando y Lis,” and when it was debuted in Mexico, it triggered a riot.  Jodorowsky had to be evacuated from the theatre, and for months afterwards was threatened with being deported. 

Although Jodorowsky is often referred to as a Mexican film-maker—especially by those who want to link his legacy to Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro—he was actually born in Chile and educated in France, and his parents were Russian Jews. 

The film contains many of the themes that would run through the rest of his work—especially the unflinching meditation on the crippled human body.  Jodorowsky’s work is remarkable in that it never becomes mere exploitation of the unusual and different.  Perhaps that’s because, like David Lynch, shit is too weird to ever be “mere” anything or cohere into a straightforward narrative.  Frankly, it’s a miracle unto itself that Jodorowsky’s work is not the subject of much academic and critical meditation, because any one of his films is fertile territory for several dozen books of philosophical bullshit.  Perhaps it’s a terribly cheeseball and trite thing to say, but Jodorowsky’s work doesn’t lend itself to interpretation, it’s mostly just something you experience.

Guru, Demon, and Vampire, Too

Jodorowsky inhabits the Trickster archetype like few humans before or since.  All of his films are like a SubGenius holy book, allegories within metaphors within symbols within really, really f***ed up dreams.  So it would make sense that the man himself is a slippery beast.

As the wiki entry on Fando y Lis notes:

...Sergio Klainer was spreading a rumor that Alejandro Jodorowsky was a vampire, since he insisted that Mariscal’s actual blood be used in a scene where a man drinks Lis’ blood.

Jodorowsky, of course, has done nothing to dispel the rumor, but he does offer a clarification in this excellent interview:

“I know the taste of blood.  I’ve eaten blood, human blood.  Once during a happening in Mexico, my disciples drew a little blood from their arms.  Then they collected it all in a glass and offered it to me with some tequila—a sangria.  I took the glass in my hands and started to improvise a long Panic poem, trying to put off drinking it for as long as possible.  By the time I decided to drink it, the blood had coagulated.  That day I had just finished reading Zanoni’s works, so there was no turning back:  I put my hand in the glass, scooped out the red gelatin, and devoured it.

At first it made me sick, nauseous.  But almost immediately, as soon as I allowed myself to sense the taste of it, I felt an exquisite pleasure. It was the finest food my mouth had ever been fed: delicate, velvety, delicious.  The next morning I woke up with the smoothest complexion ... and a dry mouth. ”

Many people call you a madman.  Are you?

JODOROWSKY: Sometimes I feel myself absolutely mad.  I say what am I doing here?  Because I feel reality so unreal and myself so strange.  I have a mind, a liver, a heart.  Everything I look and I feel is inside myself.  It’s not reality.  What I am is enormous reaction. It is not the thing.  I am not the feeling. I am what is felt.  The man who feels. Everything is so subjective.  If someone says to me, I am mad, I say yes, I am absolutely mad like all the civilization and like all the persons in this planet. I think all the humanity now is absolutely crazy and mad.  And some day when my essence sees myself, how my ego is crazy and mad, I laugh—with love and compassion. And in the moment when you have the enlightenment you start to laugh.  Because you see yourself, how crazy and mad you are.  Then you feel compassion.  I have great pity on myself because I am so mad and crazy.

A Western Movie From Hell, On Acid, Etc

Jodorowsky’s first major hit was the incomparable El Topo.  (Torrent Link) The film was built around the Western mythos—nameless gunman avenges horrible crime in a desert land with no laws—but the film was a departure from more or less every genre that could be attached to it.

John Lennon loved the movie, which had great success on the midnight arthouse circuit.  El Topo became a cult hit in the United States, spreading via word of mouth from stoners and college kids who got their minds blown and couldn’t talk about too much else—Lennon being among them.  Many directors recoil in horror when their films get embraced by the unwashed hordes, but Jodorowsky was ecstatic.  When asked if he felt audiences would benefit from being on drugs during the film, his reply was an all-time classic:

“Yes, yes, yes, yes. I’d demand them to be.”

