Alejandro Jodorowsky Archives

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Alejandro Jodorowsky Kickstarting New Film

February 17, 2015 / Klint Finley

DINERO POÉTICO

Alejandro Jodorowsky, who successfully crowdfunded his last film The Dance of Reality is turning to Kickstarter to fund his next film:

After a 23 yearlong absence, the director of cult classics El Topo (1969) and Holy Mountain (1973) made his comeback in film direction in 2013 with The Dance of Reality. The film was based on the first part of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s homonymous autobiographical book, depicting his childhood years in Tocopilla, Chile. His new film ENDLESS POETRY (Poesía Sin Fin) will be based on the latter half of the same book, depicting the author’s youth in lively Santiago de Chile.

Full Story: Kickstarter: Jodorowsky’s new film ENDLESS POETRY(Poesía Sin Fin)

Backers, besides getting to help get the movie made, will be compensated with Jodo’s own currency DINERO POÉTICO.

(via Threadbare)

New Book by Alejandro Jodorowsky Coming Soon: Metagenealogy

August 18, 2014 / Klint Finley

Metagenealogy: Self-Discovery through Psychomagic and the Family Tree by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa

The English translation of Metagenealogy: Self-Discovery through Psychomagic and the Family Tree by Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa comes out September 1. Looks like it’s been out in Spanish for a while.

Metagenealogy: Self-Discovery through Psychomagic and the Family Tree by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa

Here’s the description from Amazon:

A practical guide to recognizing and overcoming the patterns and influences of the four generations before you

• Provides exercises to uncover your family’s psychological heritage, heal negative patterns of behavior and illness in your family tree, and discover your true self

• Explains how we are the product of two forces: repetition of familial patterns from the past and creation of new ideas from the Universal Consciousness of the future

• Interwoven with examples from Jodorowsky’s own life and his work with the tarot, psychoanalysis, and psychomagic

The family tree is not merely vital statistics about your ancestors. It is an embodied sense of self that we inherit from at least four prior generations, constituting both a life-giving treasure and a deadly trap. Each of us is both an heir of our lineage and a necessary variation that brings the family into new territory. Are you doomed to repeat the patterns of your parents and grandparents? Or can you harness your familial and individual talents to create your own destiny?

In Metagenealogy, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa show how every individual is the product of two forces: the imitating force, directed by the family group acting from the past, and the creative force, driven by the Universal Consciousness from the future. Interweaving examples from Jodorowsky’s own life and his work with the tarot, psychoanalysis, and psychomagic, the authors provide exercises, visualizations, and meditations to discover your family’s psychological heritage and open yourself to the growth and creativity of Universal Consciousness. They reveal how identifying the patterns, emotional programming, and successes and failures of the four generations that influence you–your siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-grandparents–allows you to see beyond the stable identity formed by family lineage. It frees you to overcome your inherited subconscious patterns of behavior and illness, stop the transmission of these patterns to future generations, and reconnect with your true self and unique creative purpose in life.

By understanding your family tree and your place in it, you open your ability to heal the ancient struggle between the repetitive forces of the past and the creative forces of the future.

Drive Director Refn Adapting Jodorowsky and Moebius’ The Incal

June 3, 2013 / Klint Finley

Nicolas Winding Refn — who dedicated Drive to Alejandro Jodorowsky — is reportedly adapting Jodo and Moebius’ comic book The Incal:

France Inter also talked with Refn on the Croisette, and while they don’t provide a direct quote, they do report that he’s working on an adaptation of Jodorowsky and Moebius’ comic series “The Incal.” The original six book series launched in 1981 and is set in a dystopian future, detailing the battle over the powerful Incal crystal. The comic series is notable in that it followed the collapse of Jodorowsky’s “Dune,” and utilizes some of the similar designs that Moebius had created while working on the movie. (The forthcoming documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” goes into more detail about that, and you can read our report on that flick right here).

Full Story: Indie Wire: Nicolas Winding Refn Reportedly Working On An Adaptation Of Alejandro Jodorowsky & Moebius’ ‘The Incal’

(Thanks Ales)

Here’s an animated trailer for the comic:

If that looks familiar, it’s because Moebius was also the designer for The Fifth Element. He and Jodorowsky unsuccessfully sued the director Luc Besson for plagiarizing The Incal.

