About Alejandro Jodorowsky: Chilean-French Filmmaker (1929-)
Alejandro Jodorowsky Prulansky ([xoðoˈɾofski]; born 17 February 1929) is a Chilean-French filmmaker and artist. Since 1948, Jodorowsky has worked as a novelist, screenwriter, poet, playwright, essayist, film and theater director and producer, actor, film editor, comics writer, musician and composer, Philosopher, puppeteer, mime, psychologist and psychoanalyst, draftsman, painter, sculptor and spiritual master. Known for his avant-garde films, his work “filled with strong surreal imagery and a mixture of mysticism and religious provocation” was “revered by avid film lovers”.
Overview
Born to Jewish-Ukrainian parents in Chile, Jodorowsky experienced an unhappy and estranged childhood, so he immersed himself in reading and writing poetry. After dropping out of college, he started dabbling in theatre, especially pantomime, and worked as a clown before starting his own troupe. mock theater1947. Moving to Paris in the early 1950s, Jodorowsky studied pantomime under Étienne Decroux before turning to film, directing this short film Les têtes interverties 1957. From 1960 onwards, he traveled between Paris and Mexico City, where he became a founding member of the Panic Movement, an anarchist avant-garde performance artist. In 1966, he created his first comic, Anibal 5while in 1967 he directed his first feature film, Surrealism Van Doeliswhich caused a huge scandal in Mexico and was eventually banned.
His next film, Acid Western el topo (1970), which became a hit in American midnight film circles, was considered the first midnight cult film ever made, and was highly praised by John Lennon, who persuaded former Beatles manager Alan Klein to give Jodo Lowski offered $1 million to fund his next film.The result is holy mountain (1973), a surrealist exploration of Western mysticism.However, disagreements with Klein led to both sides holy mountain and el topo Failed to gain wide distribution, although both became classics in the underground cinema.
After failing to film Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel duneZodorowsky made five more films: Family Movies ivory (1980); The Horror of Surrealism saint sangrey (1989); failed blockbuster rainbow thief (1990); and the first two films in a planned five-film autobiographical series dance of reality (2013) and endless poetry (2016).During the same period, he created a series of sci-fi comic books, the most famous of which are Inca (1980-1989), it was described as claiming to be “the best comic book ever”, and technical priest and Baron YuanHe also writes books and regularly teaches about his own spiritual system, which he calls “spiritual magic” and “spiritual shamanism,” which stems from his interests in alchemy, tarot, Zen Buddhism, and shamanism. His son Cristobal followed his teachings on psychological shamanism.This work is included in the feature documentary quantum mandirected by Carlos Serrano Azcona.
Early life and education
Jodorowsky was born in the Chilean coastal town of Tokopila in 1929 to parents from Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro), Elisa Vigrad (now Kropivnitsky) and Jewish immigrants from other cities in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). His father, Jaime Jodorowsky Groismann, a businessman, largely abused his wife, Sara Felicidad Prullansky Arcavi, and at one point accused her of flirting with a customer. Furious, he then beat and raped her, impregnating her, which led to the birth of Alejandro. Because of this cruel conception, Sarah hated both her husband and her son, telling him “I can’t love you” and showing little tenderness to him. Alejandro also has an older sister, Raquel Jodorowsky, but he doesn’t like her because he thinks she’s selfish and “does everything he can to expel me from the family so that she becomes the center of attention. focus”. In addition to his disgust for his family, he also despised many locals who saw him as an outsider because he was the son of immigrants, as well as the American mining industrialists who worked locally and abused the Chilean people. The treatment at his hands led him to later denounce U.S. imperialism and neo-colonialism in Latin America in several of his films. Still, he loved his area and was so upset when he was forced to leave at the age of nine that he blamed his father for it. His family then moved to the Chilean city of Santiago.
He immersed himself in reading and also began to write poetry, publishing his first poem at the age of 16 and befriending Chilean poets Nicanor Parra, Stella Díaz Varín and Enrique Lihn. Intrigued by the political ideology of anarchism, he started college, studying psychology and philosophy, but only stayed there for two years. After dropping out of school, he developed an interest in theatre, especially pantomime, he worked as a clown in a circus and started a career as a theatre director. Meanwhile, in 1947, he founded his own troupe, the Mimic Theater, which had 50 members by 1952, and the following year he wrote his first play, ermino taura (Minotaur). Still, Jodorowsky felt that Chile was running out of things for him, so he moved to Paris, France that year.
