I first encountered the hallucinatory films of Alejandro Jodorowsky in the early 2000s. It was around the time Mulholland Drive came out and I was just beginning my pursuit of “weird” cinema. I’d been into crazy Italian horror films for a while, but my tastes were becoming artier and I wanted to discover the strangest most marginal styles of filmmaking I could unearth. There was a fantastic little independent video store in Kansas City called SRO video and that’s where I came across Fando & Lis (1968).
It was this cover that first drew my attention. The back looked something like this, albeit on VHS, not DVD.
That description was what convinced me to rent the movie. The idea that a movie at a film festival could be so controversial as to cause a riot was all I needed to know. Later I learned that following this catastrophic screening Jodorowsky became very depressed and branded himself a failure. Then he decided he would make something more mainstream. He would make a cowboy movie. A spaghetti western. Which is how El Topo (1971) was born, and along with it the phenomenon of the “midnight movie.”
“El Topo” is about, in the words of Jodorowsky himself, “a criminal who becomes a saint.” It concerns a gunslinger who abandons his son for the affections of a beautiful woman who demands he murder four spiritual masters in the desert. In so doing he himself is killed and reborn as a man who pines to help the downtrodden escape their underground prisons, only to find his efforts sabotaged by a Sodom and Gomorrah-like town who is unwilling to receive them. This film made a big splash in the early 70s and began screening at midnight every weekend to sold out crowds, drawing the praise of filmmakers, musicians and other artistic types. Even The Beatles were fans.
Jodorowsky followed El Topo with his most extreme film to date, The Holy Mountain (1971).
If memory serves, this was the second Jodorowsky film I encountered at SRO video. The VHS was censored so that whenever there was a man or woman with their genitals out, a little white dot would be hovering over the offending parts to hide them from view. The Holy Mountain has always been my favorite Jodorowsky movie, just because it’s so over-the-top and chockfull of the the kinds of social commentary that as a young man in his late teens I felt really engaged by.
Jodorowsky did some lesser films in the 70s and 80s (There’s a whole documentary about his efforts to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune) but didn’t make anythingt of much note until Santa Sangre (1989), a psychedelic horror film produced by Claudio Argento, Dario Argento’s brother.
Then he disappeared again only to reemerge in 2013 with back-to back films, The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016).
This duo of films were autobiographical depictions of Jodorowsky as a youth first discovering the beauty of art. He was in his 80s when he made these films and from both a technical and narrative standpoint, it could easily be argued they are his best films.
This past weekend the American Cinematheque hosted a Jodorowsky retrospective, and Jodorowsky, now 95, was present alongside his wife, Pascale. Just before he came the LA Times published this quirky little interview with him where he opines about art and spirituality.
Here are some photos from the event—
At 95 he’s still spry and lucid, full of jokes and sass. One thing that’s always intrigued me about Jodorowsky is his unwillingness to be coy and accept ambiguity. Ask David Lynch what any of his films mean, and that’s precisely what you get. But listen to Jodorowsky talk about his films (for example on the commentaries of his blu-rays) and he will tell you exactly what every single image means, and why he made each and every choice. It’s quite the feat.
Thanks for reading!
Independent authors need readers to purchase their books to support their endeavors. If you like and want to support independent and transgressive literature, you can buy my debut novel "Help me I am in Hell" right here.