(The above video is a higher quality version of the trailer originally shared by Quenched Consciousness curator Ian MacEwan)

Trailer for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s New Film Danza De La Realidad

May 18, 2013 / Klint Finley

Danza De La Realidad (“The Dance of Reality”) is an autobiographical film that Jodorowsky crowdsourced. It should debut today at the Cannes film festival (or perhaps already did), along with Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about the director’s cancelled attempt to adapt the book.

The LA Times has more:

Born to Russian Jewish émigrés in 1929, Jodorowsky studied theater and worked as a circus clown and puppeteer in Santiago. In postwar Paris he performed mime with Marcel Marceau and fell in with the surrealists. He then moved to Mexico, where he mounted dozens of plays inspired by Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty. Back in Paris, where he has lived since the 1980s, he cultivated multiple sidelines: writing comic books, studying the tarot and developing a therapeutic method known as psychomagic, rooted in both psychoanalysis and shamanism.

Psychomagic is the guiding philosophy of “The Dance of Reality,” a kind of home movie writ large. Jodorowsky’s wife, Pascale Montandon, was the costume designer, and three of his sons appear in it, including Brontis (who in “El Topo” portrayed the son of the title character, a gunslinger known as “the mole” and played by Alejandro Jodorowsky). In the new film, Brontis, now 50, plays Jodorowsky’s Stalin-lookalike father, whom the director described as “a very terrible father, a very hard man, but he had his reasons.”

“Before we started, I said to the crew, ‘I am trying to heal my soul,'” Jodorowsky said. “But it’s not an egocentric, narcissistic picture. Poetry doesn’t speak about history. It speaks about interior life, universal problems.”

Full Story: The LA Times: Chile’s onetime cult king still the wizard of weird

And from The Guardian’s review:

Of course, the entire story is swathed in surreal mythology, dream logic and instant day-glo legend, resmembling Fellini, Tod Browning, Emir Kusturica, and many more. You can’t be sure how to extract conventional autobiography from this. Despite the title, there is more “dance” than “reality” — and that is the point. Or part of the point. For the first time, Jodorowsky is coming close to telling us how personal evasiveness has governed his film-making style; his flights of fancy are flights of pain, flights from childhood and flights from reality. And now he is using his transformative style to come to terms with and change the past and to confer on his father some of the heroism that he never attained in real life.

For more on Jodorowsky, see our Alejandro Jodorowsky dossier.

6 Essential Moebius Books

March 20, 2012 / Klint Finley

Joe “Jog” McCulloch rounds up the top six most essential Moebius books that you actually stand a chance of finding in the U.S. His picks are:

1. The Airtight Garage
2. The Incal [with Alejandro Jodorowsky]
3. Arzach
4. The Gardens of Aedena
5. The Long Tomorrow
6. Mississippi River

Six essential Moebius books

What are your favorites?

Alejandro Jodorowsky Crowd Funding Next Film

December 29, 2011 / Klint Finley

Danza De La Realidad

Alejandro Jodorowsky, apparently fed up with not being able to raise funds from traditional sources, is appealing directly to fans to raise money for his next film, the autobiographical Danza De La Realidad (“The Dance of Reality”). Here’s the Google translate of the official site:

We invite you to participate in financing the film “The Dance of Reality,” directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean artist and director.

With your donations we can make this project real. The people involved will have their name printed on the film. Donations totaling more than 100 USD will receive a certificate of ownership of an exclusive DVD of the movie version.

You can donate here.

(via Twitch film)

Alejandro Jodorowsky Leads Group Psychomagic Ritual for Casualties of the War on Drugs

December 6, 2011 / Klint Finley

Psychomagic

Alejandro Jodorowsky made a rare public appearance in Mexico City to lead a group psychomagic ritual with over 3,000 participants:

It was billed as “the first act of collective psycho-magic in Mexico.”

The call made by the cult mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky said the event would seek to “heal” the country of the cosmic weight of so many dead in the drug war, by gathering for something he called the March of the Skulls.

On Sunday, on a wet and frigid morning in this mountain capital, hundreds of Jodorowsky fans answered the open convocation (video link in Spanish).

They donned black top hats and black shawls, and carried canes and Mexican flags colored in black. They wore calavera face paint or masks to give themselves the look of stylish skeletons gathered in this often-surreal city in the name of Mexico’s tens of thousands of sometimes nameless drug war dead.

LA Times Blog: Cult mystic holds ‘march of skulls’ for Mexico’s drug war dead

Update: You can find a collection of links to more pictures here.

(Thanks Trevor!)

