The Holy Mountain
1973
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Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky (Spanish: [xoðoˈɾofski]; born 17 February 1929) is a Chilean and French avant-garde filmmaker.Best known for his 1970s films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky has been "venerated by cult cinema enthusiasts" for his work which "is filled with violently surreal images and a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation".
Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in Tocopilla, Chile on February 17, 1929. In 1939 he moved to Santiago where he attended university, was a circus clown and a puppeteer. In 1953 he went to Paris and studied mime with Marcel Marceau. He worked with Maurice Chevalier there and made a short film, La cravate (1957). He also befriended the surrealists ...
- January 1, 1
- 3 min
- Tocopilla, Tocopilla, II Región, Chile
- Overview
- Early work
- El Topo and The Holy Mountain
- Later films, comic books, and psychomagic
- Controversy over remarks about El Topo
Alejandro Jodorowsky (born February 17, 1929, Tocopilla, Chile) Chilean-born French filmmaker and author known for his surrealistic films, especially El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973).
Jodorowsky’s parents were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. When he was eight years old, the family moved from Tocopilla to Santiago. He enrolled in the University of Chile in 1947 but dropped out two years later. He began writing plays in 1948 and founded an experimental theatre group in 1950.
In 1953 Jodorowsky moved to Paris, where he worked with French mime Marcel Marceau. He made his first film, the short La Cravate (1957; The Severed Heads), about a young man (played by Jodorowsky) who falls in love with the proprietor of a shop where one can swap out one’s head. In the early 1960s Jodorowsky, Spanish-born French author Fernando Arrabal, and French artist and author Roland Topor formed a loose avant-garde movement, Panique, named after the Greek god Pan and dedicated to the shocking and the surreal. Jodorowsky’s most-noted work in that period was the four-hour-long performance “Mélodrame sacrementel” (1965; “Sacramental Melodrama”), in which he slit the throats of two geese, was whipped, and nailed a cow’s heart to a cross, among other bizarre happenings.
Jodorowsky’s next film, El Topo (1970; “The Mole”), brought him worldwide notoriety. In a western setting saturated with sex, violence, and religious symbolism, the gunfighter El Topo (Jodorowsky) crosses the desert with his naked son (played by Jodorowsky’s son Brontis) but leaves him behind to go on a quest to kill the four master gunfighters. At the quest’s end, El Topo is left for dead, but he awakes 20 years later in a cave where he is worshipped as a god by dwarves and the physically deformed. El Topo and a dwarf woman, seeking to raise money to build a tunnel out of the cave, climb out to a nearby town, an evil place where slavery is legal and a church service includes Russian roulette.
Because of Fando and Lis’s reception in Mexico, Jodorowsky took El Topo to the United States. American movie-theatre owner Ben Barenholtz saw El Topo at a private screening and booked it to play at midnight at the Elgin Theater in New York City. The film became a word-of-mouth success and was the first “midnight movie.” El Topo divided critics, with some praising it as a masterpiece and others deriding it as a repulsive freak show. John Lennon’s manager, Allen Klein, bought the rights to El Topo on Lennon’s recommendation, distributed it throughout the United States, and immediately engaged Jodorowsky to produce another film.
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The Holy Mountain was not a hit like El Topo. Klein then wanted Jodorowsky to do a more commercial film, an adaptation of Pauline Réage’s pornographic novel Story of O. Jodorowsky instead decided to adapt Frank Herbert’s science-fiction novel Dune. (In retaliation, Klein withdrew El Topo and The Holy Mountain from circulation until 2006.) For Dune he assembled a cast that included Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, and David Carradine. Jodorowsky engaged designs from Swiss artist H.R. Giger and French comic-book artist Moebius. Pink Floyd would have composed some of the score. The project was never filmed, but some film historians contend that, through its extensive amount of preproduction design, it influenced later science-fiction movies, most notably Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), for which Giger designed the creature.
Jodorowsky and Moebius collaborated on comic books, beginning with Les Yeux du chat (1978; The Eyes of the Cat) and including most notably L’Incal (1981–88; The Incal), a science-fiction story in which a bumbling private detective comes into possession of the powerful title artifact. Jodorowsky became a prolific and acclaimed author of comic books, many set in the same universe as The Incal.
Tusk (1980) was a children’s film, set in British colonial India, about the attachment between a young English girl and an elephant, both born on the same day. Jodorowsky was dissatisfied with the film’s technical deficiencies and later disowned it.
During his long hiatus from filmmaking in the 1980s, Jodorowsky developed a form of personal therapy that he called “psychomagic,” which combined insights from Jungian psychology and the tarot. (He was an avid tarot reader and for years performed weekly mass readings.) A key aspect of psychomagic is “acts” that one must perform that enact a metaphorical solution to one’s emotional problems. He outlined the therapy in the book Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010) and the documentary Psychomagic, A Healing Art (2019).
In Santa Sangre (1989; Holy Blood), insane-asylum inmate Fenix (Jodorowsky’s son Axel) remembers his childhood growing up in the circus and the horrific event of his father’s cutting off his mother’s arms and then killing himself. Fenix escapes from the institution and reunites with his mother. However, under her influence, Fenix becomes her arms and kills any woman he loves.
Jodorowsky was a director-for-hire on The Rainbow Thief (1990), a gentle fantasy in which a petty thief (Omar Sharif) befriends a prince (Peter O’Toole) and the two live underground in the sewers while waiting for the prince to assume his inheritance. Jodorowsky subsequently disowned the film.
In 1972 Jodorowsky boasted about having raped an actress during the filming of El Topo. Although the comments did not immediately cause a stir, they resurfaced on and off in the ensuing decades. In the late 2010s, amid the #MeToo movement, the statements received greater scrutiny, and in 2019 El Museo del Barrio, an institution in New York City pro...
- Jeremy Urquhart
- Senior Author
- 'The Holy Mountain' (1973) Starring: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas, Zamira Saunders. A definitive film within the entire arthouse genre/movement, The Holy Mountain is a singular achievement unlike anything else in cinema, for better or worse (depending on how much you like Alejandro Jodorowsky and his singular style).
- 'El Topo' (1970) Starring: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, José Legarreta. After two bizarre yet somewhat light-hearted fantasy films, El Topo was the film that ended up making Alejandro Jodorowsky whatever the cult director version of a household name is.
- 'Santa Sangre' (1989) Starring: Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell. Plenty of Alejandro Jodorowsky movies have dreamlike or nightmarish sequences, but none are as abundantly horror-focused as Santa Sangre.
- 'Endless Poetry' (2016) Starring: Adan Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores. With Endless Poetry, Alejandro Jodorowsky essentially made a sequel, with this film picking up right where The Dance of Reality left off.
May 15, 2024 · Director Alejandro Jodorowsky, in his ninth decade, keeps seizing the crown. At 87, Alejandro Jodorowsky might be expected to take it easy. June 1, 2016. “Before, everyone had to go to the ...
412K Followers, 112 Following, 529 Posts - Alejandro Jodorowsky (@alejandro.jodorowsky) on Instagram: "Multidisciplinary Artist & Filmmaker Official account"
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Mar 14, 2014 · March 14, 2014. In September, on the day of the Paris premiere of “The Dance of Reality,” his first movie in 23 years, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born filmmaker, learned that he was now ...
