ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY (1929)

MASTER OF THE ABSURD

The spiritual founder of the midnight movie, Alejandro Jodorowsky is a visionary director whose cinema is a drug-addled trip through strange worlds, including his own past.

Jodorowsky’s greatest cult film might just be the one he never made. In 2013, the filmmaker, who was born in the north Chilean city of Tocopilla, appeared in Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, an account of his attempts in the mid-1970s to adapt Frank Herbert’s sprawling science-fiction epic. Intended to be a 14-hour opus, the film far exceeded its budget and was never realised. However, the book that Jodorowsky produced with his collaborators has since become the stuff of legend and has been hugely influential over subsequent visionary science-fiction films. In the same year the documentary came out, Jodorowsky released the first of two magical realist–inspired fictional autobiographical films, The Dance of Reality. (It was joined in 2016 by Endless Poetry). Like his vision for Dune, these films underpin the irreverence, visual ingenuity and surreal imagination of this singular filmmaker.

Jodorowsky has always blended politics, genre filmmaking, the influence of art movements and the carnivalesque into films that are as unclassifiable as they are wildly entertaining. Beyond his role as director, producer, screenwriter and frequent actor in his films, he is a composer, novelist and comics writer, painter, sculptor, mime artist and theatre director. The son of Jewish immigrants from what is now Ukraine, Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky experienced an unhappy childhood – he claims he was the result of his father raping his mother in a fit of jealousy – and witnessed first-hand US imperialism through the activities of a mining company in Tocopilla. He immersed himself in reading, became involved in theatre and eventually moved to Paris in his early 20s to study mime. He directed his first short there, Les Têtes Interverties (1957), followed by his first comic strip, Anibal 5. He moved to Mexico in 1960, where he directed his feature debut, an avantgarde adaptation of Fernando Arrabal’s play Fando y Lis (1968). It caused a minor riot when it premiered at the Acapulco Film Festival and was subsequently banned in Mexico.

El Topo (1970) not only remains Jodorowsky’s most famous film, but also it was the feature that started the midnight movie trend. A wildly surreal take on the western, with the filmmaker in the title role, it follows a gunslinger and his son on a journey through a post-apocalyptic desert landscape on a quest for enlightenment. Drawing heavily on Christian symbolism and Eastern philosophy, the film depicts the gunslinger as he takes on four challengers, each representing a religion or philosophy. With its wild ferocity, the film soon found a following, including an ecstatic John Lennon. Ben Barenholtz, the owner of New York’s Elgin Theater, chose to take a chance on the film when no other distributor would show it and screened the film in the late-night slot, where it remained, playing seven days a week for six months.

Jodorowsky’s subsequent work, from The Holy Mountain (1973) to Santa Sangre (1989) to more recent films, continues the style set out in El Topo, but the filmmaker never quite achieved the sense of doom-laden wonder that he scored with that strange, quixotic and disturbing masterpiece.

“MAYBE I AM A PROPHET. I REALLY HOPE ONE DAY THERE WILL COME CONFUCIUS, MUHAMMAD, BUDDHA AND CHRIST TO SEE ME. AND WE WILL SIT AT A TABLE, TAKING TEA AND EATING SOME BROWNIES.”

“MOST DIRECTORS MAKE FILMS WITH THEIR EYES; I MAKE FILMS WITH MY TESTICLES.”