Alejandro Jodorowsky

Biography

In 1975 in Paris there lay a file as thick as a telephone directory: the script for Dune, which, as Frank Herbert recalled, would have made a film of twelve hours or more. The film was never made, and the drawings for it would turn out to matter more than many films that were.

Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky was born on 17 February 1929 into a family of Jewish emigrants from Ukraine. The sources give his birthplace differently: more often Tocopilla in northern Chile, less often Iquique. His father kept a shop in Tocopilla. Around 1939 the family moved to Santiago. Alejandro began publishing poems as a teenager and was friends with the poets Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. He briefly studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Chile, dropped out, and became absorbed in marionettes and mime. In 1947 he founded a troupe, the Teatro Mímico, and for a time performed as a clown in a circus; in 1950, according to some accounts, he opened a puppet theatre at the university’s Experimental Theatre.

In 1953 he left for Paris. He studied mime with Étienne Decroux, joined the troupe of Marcel Marceau and wrote routines for it, among them “The Cage” and “The Mask Maker”. He directed stage productions, including the comeback of Maurice Chevalier, and attended Gaston Bachelard’s lectures at the Sorbonne. In 1957 he made the short film La cravate (also known as Les têtes interverties), after Thomas Mann’s novella The Transposed Heads; Jean Cocteau wrote an introduction to it. The film was thought lost until a print turned up in 2006.

In 1960 Jodorowsky moved to Mexico, though he returned to Paris from time to time. There he staged avant-garde plays, studied Zen with the monk Ejo Takata, and in 1962, together with Arrabal and Topor, founded the Panic Movement. He traced its name to the god Pan. Its three principles were horror, humour and simultaneity. Around then he also created the comic strip Anibal 5 (1966, drawn by Manuel Moro) and the weekly series Panic Fables for the newspaper El Heraldo de México.

His first feature, Fando y Lis (1967), based on a play by Arrabal, was shown at the Acapulco festival in 1968. A riot broke out, the director left the hall to escape an angry audience, and the film was banned in Mexico. His next film, El Topo (1970), was released in the United States and ran for months at the Elgin Theater in New York as a midnight show. John Lennon spoke of it very highly and persuaded Allen Klein, the Beatles’ manager, to put up money for a new project. That became The Holy Mountain (1973), a film about esotericism and the search for immortality, in which Jodorowsky also played the alchemist. Soon afterwards he quarrelled with Klein, and the rights to both films stayed with Klein for a long time: for more than thirty years they could not legally be seen. In 2000, at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Jodorowsky received the Jack Smith Lifetime Achievement Award; the organisers did not know until the last moment whether they would be allowed to screen El Topo and The Holy Mountain.

Then came Dune. At the end of 1974 a French consortium bought the rights to Herbert’s novel and asked Jodorowsky to direct. He approached Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Pink Floyd; the designers were Mœbius (Jean Giraud), Chris Foss and Hans Rudolf Giger, and the role of Paul was meant for his son Brontis. When Herbert came to Europe in 1976, two million of the 9.5 million dollar budget had already gone on preparation. No studio would fund the project on the director’s terms, and everything stopped. More than three thousand of Mœbius’s storyboard drawings became the basis of The Incal. Members of that team later worked on Alien, and by some estimates the project’s ideas influenced other science fiction films as well. Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune appeared in 2013.

After the collapse he made Tusk (1980) in India, from Reginald Campbell’s novel about an elephant. It was never widely shown. He turned to comics in earnest: The Incal (from 1981), then The Metabarons with Juan Giménez, The Technopriests with Zoran Janjetov, The White Lama with Georges Bess, Bouncer with François Boucq. For Le Cœur couronné (published in English as The Madwoman of the Sacred Heart) he and Mœbius won the Haxtur Award in 2001. Later he made Borgia with Milo Manara.

In 1989 he finished Santa Sangre in Mexico: he had worked on the script for six years, and his sons appeared in the film. In 1990 he made The Rainbow Thief with Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, but the producer Alexander Salkind, by some accounts, limited his freedom. The film is considered a failure.

Alongside all this, to my mind, ran the work that he himself values above his films. For almost ten years he reconstructed the original form of the Tarot de Marseille, and for a quarter of a century he gave free lectures and tarot-reading classes in Paris cafés and universities. Out of this grew “psychomagic”: a set of actions which, as he believes, act on the unconscious and release trauma. It cannot be regarded as a scientific method, and he himself does not place it “in the scientific field”.

He returned to cinema only in 2013. The Dance of Reality was shot in Tocopilla, drawing on his autobiographical book; it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where Jodorowsky’s Dune was shown the same year. Its sequel, Endless Poetry, was shown at Cannes in 2016, and in 2019 came the documentary Psychomagic, a Healing Art.