Later, Lennon and George Harrison convinced their post-Epstien manager, Allen Klien, to fund Jodorowsky’s next film.  This proved to be simultaneously a stroke of genius and the worst mistake ever...but first, let’s take a look at that “next film.”

Holy Mountains and Gurdjieff Impersonators

Although blunts aren’t cool anymore, they still get you way too stoned and that will never change.  I was just getting used to blunts when I was living in Montreal for a month or so and wandered into Cinema Du Parc—the only arthouse multiplex that I’ve ever seen—and watched Holy Mountain for the first time.  I knew it would be weird, but that’s like knowing that acid will make you feel different the first time you take it.  That’s not exactly being prepared, you know?  You know.

Holy Mountain remains my favorite Jodorowsky film to this day.  I guess it’s to his credit that I’m still unclear on why....whether that’s because I liked that movie the most, or it’s just a cinematic variation on Stockholm Syndrome.

I found out later that the film was actually based around a book, by the unusually simple title of Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing.  The books author, Rene Daumal, had his life changed by one Alexander de Salzmann.  Odds are you’ve never heard of either one of those people, but Salzmann’s teacher you might be familiar with: Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff.  Now, I dig Marshall McLuhan, I admire Timothy Leary, I love Jiddhu Krishnamurti, but I will probably pass from this mortal coil without even coming close to understanding Gurdjieff. 

The film is infused with a quest for the Nine Masters—I know that will perk up the ears of more than a few Brainsturbator readers who are familiar with Andijra Puharich, Uri Geller and 1000 other insanely weird hidden threads of occult history—and considering Holy Mountain is being remastered for a DVD release, I won’t give away the ending.  Onwards.

PENTHOUSE:Can you tell us a little of the sequence of events in The Holy Mountain?

JODOROWSKY: The movement of the picture is from a fairy tale to the realistic, no?  The theme is very simple.  The master takes nine other persons, who make a solar system, and promises to these persons immortality.  In all the traditions there is a sacred holy mountain.  And on top of the mountain—there are always immortals, Olympians.  Then the master says: “We need to steal from them the secret of immortality. Other persons put together all their force in order to steal money, to steal from a bank.  Why we do not put our forces together to steal the secret of immortality?  The immortals are wise persons, enlightened persons.  In order to fight with them we need to become wise and enlightened.  And then we need to travel and be powerful in our wisdom to fight with the immortals.” We come to the top of the mountain and...but no, I cannot tell you what is in the picture. But I finish it in a very surprised way.

The Greatest Movie Never Made

I didn’t want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me, Dune didn’t belong to Herbert just as Don Quixote didn’t belong to Cervantes. There is an artist, one alone among millions of others artists, who one time in his life, by a piece of divine grace, receives an immortal theme, a MYTH.

I say “receive” and not “create” because works of art are received in a state of mediumness directly from the collective unconcious. The work overtakes the artist and in some way it kills him, because humanity, in receiving the impact of Myth, has a profound need to erase the individual who receives it and transmits it: his individual personality hampers, stains the purity of the message which, at the root, asks to be anonymous. We don’t know who created the Notre-Dame cathedral, nor the Aztec solar calendar, nor the tarot of Marseille, nor the myth of Don Juan, etc.

One feels that Cervantes gave HIS version of Quixote—of course incomplete—and that we carry in our soul our total character. Christ didn’t belong to Mark, Luke, Matthew or John.

It’s interesting that Jodorowsky would mention Quixote, since that story also obsessed visionary director Terry Gilliam, whose failed epic is documented in “Lost in La Mancha”.  It’s a damn shame that Gilliam’s film never got made, but it’s a motherf***ing tragedy that Jodorowsky’s Dune never came to be.  Know why?

Let’s begin with the cast.  David Carradine, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and none other than Salvador Dali playing the role of the Emperor.  Dali would be on set for exactly one hour and be paid $100,000 for his time—which would have made him the highest-paid movie star of all time.  Not even Tom Cruise has pull like that. 

