Given his wild reputation, Alejandro Jodorowsky is — to use the lingo of the 1960s era that fostered him — a pretty mellow cat. This, after all, is the guy who once claimed: “Most directors make films with their eyes. I make films with my cojones.” Now 77, the Chilean émigré has a vibe that is more avuncular than the imperious aura of the macho shaman he portrayed in the classic cult movies El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973).
Visiting this fall for the New York Film Festival’s revival screenings of the films, Mr. Jodorowsky was nonetheless an iconoclast, if a good deal stealthier in his soft-spoken expression. The three decades that have passed since his mystic gonzo epics became countercultural touchstones have made the filmmaker a legend, even as the movies seemed to vanish — traded by collectors as poorly dubbed bootleg videos, washy and incomplete. Legal issues between Mr. Jodorowsky and his former producer, Allen Klein, cast the films into limbo for all those years, but were resolved in 2004. Thus, a remastered, high-definition video version of El Topo opens today at the IFC Center. Incorporating influences from tarot to the Bible to surrealism into a stupefying Western, Mr. Jodorowsky cast himself as the leather-clad gunman, El Topo (”the mole”), who ambles through a desert strewn with mystical symbols on an unnamed quest, leaving carnage and destruction in his wake.
These days, Mr. Jodorowsky prefers Paris, his adoptive home since the 1960s, when his work in avant-garde street theater led him to create something he called the Panic Movement, a polymorphously perverse circus in which Antonin Artaud met lysergic freakout, and which forecast the metaphysical violence and sexuality of the films to come. As reported in the 1983 cult-film history Midnight Movies, by critics J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, the movement’s grandest spectacle was a four-hour event staged in 1965 called “Sacramental Melodrama.”
“Against music provided by a six-piece rock band, a set consisting of a smashed automobile, and the visual frisson provided by a cast of bare-chested women (each body painted a different color),” they wrote, “Jodorowsky appeared dressed in motorcyclist leather. He slit the throats of two geese, smashed plates, had himself stripped and whipped, danced with a honey-covered woman, and taped two snakes to his chest.”
Such conduct may be unbecoming to the dapper graybeard sipping tea high up in the skyscraper that houses ABKCO, the company owned by Klein. And besides, that was the ’60s.
“I feel good in Paris,” Mr. Jodorowsky said, speaking with a delicate Spanish accent and occasionally aided by a translator.”Because the French are very inhuman. They are cold, and you can be quiet. Nobody bothers you. In order to be invited to someone’s house, you have to know them for 10 years.”
They need not wait so long to make Mr. Jodorowsky’s acquaintance. He gives tarot readings every week at a Parisian café. He doesn’t peer into anyone’s future, though, he merely offers his advice, adhering to a “post-psychoanalytical” form of therapy he calls “psycho-magic.” As he explained, outlining a predicament with which many New Yorkers can identify, “You can go 15 or 20 years to a psychoanalyst and your problems are still there. Words are not realities. Instead, I use art and theater. If you have a problem, I give you an act to do, an act to speak to your subconscious.”
Method psychology aside, the depth to which Mr. Jodorowsky’s films have seeped into the subconscious of two or three generations of filmmakers is impossible to ignore. Two recent films from two wildly disparate directors, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, can be read as explicit homages to the hallucinatory power of The Holy Mountain — a tripped-out quest saga in which the filmmaker cast himself as a prophet in the line of Buddha and Jesus, amid flayed lambs, a stockpile of Christ mannequins, whores, dwarves, wild dogs, and monkeys.
Mr. Jodorowsky long ago switched to comic books as his preferred medium. “Three or four years to make a film is too long,” he said. Here I have no limits. If I want to have 1,000 spaceships, I do it.”
But he’s enthusiastic about the new editions of his films. Thanks to advancements in printing technology, the frames glow with a new vibrancy.”It is a visceral shock, like Guernica, ” he said. “It’s the first time in my life I see the picture the way I wanted to see it. I never foresaw the impact of the films. People laughed at me because they didn’t understand what I was doing.”
Shooting in Mexico, Mr. Jodorowsky often ran afoul of the authorities.
“They called me a degenerate,”he recalled. “The church organized a parade against me. Riots. Two thousand people, saying I was el Diablo. I was compared to Charles Manson.”
One suspects Mr. Jodorowsky may have been privately thrilled by his demonization. When he talks about a visit to the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, he shudders. All those fancy people in their tuxedos. “A monstrosity — so very mundane!” he says. Then he chuckles. Next time, he promises, “I will oblige the audience to be naked.”
Originally published December 2006 in the New York Sun
Steve Dollar has been thinking about film since his childhood visits to the drive-in theaters of the Florida Panhandle in the early 1960s, where exposure to Mondo Cane and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly irradiated his tender brain, causing permanent after-effects. Later on, he started writing about the stuff for daily newspapers in large American cities. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he collects Steve Buscemi's junk mail. He also has contributed to such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, the New York Sun, GQ, Paste, Playboy.com, and Time Out New York. 24XPS is a topology of cinematic enthusiasms: interviews with filmmakers, screenwriters, actors and designers; reviews of indie, cult, genre, art, forsaken, forgotten, and forbidden movies; conversations with artists and fans about the films they love and hate; news about upcoming releases; festival coverage; and personal essays about anything and everything celluloid and pixel. Please visit often and tell your friends.
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