Rerun: Alexandro Jodorowsky Day (orig. 02/03/07)

"And I imagine...with great pleasure...all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsions and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live."-- A. Jodorowsky, 1971.

"I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs."-- A. Jodorowsky, 1971

Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alexandro Jodorowsky (Creation Books)



____________




Fando Y Lis (1967)

'Fando Y Lis definitely shows what was to come from this unorthodox, inconsistent genius. Based on Fernando Arrabal's play, the flick was castrated by its distributors, Cannon Films, after causing a fracas at the Acapulco Film Festival for being too "corrupting." Working with no budget to speak of, and filmed on weekends, the production reeks with Bunuel influenced surrealism and pretensions. Sergio Klainer and Diana Mariscal star as the title characters, a young couple in search of the enchanted city of Tar, where ecstasy can (supposedly) be found. Fando is impotent, Lis is paralyzed, and together they travel across a rocky landscape, equipped with their only possessions, a drum and an old fashioned phonograph. Basically, it's a road movie that takes these holy innocents nowhere, as they encounter bizarre characters, experience childhood flashbacks, play cruel jokes on each other, and sit on rocks, rambling banalities. Sure, there are plenty of striking images along the way (i.e. a musician sits amidst urban rubble, playing a flaming piano), but the first half of this flick is an incoherent, maddeningly edited mess that makes even Fellini's most indulgent work look coherent. It's not until Jodorowsky ups the tripped-out absurdity that the movie begins to hit you on a gut level. Such as when Fando is whipped by a bikinied torturess and eyed by some horny transvestites, or encounters vampires drinking snifters of blood (as an additional note, Jodorowsky said that all on-screen blood was real). And what other director would keep a straight face while live pigs are being pulled from Lis' vagina? It's dense going for Jodorowsky amateurs, yet a field day for fans of murky, symbolic baloney.'-- Steve Puchalski, Shock Cinema

Watch the opening scene of Fando Y Lis (0:57)





____________




El Topo (1970)

'The movie may seem bewildering, however, because the narrative is overlaid with a clutter of symbols and ideas. Jodorowsky employs anything that can give the audience a charge, even if the charges are drawn from different systems of thought that are -- *as thought* -- incompatible.... Well, of course, you don't need erudition to draw on matters religious and philosophical that way -- any dabbler can do it. All you need is a theatrical instinct and a talent for (a word I once promised myself never to use) frisson. Jodorowsky is... a director for whom ideas are sensuous entities -- sensuous toys, really, to be played with. By piling onto the Western man-with-no-name righteous-avenger form elements from Eastern fables, Catholic symbolism, and so on, Jodorowsky achieves a kind of comic-strip mythology. And when you play with ideas this way, promiscuously -- with thoughts and enigmas and with symbols of human suffering -- the resonances get so thick and confused that the game may seem not just theatre but labyrinthine, 'deep': a masterpiece.'- Pauline Kael

The US and Japanese trailers for El Topo (6:31)

A good portion of El Topo can be watched on youtube. See the first scene here, and find the rest of the available segments here.

The El Topo Soundtrack Album
Interview with Jodorowsky from the El Topo Book









____________




The Holy Mountain (1973)

'It is totally impossible to summarize Alexandro Jodorowsky's film, The Holy Mountain. Like El Topo, it is drenched in blood and abounds in monsters. The film is the adventures of a man in search of the wise men on the Holy Mountain who finds that there are no wise men, that they are all stuffed dummies. The film attacks everyone, everything. A mother wakes up her son by tickling his genitals. She sits on the toilet seat while he takes a bath. A gas is sold that turns mothers into cannibals who then eat their children. A handbag case comes equipped with a beartrap for feminists to castrate men. The ruler of an empire is deaf, dumb, and blind. Before making an important decision, he puts his hand into his wife's sexual organs. If they are moist, the decision is positive. If dry, the response is negative. Groups of young men are initiated into a secret society by cutting off their penises. At the end, the films's guru makes comments like, "The flower knows. You don't need to ask it. Plants are the books where knowlege is written. The grave is your first mother."'-- BJ Demby

