Alejandro Jodorowsky is a mystic, theater director, prolific author, anarchist, musician, psychomagician, filmmaker, tarot card reader & restorer, costume designer, poet, genealogist, Zen Buddhist, comic book writer & artist, self-help guru, friend to both Marcel Marceau & Marilyn Manson and octogenarian wild man. Or, as he would say, he is ‘not anything but a human being’. Whatever he may be, he will forever primarily be known in the US as the man behind the bug-fuck, midnight movies ‘El Topo’ (1970) and ‘Holy Mountain’ (1973). Thus it is not surprising that a retrospective of his meager film output, Blood Into Gold: The Cinematic Alchemy of Alejandro Jodorowsky, at the Museum of Arts and Design (Sept. 23rd – Oct. 8th) is what brought him to NYC. Not that I’m complaining, mind you; any reason to see the Maestro in action is well worth the price of admission.
Jodorowsky spoke at screenings of El Topo and Holy Mountain, on Thursday and Friday respectively, before giving what the museum dubbed his ‘master class’ on Saturday. He seemed genuinely pleased that the retrospective was sponsored by a museum instead of a regular or even repertory movie theater because he considers his work to be art and not films (at least not in the Hollywood/business/multiplex sense of the word). Remarkably, given that English is not his first or even second language, he did an excellent job of making himself understood and made sure he in turn understood all the questions and comments directed towards him with a minimum of help from his translators.
Jodorowsky began his Saturday afternoon lecture by telling a very funny penguin joke. And with the ice broken he proceeded with a short bio and a few video snippets of ‘Holy Mountain’ and ‘Santa Sangre’ (1989) which segued into a crash course in filmmaking – anarchist mystic style (thus effectively aligning his lecture with the film retro). He moved into a discussion of his use of symbols and dreams as well as his studies in various Shamanistic practices and Zen Buddhism in his work and gave a brief rundown on his popular Parisian Psychomagical (mystical psychoanalysis) practice. He neatly tied it all together by giving examples of ways in which an individual might use these ideas in their every day life as well as their creative projects. All the while, he digressed into fascinating, alternately humorous and heartbreaking personal anecdotes, as well as fables and jokes, which served to vividly illustrate his ideas. He then opened up the floor to questions from the audience.
If you are at all familiar with Jodorowsky’s notoriously difficult works, you can imagine that the pretension factor in the audience was extremely high. That coupled with the proliferation of painfully self-conscious, art wanky attire and antisocial haircuts meant we were in for a bumpy ride, question-wise. To be fair, some of the questions were actually very thoughtful and interesting and inspired some quite poignant answers and anecdotes but, as I feared, there were some really awful, generic and cheesy questions, which, thanks to Jodorowsky’s vast public speaking experience and seemingly infinite patience, still inspired some pretty intelligent or at least humorous answers. Throughout the process, he made sure that everyone understood his answers and his points, which, given the language barrier was a quite admirable undertaking.
To Jodorowsky’s eternal credit, he never preached to the audience even though he made his prejudices clear from the outset. He is an artist, not a businessman but he encouraged his listeners to make their own choices and decide what path was the right one for them. As he said while relating an ancient parable to the current cultural landscape and its relationship to art and commerce: when the Emperor who had commissioned a beautiful temple and Buddha painting asked the artist why he painted a beautiful temple with no Buddha in it, the artist responded, ‘I offer you a temple, go inside, you are the Buddha’.- Christien Lauro
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