Arthur Magazine editor Jay Babcock has re-published his 2004 interview with Alexandro Jodorowsky from LA Weekly:
I don’t suffer to write it. But when I need to write a new series, a new album, for three days I do nothing. The only thing I can do is to see movies, see television, read . . . Because I am as if paralyzed! Suddenly, [with relief] the idea comes. I say thank you, because I am grateful. I am really grateful because I received the idea. But I don’t construct the idea. I am not a constructor. I receive the idea.
Q: Where do you think it comes from?
The unconscious. It comes directly from the unconscious. I think the unconscious is a very, very enormous universe, no? And when you open the doors to the unconscious, you start to receive. Sometimes you see a terrible vision of yourself: desires you don’t want to have, ideas you detest, feelings that hurt you. When you open the door, you can see yourself in a very weird way, like a bad trip on LSD. You can have that. You have all the hell, and paradise, no? You need to have the courage to open the doors.
In May it was announced that Jodorowsky was going to work with acclaimed director David Lynch on King Shot which was described as a “metaphysical spaghetti western.” Though he hasn’t exactly been relevant in contemporary filmmaking over the past two decades, it looks like his work with Lynch has paid off as Quiet Earth reports that he now has the funding needed to make his dream project Abel Cain.
Jodorowsky calls the film “the sons of El Topo” (see above), a nod to his 1970 revisionist western El Topo. The story follows Abel and Cain who, upon the death of their mother, embark on a journey to bury her holy body next to their father’s grave on a forbidden paradise island.
Did you know that Alejandro Jodorowsky was originally going direct Dune? (I could swear I’d written about this here before, but I apparently haven’t. For this, I am sorry.)
In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Dune from Arthur P. Jacobs. Jodorowsky was set to direct. In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a ten hour feature, in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Alain Delon, Hervé Villechaize and Mick Jagger. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd. Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris consisting of Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers for science fiction periodicals, Jean Giraud (Moebius), a French illustrator who created and also wrote and drew for Metal Hurlant magazine, and H. R. Giger. Moebius began designing creatures and characters for the film, while Foss was brought in to design the film’s space ships and hardware. Giger began designing the Harkonnen Castle based on Moebius’ storyboards, and Dali was cast as the Emperor with a reported salary of $100,000 an hour. His son Brontis Jodorowsky was to play Paul. Dan O’Bannon was to head the special effects department.
Instead, some of the people involved went on to make Alien and Jodorowsky went on to write the comic book series Metabarons, and David Lynch gave up the opportunity to direct Revenge of the Jedi to direct Dune (Wikipedia says David Cronenberg was also offered the chance to direct Jedi and turned it down – I didn’t know that before today!)
Anyway, the Drawing Room in London will have an exhibition of the materials created for the movie 17 September – 25 October 2009
(much thanks to Jellyfish for all the Jodorowsky Dune trivia)
Richard Metzger also points to this saying it was some footage from the movie (I haven’t watched it yet): It’s actually trailers for two Moebuis animated movies: 1) L’Incal, based on a comic book collaboration between Moebuis and Jodorowsky and later ripped off by Fifth Element and 2) An animated version of Moebuis’s Arzach. Neither was ever released, to the best of my knowledge. The video was uploaded, incidentally, by the above mentioned artists extraordinaire and pop culture trivia maven Popjellyfish.
Alejandro Jodorowsky talks about his fascination with the Tarot and how he helped recreate what the Tarot of Marseilles looked like 1400 years ago. He also goes into what the different Tarot cards mean. This video is an extra from the 2007 restored DVD of The Holy Mountain (1973 film).
So it was with great excitement that I read the recent translation of Jodorowsky’s spiritual autobiography, entitled-hold onto your hats-The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Like his films, it is a puzzling, wonderous, grotesque, and sometimes tedious book, but it does confirm the sense I get from his films that he is not fucking around with the mysteries. In the Sixties and Seventies, Jodorowsky was a serious practitioner of Zen, studying and meditating with a Japanese priest in Mexico City named Ejo Takata. Their koan combat is the most steady thread of this book, a male-buddy-cognitive conversation that forms a counterpoint with the other figures in the book, all of whom are women who offer Jodo various modes of initiation-artistic, sexual, magical, energetic. These women include the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who sounds as wacky brilliant as Dali, and a goat-killing silicone-implanted Mexican actress known as La Tigress.
The strongest aspect of the book are the tales themselves. Jodo is a great story-teller, and the details he provides about his fascinating life-a Chilean expat in Mexico, a renegade theatre director turned filmmaker, a celebrity in Mexico City’s hothouse creative environment-make me pray that someone chooses to translate his autobiography La Danza de la Realidad as well. His stories are rounded out with remarkable and sometimes hilariously bizarre details about random encounters with street urchins and strange synchronicities involving firing squads and singing vulvas. Late in the book, he visits a brujo, and the setting tells you all you need to know: ‘A black dog gnawed the remains of an iguana and a pig was snuggling its belly comfortably into a freshly dug hollow in a humid patch of ground.’