Jodorowsky was utterly and selflessly obsessed with the film:

At that time, I had already almost lost my individual consciousness. I was the instrument of my sacred, miraculous work where everything could happen. Dune wasn’t at my service, I was like the samurai that I had found, at the service of the work.

He conferred with HR Giger and Jean “Moebius” Giraud for set designs, and even arranged a meeting with the fugtive guerrilla warfare expert Carlos Marighella.  To make things even more depressing, Jodorowsky got Pink Floyd signed on to do the entire soundtrack, which would also be released as a double album. 

I liked fighting for Dune. We won almost all the battles, but we lost the war. The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Their message was not “Hollywood enough”. There was intrigue, plunder. The storyboard was circulated amongst all the big studios. Later, the visual aspect of Star Wars strangely resembled our style. To make Alien, they called Moebius, Foss, Giger, O’Bannon, etc. The project signalled to Americans the possibility of making a big show of science-fiction films, outside of the scientific rigour of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Years in Exile

What was the conflict with Allen Klein?

He wanted me to make a picture and I didn’t want to do it so I escaped. So he said, “If you escape like this, no one will see your picture [El Topo] anymore.” We fought for a lot of years, and I gave away videos of the film. But after all these years, we talked on the telephone and realized we were spending a lot of money because we don’t hate each other. We made peace. So I went there to see my old enemy. When he opened the door, he said to me, “You are beautiful. You are not a monster.” I say to him, “You are also not a monster, you are like a spiritual master.” We are old now. It is 30 years later. So now we are friends… Your best friend is your worst enemy always.

There was really no reason?

I was guilty, myself was guilty. At that time Allen Klein proposed to me to do The Story of O but I escaped. I didn’t want to do it. I really escaped. But he had prepared everything and he wanted to make an erotic picture. Then I escaped and he said that nobody would see your picture anymore. I offended him. I understand because I escaped. I take a plane, I went to another country; I escaped.

Worth noting for anyone unfamiliar that ”The Story of O” is not just “an erotic picture”, it’s the story of a woman being sexually enslaved until her will is destroyed and she comes to love the man who’s been torturing her.  I remember pilfering my parent’s copy in my youth and being disappointed to find I couldn’t even whack off to it, it’s just too grim and depressing.  I can see why Jodorowsky would be less than keen on adapting the book to screen.

The problem was this: Allen Klien owned the rights to El Topo and Holy Mountain. When I saw Holy Mountain in Montreal, it was because the theatre was taking a legal risk by showing an unauthorized copy.  (They did that quite a bit, bless their souls.) Klien spent over two decades refusing to allow anyone to show the films.

Fortunately, that’s finally changed, and there will be a DVD collection of Jodorowsky’s films, fully restored, just in time for my dang birthday.  How about that.

And The Future?

What is your next project?

It’s called King Shots. It’s a gangster movie. There are a lot of actors who want to play in the picture. Marilyn Manson will play the role of a 300-year-old Pope. Nick Nolte called me and said he saw a picture I did called Santa Sangre. He said, “I want to work with you.” I said, “How can I pay you.” And he said, “That is not important.” I want to shoot in Romania and in the desert in Spain where Leone shot his pictures. It’s set at a casino in the middle of the desert and all the gangsters come to gamble. In the desert they find the skeleton of a giant man as big as King Kong. I wanted to make a film called Abel Cain which was the Son of El Topo but I could not raise the money. Too expensive. You know, I am a poor poet trying to make artistic, individual pictures. I am not a multinational. I think my pictures are some kind of an elixir that can change the mind for the better. I hate pictures where you go in silly and you come out silly, not changed. With my pictures I want to change the way you see the world. That is for me is the meaning of cinema.

Further Reading for Curious Primates

HR Giger’s Dune designs

Premire Magazine interview with Jodorowsky

Horribly designed but thorough Jodorowsky fansite

Jodorowsky discussed Dune

HUGE interview with Jodorowsky about El Topo, poetry, magick and art

1973 Penthouse interview with Jodorowsky