Theatrical trailer for The Holy Mountain

Scenes from The Holy Mountain
Scene one (3:36)
Scene two (9:56)
Scene three (3:46)

Jodorowsky talks about The Holy Mountain and El Topo (4:44)







____________




Dune (never realized)

'Jodorowsky began working in 1975 on an adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. The project was intended to involve his son Brontis (Paul), Orson Welles as the Baron, Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha, Alain Delon as Duncan Idaho, Geraldine Chaplin as Lady Jessica, Dan O'Bannon for the script, Chris Foss, Pink Floyd, H.R. Giger and Jean Giraud (Mœbius). Ultimately, its funding evaporated, but Jodorowsky claimed it was sabotaged by the major studios in Hollywood because it was too French (a strange claim considering that Jodorowsky, while a naturalized citizen of France, has never identified with any particular country or culture. Although the funding and his producer were French: Jerome Seydoux). Many close to the project claim that the set designs later turned up in Star Wars. Several of the people working on Jodorowsky's version of Dune later worked on Alien with elements (specifically those designed by Giger) similar to that of the failed Dune project.' -- Wikipedia


from The Film You Will Never See
by Alexandro Jodorowsky

The actor that I wished for most was Dalí: for the role of the insane Emperor... Which adventure!... The Emperor buffoon, seemed to me it, could be played only by one man of the great delirious personality of Dalí . To New York, with Michel Seydoux and Jean-Paul Gibon, I arrived at our hotel, San Régis and in the hall I sees sitted El Salvador Dalí . I guess that it is indelicate to approach him immediately and the following day I called him by telephone. I speak Spanish. Dalí had not see my films but friends spoke to him about them with enthusiasm. He invites me to a very private surrealist exposure and promises to leave me the invitation under the door.

Dalí agrees with much enthusiasm the idea to play the Emperor of the galaxy. He wants to film in Cadaquès and to use as throne a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins. The tails will form the feet and the two open mouths will be used one to receive the "wee", the other to receive the "excrement". Dalí thinks that it is of terrible bad taste to mix the "wee" and the "excrement".

It is said to him that I will need him for seven days... Dalí answers that God made the universe in seven days and that Dalí, while not being less than God, must cost a fortune: 100,000 dollars an hour ... (read the rest)



____________




Tusk (1980) *

'Set in turn of the century India, Jodorowsky drops most of his crazed mystical/ religious/ hallucinogenic stylings in order to tell a relatively straightforward story of a little girl, Elise, and a little elephant, Tusk, both of whom are born at the same time, and how their lives interconnect over the years (yawn). It begins on a good note, with Jodorowsky intercutting an elephant and a woman, each giving birth. But the movie swiftly turns into nothing more than a Disney G-rated nature film, with most of the $5 million budget going for Elephants-Are-Us rentals. There are a few sledgehammer-subtle points about French colonialism vs. the Forces of Nature, with Anton Diffring playing the girl's tyranical father, and a nutty Indian medicine man popping up for comic relief. But for most of this debacle's interminable two hour running time all we're fed are long scenes of big animals lumbering around the countryside. When the little girl grows up, she discovers a psychic link to Tusk the Elephant when she stops it in its tracks during a rampage, but none of Jodorowsky's crackpot enlightenment or savage grotesqueries from his earlier epics is on display here. Instead, it takes all too many predictable routes, such as Elise getting kidnapped by the buffoonish bad guys (they're the ones who don't respect elephants), with our heroic packyderm saving her life. Maybe Jodorowsky was so desperate to get behind a camera after all his failed attepts at DUNE, that he grabbed the first thing to come along.'-- Steve Puchalski, Shock Cinema

* Tusk was never distributed, and Jodorowsky has subsequently disowned the film. I'll add that I actually saw the world premiere of Tusk at Filmex (The Los Angeles Film Festival) in 1980, and it is an excruciatingly tedious and awful film.



