Using players from his Panic productions, and an obvious bow to Marcel Marceau and the mime movement that was popular during the time, the scant story was saved by the unique visual approach the director brought to the project. Anyone who was lucky enough to see Cravate may recognize Thomas Mann’s 1940 absurdist effort The Transposed Heads. While neither was completely successful, they proved that Jodorowsky had an eye for cinema and could really tell a story visually. After fooling around with a work about a lady who sells substitute heads – La Cravate – he went off to tackle his first full-length project a quasi-adaptation of a play written by Fernando Arrabal. But even his missteps are fabulous in their fascination.Īfter beginning life as a performance artist and theatrical “terrorist” (part of the Panic Movement-inspired by the god Pan-in early ’60s France) Jodorowsky’s move to film was seen as a way of extending his influence beyond the simplicity of the stage. Sometimes he succeeds in stunning fashion. Out of said incongruities, he hopes to unlock the secrets of love, desire, death, evil, happiness, hate, terror, wisdom, God, man, the Devil, and the bifurcated nature of spirituality and physicality. His is an aesthetic of contradiction, the juxtaposing of the sacred with the profane, the beautiful with the grotesque, the simple along with the complex. But Jodorowsky isn’t content to simply shock and confuse. Typically, a surrealist tackles the real world from a ridiculous yet recognizable avenue. In fact, it’s safe to say that Jodorowsky is the most arcane avant-gardist ever to take up the genre’s mantle.
Like all artists working within said medium, the Chilean-born Renaissance man loves to break convention as he embraces the recognizable. He works in the weird and fashions out of the freakish. In the grand tradition of fellow experimentalists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, Alejandro Jodorowsky is, at his heart, a surrealist. The recently released Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky box set provides a chance to see the works that loom largest in the auteur’s considerable legend. Only the first title has ever appeared on DVD, the other two considered “lost” due to ongoing animosity between the director and infamous ’70s business bully Allen Klein. The final issue with his covert career is the lack of access to his major films – Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain.
Like many Latino moviemakers, he lives his works and is only driven to create when the passion (and the fiscal possibility) strikes him. Part of the problem is also that Jodorowsky remains a vehemently idiosyncratic artist. This could be due to the fact that the filmmaker has only helmed seven projects in the 50 years he’s been in the business (that’s right, seven in half a century behind the camera).
Others only know selected works-the ’80s effort Santa Sangre, the consistently mentioned “midnight movie” El Topo – but even for those who claim an intimate knowledge of cinema, director, poet, agitator, self-described “deity” Alejandro Jodorowsky remains an enigma.