A GUIDE TO THE MYSTICAL, MIND-EXPANDING

FILMS OF ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY

We take a deep dive into the psychotropic world of Chile’s most radical filmmaker, whose surreal countercultural epics brim with spiritualism and symbology, violence and lust, humour and horror – and are guaranteed to blow your mind

To watch a film by cult Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky is to arrive as a backpacker in a foreign universe: a heady, visually intoxicating world where everything is familiar, yet new; where the entire spectrum of human attributes, from wisdom, goodness, and spirituality to lust, greed and violence are amplified and paraded at every turn. To understand Jodorowsky and his extraordinary, frequently controversial practice, it is vital to know his history – because, as transgressive and trippy as his films may seem, they are all intensely personal to their maker. 
The director grew up in Tocopilla, a small copper-mining town in northern Chile. His childhood was an unhappy one and he sought escape in performance, acting and working as a circus clown before setting up his own theatre company in his early 20s. By 23, he had moved to Paris, where he wrote for Marcel Marceau’s mime troupe, and co-founded the Panic Movement, a performance art collective that spearheaded subversive, often bloody happenings. In 1960, Jodorowsky relocated to Mexico, where he remained for ten years, directing over 100 avant-garde plays, penning a comic strip and studying under a Zen monk. “The spirit of Mexico is excess,” the filmmaker told Donatian Grau of his early impressions of the Central American country in a telling interview for Purple magazine. “The flora, the fauna, the food, the social relations, the fashion, the songs, the music – there were no limits anywhere.”

It was in this limitless environment that Jodorowsky made his first film Fando y Lis (1968), loosely based on a play by the absurdist playwright Fernando Arrabal, which sparked riots when it premiered at the Acapulco Film Festival, and was banned nationwide thereafter. But it wasn’t until the release of his second film, the acid western El Topo (1970), that Jodorowsky would truly penetrate public consciousness. El Topo, which he wrote, directed, co-scored and starred in, sets the tone for the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic oeuvre: a mixture of Eastern mysticism, Latin American folklore and European, surrealist art house cinema à la Buñuel and Fellini. As with most Jodorowsky films, it centres around a man on a mission: here, a gun-toting outlaw (Jodorowsky) in search of the four great masters of the desert, whom he must kill to win the heart of the woman he loves.

Three years later, having secured $1M in funding from ABKCO and Allen Klein (at the urging of Jodorowsky fans John Lennon and Yoko Ono), the director returned with The Holy Mountain (1973), aptly described by Mubi as an “incendiary, surrealist, sacrilegious satire … infused with tarot imagery, alchemical mysticism, and countercultural freakery”. In it, a mad alchemist (Jodorowsky) leads a group of morally dubious beings on a quest to overthrow nine immortal gods residing on a mountaintop. Poking fun at consumerist, war-hungry Western culture, the idolatry nature of religion and even the conceit of cinema itself, The Holy Mountain is a filmic fever dream comprising some of cinema’s most visually arresting scenes. 

On a roll, Jodorowsky next embarked on what is arguably the most iconic movie never made, an ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. This saw him wrangle a remarkable team: the artists Mœbius and H.R. Giger to create the 3000-image storyboard; Dan O’Bannon to produce the visual effects, Pink Floyd to make the soundtrack, and Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger and Orson Welles to star. Tragically, the film failed to secure Hollywood backing, although – as detailed in Frank Pavich’s 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune – its storyboard would, in no small part, help shape the future of sci-fi cinema.
Wildly disparaged, Jodorowsky took a break from filmmaking, co-creating a number of graphic novels with Mœbius instead (including The Incal, which will soon be brought to the big screen by Taika Waititi), and developing psychomagic, a new type of tarot- and performance-art-derived therapy. It wasn’t until 1989, following the release of two other films that he would subsequently disown, that he made his cinematic comeback, with oedipal horror Santa Sangre. Boasting a more straightforwardly linear narrative, but distinctly Jodorowskian in tone, it is the tale of a former circus performer, plagued by childhood trauma, who reconnects with mother in adulthood – with blood-curdling results. 

Nevertheless, it proved the director’s most emotional, psychologically rich offering to date, and would pave the way for Jodorowsky’s later, deeply autobiographical works The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016), which he made after a 22 year hiatus dedicated to writing books and poetry, and the continued pursuit of theatre and tarot. In 2019, he released a documentary detailing psychomagic’s therapeutic powers, titled Psychomagic: A Healing Art. In every one of his artistic endeavours, whatever form they’ve taken, Jodorowsky – now 92 and residing in Paris – has had one overarching goal: to expand people’s minds. “I want my images to turn the viewer’s brain into what it is: a flying carpet,” he told Anton Bitel in an interview for the British Film Institute. And his own personal quest, there is no doubt that he has succeeded.

Text: Daisy Woodward

Images: Courtesy © ABKCO Films a division

of ABKCO Music & Records, Inc.