Shamanic street preachers

"Last night I dream of blind men,” says Alejandro Jodorowsky. “12 of them had surrounded another blind man and were beating him. They surrounded me but I said ‘I am not blind’ so they left me alone.”

Say ‘Hello’ to a true underground hero, a celebrated actor, playwright, director, producer, composer, mime, graphic novelist, psychotherapist and newsreader.
Born in 1929 in Chile to Russian-Jewish immigrants who owned a dry-goods store, the young Jodorowsky would develop an interest in puppetry and mime and found a theatre company that, at its peak, would employ 60 people. He left for Paris, reportedly throwing his address book into the sea on the way, to collaborate with Marcel Marceau on some of his most famous mimeograms. Over the next few years, Jodorowsky would alternate between working in Mexico City and in Paris, staging the playwrights who would be major influences on his film career, including Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, August Strindberg, Theatre of Cruelty champion Antonin Artaud and Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, (with whom he launched the Panic Movement.)
“I am like a diamond,” he laughs, “a stone with many faces. I have had a family and written comics and done many things. I could leave film. But it was good for me, very good.”
For his first film project, he adapted the Arrabal play Fando And Lis, which Jodorowsky had recently staged. The film, a tale of two quarrelling lovers looking for the magical city of Tar, was banned in Mexico after starting a riot at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival.
“Mexico was very conservative at that time,” he recalls. “I had to be smuggled out of the screening. They were so offended by everything in the film.”
Happily, despite a life-threatening high-speed chase after the Acapulco screening, he kept at it. Decades have passed since he became the patron saint of New York’s hip midnight movie subculture and there are now so many myths around the cult filmmaker I’ve been inclined to doubt his very existence. Yet here he is in London, promoting the DVD release of Holy Mountain and El Topo, his two ‘lost’ masterpieces.
This, of course, is stupendous news for film fans. Though bootleg editions of these peyote classics have long doubled as the Holy Grail for video store brats, it’s been 30 years since Beatles manager Allen Klein withdrew both titles from circulation.
Details of the split between the director and Klein, who holds the distribution rights, are now legendary. When John Lennon decided El Topo was his favourite film, he convinced his manager to buy it.
Klein then produced Holy Mountain, the fantastically far-out follow-up.
“I owe John and Yoko a great deal,” says Jodorowsky in heavily accented English. “I am an artist, not an industrial movie-maker. Art comes from deep inside of your soul and is very, very difficult to distribute! When I came to the United States with El Topo the big companies said, ‘We don’t know how to open that.’ It was impossible to show. Then one person (theatre owner Ben Barenholtz) showed it to John Lennon and he liked it. So he showed it with his picture made with Yoko Ono. It began to show at midnight, which started midnight movies, pictures like Pink Flamingos. They called that ‘Midnight Mass’. After a year, Allen Klein bought the picture. John Lennon recommended that I get the money to do whatever I want. Klein gave me a million dollars. For me it was an enormous amount.”
Klein promptly withdrew the films when Jodorowsky refused to direct an adaptation of Pauline Reage’s The Story Of O. Some accounts have it that Klein hated Holy Mountain, but loved El Topo like a fine wine.
“I just did not want to make something sexual,” explains Jodorowsky. “I am a feminist. When I made El Topo I was a South American machista. I was a very, very angry person. I was a criminal. I had killed hundreds of animals. But by the time I finished I was a very, very kind person. I had come to realise what I was. And I was changing. That picture is a diary of life for me at that time. When I finished the film I knew I was El Topo. And I didn’t want to make a picture about a woman who is a slave. I had to escape. But Allen Klein had put together a big budget project. So he was right to be angry.”
How on earth did this long-running feud come to an end, I wonder?
“Ah listen,” he says. “The fight had lost its meaning long ago. I needed some peace just for myself. I asked why? I started meditating to discover where this hatred between us came from. And there was no reason. So I called him up and asked him to sit down. ‘You’ve been spending money blocking each other for years. What is the point?’ The years give you experience, you know. In three minutes we were good friends again. We’re old men now.”
Determined to make things right, Klein flew Jodorowsky to New York to remaster the films and record a director’s commentary. The resulting package, on sale here this month, includes both titles and Fando y Lis (1967), Jodorowsky’s astonishing feature film debut. It may be one of the most essential DVD bundles ever put together.
Novices can thrill to the orgiastic spectacle of the conquest of Mexico re-enacted by toads, parades of Amazon women, a Christ manufacturing yard and many, many gatherings of freaks. It is literally, like nothing you’ve ever seen, though you may occasionally have a vague sense of déjà vu. Why? Well, even though his best work has been inaccessible, Jodorowsky’s influence on film culture has been immeasurable. The trippy texts of post-classical Hollywood – Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider – would never have come to pass without El Topo. Famously, even the films Jodorowsky never made have had a huge impact. The team he assembled for an aborted film adaptation of Dune – Dan O’Bannon and the artists Jean Giraud (aka Moebius), Chris Foss, and H.R. Giger – would recycle their ideas in Alien. Meanwhile, many of Jodorowsky’s illustrations for production design would find their way into Star Wars; A New Hope.
“I think it is wonderful,” Jodorowsky tells me. “In a way, it makes it a very rewarding experience. The team we put together for Dune did everything we wanted to do. It is good that people admired what we did and stole bits. It’s a tribute.”
Marilyn Manson, who is scheduled to appear alongside Nick Nolte in Jodorowsky’s next feature King Shot, was so taken with the imagery of>o? Holy Mountain>o? that he asked the director to officiate at his non-denominational marriage ceremony. On December 3, 2005, Jodorowsky, dressed in an alchemist costume from the film, presided over the wedding of Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese at Castle Gurteen in Kilsheelan, home of artist Gottfried Helnwein , in Tipperary, Ireland.
“He called me up and explained that he wanted to recreate the alchemist sequence,” says Jodorowsky. “I said, ‘Oh, but the film was made so many years ago that I don’t have the right costume anymore’. He said, ‘Give me your measurements and we’ll find it.’ So when I came to Ireland to marry him, the costume was waiting for me. That was his dream. I was just glad he understood the picture.”
The Jodorowsky Collection is released on Tartan DVD on May 15.