____________




Sante Sangre (1989)

'Sante Sangre is a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers had bold individual visions and were not timidly trying to duplicate the latest mass-market formulas. This is a movie like none I have seen before, a wild kaleidoscope of images and outrages, a collision between Freud and Fellini. It contains blood and glory, saints and circuses, and unspeakable secrets of the night. And it is all wrapped up in a flamboyant parade of bold, odd, striking imagery, with Alejandro Jodorowsky as the ringmaster. I will never forget one sequence in the movie, the elephant's burial, where the circus marches in mournful procession behind the grotesquely large coffin of the dead animal. It is tipped over the side into a garbage dump, where the coffin is pounced upon and ripped open by starving scavengers. Another powerful image comes in a graveyard, where the spirits of female victims rise up out of their graves to confront their tormentor. And there is the strange, gentle, almost hallucinatory passage where Fenix joins his fellow inmates in a trip into town; Jodorowsky uses mongoloid children in this sequence, his actors communicating with them with warmth and body contact in a scene that treads delicately between fiction and documentary. When I go to the movies, one of my strongest desires is to be shown something new. I want to go to new places, meet new people, have new experiences. When I see Hollywood formulas mindlessly repeated, a little something dies inside of me: I have lost two hours to boors who insist on telling me stories I have heard before. Jodorowsky is not boring. The privilege of making a film is too precious to him, for him to want to make a conventional one. It has been eighteen years since his last work, and all of that time the frustration and inspiration must have been building. Now comes this release, in a rush of energy and creative joy.'-- Roger Ebert





____________




The Rainbow Thief (1990)

Thumb up:'At once stupefying and whimsical, unconscionably absurd and yet undeniably enchanting, the legendary Alejandro Jodorowsky's little-seen British follow-up to his X-rated Mexican horror piece Santa Sangre (1989) is a kind of baroque, mildly surrealistic, and irreverent slapstick parable about platonic love and friendship between two miscreants -- the dispossessed prince Meleagre (Peter O'Toole) and his sidekick, the diminutive and chubby thief Dima (Omar Sharif), who live together in the city sewers. Gone is Jodorowsky's cruel streak. As is typical for the director, however, he populates his film with social outcasts and freaks -- a towering yet slightly backward and soft-spoken giant; a dwarfish "bug man," dressed all in green, sent into a state of utter panic when Dima steals his Victrola; Kronos the dog, an Afghan-hound puppet given life by Meleagre. One would be hard-pressed to explain the meaning of this piece of arcanum, yet it retains a dotty charm throughout.'-- imbd.com

Thumb down:'Made just after the return-to-form that was Santa Sangre, 1990’s The Rainbow Thief finds a de-fanged Jodorowsky infiltrating the world of middlebrow international cinema, with Omar Shariff as a bum playing butler to Peter O’Toole’s sewer-dwelling heir - a potentially queasy premise to be sure. To his credit, he fails miserably, damaging the film with fuzzy plotting (test audiences said they couldn’t even find the story) and rampant weirdness, much of it during the opening where Christopher Lee plays a dalmation-obsessed billionaire who serves giant bones to his guests. Still, better a failed attempt to play straight than a successful calcification. Shariff, unpredictably, delivers some unsightly mugging, but there’s a dark side to his turn, and a couple times where he could turn murderous. The ostenatious rainfall that eats up most of the final half hour is techinically impressive, but it’s sad to think that, should the upcoming DVDs not result in the handing-over of a budget to Jodorowsky’s whims -- or worse, his game is now gone -- this would be where his oeuvre stops.'-- Matt Prigge





____________




Psychomagic

'Alexandro Jodorowsky has lately committed his time and attention to developing a psychological therapy called "Psychomagic" which aims to heal the psychological wounds suffered in the early stages of life. This therapy is based on the belief that the performance of certain outside acts can directly act upon the unconscious mind, releasing it from a series of traumas, some of which are passed down from generation to generation. These acts are prescribed by the therapist after having studied the patient's personality and family tree.'-- Wikipedia




