The Borderless Vision of Alejandro Jodorowsky
My profile of Alejandro Jodorowsky for V Magazine upon the release of his novel, Albina and the Dog-Men (2016)
This profile originally appeared in V Magazine. I wish I could post the entirety of the unedited interview transcript but for some reason the recording was marred with a bizarre beeping sound that made the experience mostly irretrievable, as I suppose it should be. - B
I’m live on Skype with Alejandro Jodorowsky talking about cyborgs and rebirth when my sister texts me that she’s gone into labor with her first child. I don’t bring it up in our conversation, but I can’t stop smiling, and I can’t help but imagine somehow that the legendary Chilean director and author’s voice is in my head right now for a reason, one that has something to do with the sublime.
“One day is a fantastic gift, one more day,” Jodorowsky is saying. “What is a year? It’s a circle around the sun. That is all.”
Casual viewers of Jodorowsky’s work, including his most notoriously known midnight cult films El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), all the way up to his most recent creations, the newly translated novels Albina and the Dog-Men and Where the Bird Sings Best—might not expect to find a message of such life-affirming exuberance coming from a man whose halting imagery includes scenes where a thief eats the face off of a mass-produced replica of Jesus Christ, but that would only be because they do not understand. Jodorowsky’s work is nothing if not deeply spiritual, intensely dedicated to beauty, discovery, and enlightenment.
“Today for me the art is the way to discover who you are,” Jodorowsky says, his voice ripe with conviction even through the filter of the computer screen. “To heal this long history full of wars, of blood, of economic difficulty. Why would you do that? What can we do? For me, I want to change the world, and I cannot! But I can start to change it. And I cannot change myself, but I can start to change myself.”
In Jodorowsky’s work, the fact that the unexpected might occur at any moment imbues the audience’s experience with something akin to a religious act more than shock or entertainment.
“Myself, I am not making magical realism,” Jodorowsky explains while describing how, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he learned to tell stories by listening to his grandmother tell stories combining family history with dreams. “I am making real magic. Real magic because it continues, no? It is not an effect of magic; the magic is real.”
And the boundaries of this magic are alive. Often in the midst of Jodorowsky’s work, one gets the sense that you aren’t just watching, reading, but that somehow the reach of the art extends out of the frame, invoking the surrounding world, the universe. The Holy Mountain famously ends with the revealing of the cameras and production crew around it, the director himself proclaiming, “Nothing has an end…We must not stay here! Prisoners. We will break the illusion.” For Jodorowsky, the art of his film does not end with the film itself, nor does the present end as it becomes past.
“Our unconscious works with the history of a lot of generations,” Jodorowsky tells me. “We are the product of that history, and the trees and lightning inside of a person want to live in the present, to live here and now. But here it is called the history of the universe, of the planet, and now we cannot say, ‘No, that is only the present,’ because we are the product of that past, and we wish to know from where we are coming to know where we are going.”
Jodorowsky lives his daily life without routine. He says he finds the greatest happiness in waking up beside the woman he loves, and who he often must ask what day it is today. He doesn’t waste time doting over his own neuroses, personal failures, nor does he fret over being creative everyday. “You cannot be great every year,” he says, “do it that one time, wait to have something, then do other things.” He loves to read. He also, unsurprisingly surprisingly, loves Twitter; everyday from 12 to 1 he writes for Twitter, and takes joy in seeing what people respond to most.
In fact, for such an outwardly uncompromising and ecstatic artist, Jodorowsky takes critical feedback quite seriously, another feature of what seems the cosmic scope of his creations.
“I don’t believe in individuality anymore,” he explains. “I live it but as the idea of having no own-ness, and having beauty. Everyone has personal beauty, and that is the role of literature, art: to show the other his own beauty, not our beauty, your beauty.”
That beauty, for Jodorowsky, has no price tag. It is not a vessel that can be bound by the margins and controls placed on it by those more interested in attracting crowds than making something timeless, sublime, a fact notoriously proven by his having walked away from years of work on a 14-hour adaptation of Dune when no studio would agree to foot the bill for his epic visions to his terms.
For Jodorowsky, this line in the sand where dollars and sense intrude on the transcendent isn’t one that may be blurred; he would rather wait thirty years for the right opportunity than to take a fraction of the power now.
“Art is not a business,” he says calmly, without a hint of question, “art is art. If you make money, fantastic. Money is not happiness but without money you are not happy. So then you do the work, and if you have money, fantastic, but if you make the work to have money, it’s like a dog dancing for a stick.”