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 ANDREW LEAVOLD goes to Hollywood to have an email exchange with controversial and inspired filmmaker ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY who’s works El Topo and The Holy Mountain will screen exclusively at Dendy George St.
A Temple Priest shits into a glass bowl and it turns into gold. A cowboy rides past a river of blood from a hundred murdered brides. An armless dwarf, a legless midget, a sea of Christs and a skinned goat Crucifixion.
Profane, disturbing, infuriating, inspired: the world of Chilean-born mystic artist and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (or, in his words, the “Jodo Multi-Universe”) is a multi-tiered journey into the furthest reaches of human experience, be it real, hyper-real or otherwise. His two most characteristically perverse works have been mostly out of circulation since their releases; now El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), films as enigmatic as their Creator, are restored to the Dendy George Street screen courtesy of IMA in pristine, restruck 35mm prints.
Via email from Paris, his home since his “Mexican phase”, Jodorowsky speculates on the filmmaker as shaman, film as alchemic trigger, and his reign as Metabaron of a strange and intoxicating New World.
On the nature of art: I always tried to create images with many interpretation levels. Every spectator in front of one of my image can have a different reaction. Laugh, cry, get mad, love and hate. But the unique thing I am looking for as a unique reaction of the audience is when they look at the picture, even if they doesn’t understand it completely, they will never forget it.
On the new prints of El Topo and The Holy Mountain: I remastered the three pictures in only one week in New York. I could do that because I had an amazing technical crew. Allen Klein invested in this remasterization $500,000. May he be blessed.
On Alchemy: The whole [of] Alchemy can be summed in one sentence: ‘the spiritualisation of the matter and at the same time materialization of the spirit’. In the Christian symbology Jesus Christ represents the materialisation of the spirit and Virgin Mary the spiritualization of the matter. Through meditation, this process happens in ourselves. Our mental learns to drive its material life to realization and in the same time our body learns to integrate the spirit. Here’s what my movies are containing.
On the carnal nature of Jodorowsky’s spiritual journey: For more than 2000 years religion has divided our being in body and soul as if they were separated. It is the matter of the universe that is producing conscience. We are the song of the stone. Christ, the Virgin Mary and the 12 apostles same as Buddha and Mahomet have produced each in his life no less than six tons of shit.
On Wilhelm Reich: I like in Reich his theory of Orgon; a sexual energy, which fulls the atmosphere. Which is in fact only the Prana of Hindu mysticism. The healing virtue of the orgasm is a genius idea.
On his artistic journey: I don’t translate experience. I inspired myself of schizophrenic people. I can be a lot of characters. The theatrical director is not the movie maker, not the poet, not the mime, not the therapist, etc… I believe that every man can be multiple, like for example Leonardo da Vinci or Jean Cocteau.
On the making of The Holy Mountain: In reality, at this time I demanded to the movie to be as profound as a sacred text, an evangel or a sutra. I wanted a cinema able to change the human being, illuminating him. I didn’t use actors. In this movie a millionaire is a millionaire, a whore is a whore, a Nazi is a Nazi, a degenerate is a degenerate, a shaman is a real shaman. I filmed 35 hours in incredible circumstances where we risked our lives. For example we all jumped in the middle of the Caribbean Sea where there are sharks. Why we did this? For me the ocean was the symbol of the mystery. I wanted us to get free of the rational prison to fully enter in the deep dark waters of the unconscious. We all almost drown. The technical crew instead of filming us saved us. The two hours duration of The Holy Mountain is only a trace of an essential mystical and missed experience. I wanted to illuminate the people I filmed. Instead of making holy monks I made amateur actors ready to prostitute themselves in the industry.
On ‘Freaks’: I love all that is not mediocre and reveals imagination. The monsters are for me forms of biological art. They are a special form of beauty. Hieronymus Bosch understood that, Bruegel, Goya, Velasquez, Picasso, all the surrealists, and in cinema Todd Browning, Buñuel, Fellini, Guillermo del Toro and many others. When I was a kid, eight years old, my favourite hero was the Frankenstein monster.
El Topo and The Holy Mountain screen exclusively at Dendy George St over two weekends: Sat Jun 14 & Sun Jun 15; Sat Jun 21 & Sun Jun 22. All screenings are rated R 18+. Single ticket: $15 or a two session pass: $25. Ph. 3211 3244 for bookings.
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