While in Paris, Jodorowsky began studying pantomime with Étienne Decroux and joined the troupe of one of Decroux’s pupils, Marcel Marceau. It was with Marceau’s troupe that he toured the world and wrote several routines for the troupe, including “The Cage” and “The Mask Maker.” He has since returned to work as a theatre director, working for Maurice Chevalier’s concert hall in Paris. In 1957, Jodorowsky began to dabble in filmmaking, Les têtes interverties (decapitation), a 20-minute adaptation of the novella by Thomas Mann. Made up almost entirely of pantomime, it tells the surreal story of a head-swapping businessman who helps a young man find courtship success. Jodorowsky plays the lead role. Director Jean Cocteau enjoyed the film and wrote a synopsis for it. It was not considered lost until a print of the film was discovered in 2006.
In 1960, Jodorowsky moved to Mexico, settling in Mexico City. Still, he occasionally returned to France, once visiting the surrealist artist André Brittany, but he was disillusioned because he felt that Brittany had become somewhat conservative in his old age. Continuing his interest in Surrealism, in 1962 he founded the Panic Movement with Fernando Alabar and Roland Topol. The movement aimed to transcend traditional Surrealist ideas by embracing the absurd. Its members refuse to take themselves seriously, while mocking critics who do so. In 1966, he made his first comic, Anibal 5, which is associated with panic campaigns. The following year, he created a new feature film, Van Doelisloosely based on a screenplay written by Fernando Arrabal, who was working with Jodorowsky in the performing arts at the time. Van Doelis It premiered at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival, caused riots by those opposed to the film’s content, and was subsequently banned in Mexico.
It was in Mexico City that he met Ejo Takata (1928-1997), a Zen monk who had studied at Horyu-ji Temple and Seifuku-ji Temple in Japan, before traveling to Mexico in 1967 via the United States to spread Zen. Jodorowsky became Takada’s disciple and offered to turn his house into a meditation hall. Takada then attracted other disciples around him, who spent their time meditating and studying koans. Ultimately, Takada instructed Jodorowsky that he had to learn more about his feminine side, so he went to meet Leonora Carrington, a British surrealist painter who had recently moved to Mexico.
Profession
El Topo and the Holy Mountain (1970–1974)
In 1970, Jodorowsky released the film el toposometimes called in English mole, which he both directed and starred in. a sour western, el topo The story of a wandering Mexican bandit and gunman El Topo (played by Jodorowsky) and his young son in search of spiritual enlightenment. Along the way, he had a fierce confrontation with a few others, and was eventually killed and resurrected, living in a community of freaks trapped in a cave.Describing the work, he said: “I have the same requirements for a film that most North Americans have for psychedelics. The difference is that when a person creates a psychedelic film, he does not need to make a show that takes A movie of the hallucinations of the pill man; instead, he needs to make pills.” Know How Van Doelis Having sparked such a scandal in Mexico, Jodorowsky decided not to release el topo There, it instead focused on distribution in other countries around the world, including Mexico’s northern neighbor, the United States. In New York City, the film will run for several months at Ben Barenholtz’s Elgin Theater as “Midnight Movies.” It caught the attention of rock musician and counterculture figure John Lennon, who spoke highly of it and persuaded Alan Klein, president of The Beatles and Apple, to release it in the United States.
Klein agreed to give Jodorowsky $1 million to create his next film.The result is holy mountain, published in 1973. Someone suggested, holy mountain Possibly inspired by René Daumal’s surrealist novels installation simulation. holy mountain is another complex multi-part story about a man known as “The Thief” and equivalent to Jesus Christ, a mysterious alchemist played by Jodorowsky, representing the seven planets (Venus and six from Mars to Pluto) Seven Powerful Merchants), a religious training program for spiritual rebirth, and a quest to find the secrets of immortality on the top of the holy mountain.during completion holy mountainAfterwards, Jodorowsky received spiritual training from Oscar Ichazo of the Arica School, who encouraged him to take LSD and guided him through the psychedelic experiences that followed. Around the same time (November 2, 1973), Jodorowsky participated in the isolation tank experiment conducted by John Lilly.
Shortly thereafter, Alan Klein asked Jodorowsky to adapt a film based on Pauline Reggie’s classic female masochism novel, O’s story. Klein has promised this adaptation to various investors. Jodorowsky, who discovered feminism during filming holy mountain, refused to make films, and even went abroad to escape the directorship.In retaliation, Alan Klein El…
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