Alejandro Jodorowsky Interviewed by Richard Metzger on Dangerous Minds

November 16, 2011 / Klint Finley

Occupy Your Mind: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Richard talks to Jodorowsky about Occupy Wall Street, why revolutions fail but mutation succeeds, the magical side of reality, the search for gurus and wisdom and why Twitter is the haiku of this century.

Dangerous Minds: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Flash vs. Gurdjieff by Alejandro Jodorowsky

October 7, 2011 / Klint Finley

Gurjief

Flash vs. Gurdjieff

Comics Bulletin has published an English translation of a short article Alejandro Jodorowsky wrote for the Spanish science-fiction magazine Nueva in 1968 about Flash # 163 – which also happens to be Grant Morrison’s favorite comic of all time. I’ve never read it and had no idea the villain of the comic bore a remarkable resemblance to Gurdjieff.

Are Infantino and Broome aware that the strange gentleman is Gurdjieff? The resemblance is striking: the same bald head, the same features and moustache. The content of the parable could very well belong to the philosophy of this enigmatic being.

What does Flash signify? He is a man who possesses superspeed. Upon acquiring it, he can go around the world in less than a second, can walk through walls, can be in two places at once, etc. He is, in synthesis, the king of superficiality, always running from one place to the other, never being “AT THE THING”. Superspeed prevents him from anchoring himself to reality. Objects become inconsistent and human communication impossible. By walking through objects everything becomes superficial. People admire him because of “HIS DEEDS.” He is the perfect example of those who Gurdjieff described like this: “They are so lazy at helping themselves that they want to help others.”

[Note: The actual quote is “They are too lazy to work on themselves, and at the same time it is very pleasant for them to think that they can help others.”]

The teacher, wanting the character to be conscious of his inner emptiness, proves that his existence, by being so “from the skin outwards,” depends on others. If the others stop paying attention to him, he does not exist, the reason being that all his values are based on the opinions of the rest. Flash lives not for himself, but for others. He exists in those who see him.

By no longer being seen and admired, the artificial self behind which he hides evaporates. By becoming naked, depending on his own values, he realizes that he is nothing. Gurdjieff says that man is born without a soul and that through huge and systematic efforts he must create it for himself. Flash never made an effort to create himself. At that moment of crisis, instead of stopping to ponder, reflecting on himself and working on his inner being, he decides to go after the girl he had impressed with the classic miracle of walking on water.

Comics Bulletin: The Flash vs. Gurdjieff by Alejandro Jodorowsky

(Thanks Theoretick)

I don’t have my copy of Supergods handy, but here’s what Morrison wrote about Flash # 163 for the Guardian:

This was from the time of pop art comics in the 1960s when DC Comics had go-go chicks, and almost Bridget Riley-style op-art across the top. It’s a great cover that shows the head and shoulders of The Flash, holding up his hand to the reader. He’s yelling out, “STOP! DON’T PASS UP THIS ISSUE – MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!” A supervillain sets up a machine whereby everyone forgets that The Flash ever existed, and his body begins to attenuate into this red mist; there’s a very odd, paranoid feel to the story. In the end he’s only saved because there’s this little girl sitting by the side of the docks who still believes in him.

Documentary to Examine Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune

May 14, 2011 / Klint Finley

In “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” director Frank Pavich intends to get to the bottom of the proposed film and why it fell apart. The doc, half-completed, is currently looking for distribution at Cannes, though interviews with Jodorowsky, Geiger and others have already been recorded. They’ve also released a promo video, obtained by TwitchFilm, which should whet your appetite for what Pavich has in store—check it out after the jump

We hope this is the beginning of a Jodorowsky renaissance. His collaboration with David Lynch’s Absurda Films, “King Shot,” sought financing at Cannes in 2009, but the project was eventually canceled. And we have no idea what happened with “Abelcain,” the long-rumored sequel to “El Topo” that supposedly secured a budget in the fall that same year. It’s just as well, considering Jodo hasn’t been behind the camera since 1990’s “The Rainbow Thief” (which he has since disowned), but we do recommend the excellent two-disc “Santa Sangre” DVD put out earlier this year by the good folks at Severin Films.

indieWIRE: New Documentary To Go Inside ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’

Here’s a whole bunch of stuff about Jodorowsky’s Dune.

And here’s a clip from, I think, the documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky about the Dune project:

Jodorowsky’s ideas for Dune ended up in his comic Metabarons, which is still in print.

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