J: You, Manson, you are a symbol. You always wear make-up, no-one knows who you are… Christ is a man who became a symbol, you are the opposite. You are a symbol who is in the process of becoming human. When you say ?Eat Me, Drink Me’, you prove your love for the world. You offer yourself… you are food for the vampire cannibals. That’s what I feel. Talking about you personally: you are a mythology, but back to front. Each new era needs new mythologies…
M: I completely agree. You understood that so much better than anyone… yes.
J: To express ourselves as artists in the world, we can no longer destroy it. It is ourselves that we have to destroy.
Hot on the heels of a different announcement about Werner Herzog’s collaboration with Nic Cage comes words of an even stranger paring. The Hollywood Reporter reports that a film co-written by Herzog and his longtime assistant director Herbert Golder will be produced by David Lynch and his Absurda production company.
My Son, My Son is based on the true story of a man who, based upon a play by Sophocles, kills his mother with a sword. Lynchian enough already, the film will tell the story in a flashback structure. Also following Lynch’s style, it will be shot in DV rather than film. My Son was actually delayed in order for Herzog to work with Cage while his schedule allows. He’ll also be tight on shooting afterwards, since he’s signed on to shoot The Piano Tuner this fall. With his documentary Encounters at the End of the World out this summer, even for Herzog, 2008 is one prolific year.
As odd a collaboration as Herzog and Lynch may be (and trust us, it’s odd), even more unlikely comes the announcement that Lynch and Absurda will be working on a film with Alejandro Jodorowsky. Best known for his series of surreal, mind-bending Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky hasn’t made a film since 1990. Jodorowsky certainly shares a lot more common ground with Lynch, but hearing of any new project by the Chilean 79-year-old is a bit incredible.
Jodorowsky’s film will be the metaphysical gangster movie King Shot. Already guaranteed to be NC-17 (no surprise given his earlier works), the film features Marilyn Manson as a 300-year old pope and will star Nick Nolte.
Meanwhile, Lynch is spending any time he’s not producing on his own project according to Hollywood Today. A “Lynch-esque documentary,” (as if he could direct any other kind), it’s a road movie where he speaks with regular folks on the meaning of life and discusses the ’60s with Donovan and John Hagelin. Looks like these days Lynch may be just as busy as Herzog.
You’ve described your films as ‘initiation cinema’ and ‘healing cinema’, can you talk about what this means.
In order to talk about initiation and healing cinema, we need to talk about the ?industry’ of movies. The movie industry is a business for entertainment. And who controls this business?… The tastes and demands of normal people, no? But normal people represent mediocrity, not art; their entertainment is vulgar and gives you nothing with which to change your life. It’s like a cigarette; you smoke tobacco, and it gives you nothing, unlike marijuana, which always gives you something. That is the industrial picture.
In order to think about the ?initiatic’ picture, we need to break with industry. The goal of industry is to make a lot of money – this is the measure of a film’s art. Three hundred million dollars – it’s a masterwork! If it doesn’t make money, it’s an awful picture, a failure. But the initiatic picture doesn’t work with money, it works with soul, with spirituality. A lot of spirituality is a good picture, lack of spirituality is a bad picture. It’s different.
And then, what is it to heal somebody? In reality, the biggest illness is not to be what you are but to be what the other wants you to be – the family, the society, the culture. They tell you ‘You need to be like this, with these morals, with these feelings, with this economy, with this political thing, with this religion’. And then, you go and sign a form that puts you into a spiritual jail for your entire life. The initiation, initiatic cinema, frees you from all these forms, from the artificial world where you started out in the belly of your mother.
Initiating – the art initiation – reveals to you the hell, this prison, and shows you how to escape from it. And to heal you is to give you the opportunity to be yourself and to have your own opinion. Hitchcock, in movies, is an ill person. Why? Because he has disguised himself as a genius of movies, but in reality, he’s making his movies in jail, because he’s saying, ‘That is a system that will make terror. This, the public will love. There, they will be anguished.’ He’s directing your emotions; everything is done to hypnotize you in order to react in a certain way.
In a healing picture, they don’t say you need to react like that. You will react as you react!
Brainsturbator has done a salute to Alejandro Jodorowsky that includes a brief biography and excerpts from interviews. I just saw both El Topo and Holy Mountain in the theater here in Portland. El Topo I didn’t really get, but enjoyed watching. Holy Mountain, though, I loved. If you get a chance to see these movies in the theater as part of the current theatrical release, I strongly suggest you do so. Otherwise, the DVDs will be out in a month.
Interesting tidbit from the Brainsturbator profile: Holy Mountain was based on Mount Analogue. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard great things.
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