What does it take to be a psychomagician?
by Alexandro Jodorowsky

# A true therapist cannot be trained in less than five years and a psychomagician in no less than seven years.
# A psychomagician must first be an actor, artist, poet, writer, painter, mime, musician, etc. He should have mastered all art forms.
# Studied a martial art, Eastern philosophies and shamanism.
# Experimented with hallucinogenic mushrooms and other elements.
# Have an occupation outside of being a therapist to work free of financial pressures.
# Be familiar with tarot, alchemy and cabbala.
# Had contact with a well known healer.
# Been psychoanalyzed, know the history of psychoanalysis and its many theories and know the works of Freud, Jung, Grodeck, Lacan, Erickson, Dolto, etc.
(read more)



A first hand account by an attendee at Jodorowsky's lecture/event 'Psychomagic: Beyond Therapy' in San Francisco, December 2004.



____________




Tarot Scholar

TAROT OF MARSEILLES
restored by Philippe Camoin and Alexandro Jodorowsky

'Keeper of the Tarot of Marseilles Tradition for more than two centuries, the Camoin House was forced by the industrial revolution to change the colors of the Tarot. After a long research work, Ph. Camoin and A. Jodorowsky have restored the original colors and symbols of the Tarot. Some of them were incomplete or had already disappeared in the 18th century.'

Order it here




After studying Tarot for over 40 years, I met in Paris Philippe Camoin, who is the direct heir of the Camoin family, the last of Tarot of Marseilles printers in Marseilles. The origin of the factory dates back to 1760; it was created by Nicolas Conver, who at that time carved the most celebrated Tarot of Marseilles, the Nicolas Conver Tarot of Marseilles (reissued in 1965 by Camoin House). From the outset we decided to work together on restoring the Tarot of Marseilles such as it originally was. Knowing secrets facts regarding its history, manufacturing, tradition, symbolism and being in possession of original plates, we were the only ones who could restore the original Tarot of Marseilles. We studied and compared on computer innumerable versions of the Tarot of Marseilles, among which were the Tarot of Nicolas Conver, the tarot of Doodle, the Tarot of FranÁois Tourcaty, the Tarot of Fautrier, the Tarot of Jean-Pierre Payen, the Tarot of Suzanne Bernardin, the Tarot of BesanÁon by Lequart, etc. The difficulty inherent in such a task of restoration lies in the fact the Tarot of Marseilles is made of symbols which are tightly intertwined and linked to each other; if one modifies one single feature, the whole structure collapses. One must therefore be fully aware of its creator's plan and real intentions in order to achieve such a work without danger. (read more)



____________




Graphic Novels

'After the completion of Tusk, Jodorowsky began to study the Tarot in depth. This interest lead to a collaboration with the similarly minded artist/ designer Moebius (Jean Giraud), resulting in a graphic novel entitled The Incal with deep roots in the Tarot and its symbols. The Incal's success in France inspired a prequel and sequel, and went on to form the first three books in a sequence of science fiction themed graphic novels, all set in the space opera Jodoverse (or "Metabarons Universe".) They include The Caste of the Metabarons, The Technopriests, Incal, Moonface, and Megalex as well as a RPG adaptation entitled The Metabarons Roleplaying Game. Many ideas and concepts featured in this universe derived from Jodorowsky's planned adaptation of Dune. In 1997, Jodorowsky sued the French film director Lus Besson, alleging that the ideas in the latter's film The Fifth Element were stolen from his graphic novels. Jodorowsky lost the lawsuit. Action- adventure comics by Jodorowsky outside the science fiction genre include the historically- based Bouncer, Son Of The Gun and The White Lama.' -- Wikipedia

Alexandro Jodorowsky's graphic novels
AJ interviewed by Jay Babcock about his graphic novels
Moebius @ Wikipedia
Jodorowsky's books at Humanoid Publishing





----