Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean film director and writer of Ukrainian-Jewish extraction. He made his breakthrough in 1970 with the psychedelic Western El Topo, which was praised by celebrities such as John Lennon and Andy Warhol and kicked off the concept of the “midnight movie,” too weird and extreme to be viewed in normal hours.
He followed up with The Holy Mountain (1972) and Santa Sangre (1989), which are equally phantasmagorical and disturbing.
There followed a long period in which the Paris-based “Jodo” concentrated on poetry, cartoons and giving free sessions of tarot-reading. In 2014, in his mid-80s, he returned to the screens with The Dance of Reality, which was highly-rated by critics, and Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about his failure to film the cult SF novel by Frank Herbert.
The Dance of Reality has many similarities with Terayama’s 1973 film, Pastoral: To Die in the Country. Both are fictionalized, surreal autobiographies which contain scenes in which the adult artist meets himself as child. The major theme, common to both, is the conflict between the artist as child and a domineering parent.
Jodo’s father is a Stalin-worshipping sadist who insists his son bear the pain of tooth extraction without anaesthetic. In Terayama’s case, the crux is the boy’s stifling, near-incestuous relationship with his all-controlling mother. The mother fixation was in place as far back as Terayama’s poetry of the late 1950s, as can be seen in the following tanka.
さむきわが射程のなかにさだまりし
屋根の雀は母かもしれぬ
fixed in the cold sight of my gun
the sparrow on the roof
might be my mother
Terayama was well aware of the magical realist movement in Latin American literature. His last film, Farewell to the Ark, was based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, A Hundred Years of Solitude.
For his part, Jodo has had a lifetime engagement with Zen Buddhism and considers the most important relationship of his life to be the one he developed with Ejo Takata, a Japanese Zen priest whom he met by chance in Mexico City.
Ejo Takata now stopped and gave a loud laugh. Then he began to fan himself.
“I have fallen into the trap. I’ve been vomiting words. My tongue is soiled and your ears are as well. Come into the kitchen. I have a bottle of good sake…”
Ceremoniously we heated the alcoholic rice drink, and the more we drank, the denser our silence became. Ejo seemed more Japanese than ever to me…I felt that his mind was a predatory animal trying to get inside my brain. I shook my head violently. “Stop reading my mind,” I cried.
Ejo leaned over on his back, lifted his legs in the air and emitted a fart so stupendous that the paper walls shook.
Then he took the secret book and began reading…
From The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Terayama died in 1983 at the age of forty eight. It is remarkable to consider that Jodo, born five years earlier than Terayama, is still an active film-maker today, as well as apparently being capable of making love to his wife, who is forty two years younger than him.
It is not known whether Jodo is familiar with Terayama’s films, but Terayama saw and enjoyed El Topo. Indeed, he lobbied for it to be included in Cine Jump’s Top 10 movies of 1970, even though it had yet to be released in Japan. In fact it was not until the second half of the 1980s, well after Terayama’s death, that Jodo’s films gained general release in Japan. They never became available on video-cassette anywhere in the world owing to a feud between Jodo and music industry Svengali Allen Klein, who owned the rights.
Both Jodo and Terayama were prolific writers who came to film after making their names in poetry and experimental theatre. Both were strongly influenced by Fellini and Bunuel. Both view sexual transgression and outsider figures, such as circus people, freaks and prostitutes as channels of liberation.
Another communality is their use of a close-knit group of actors. Terayama used the members of his avant-garde theatre troupe, Tenjo Sajiki, in his films. Jodo uses members of his extensive family. His son, Brontis, who played the naked child in El Topo forty four years before, becomes Jodo’s tyrannical father in The Dance of Reality. The black-clad Zen gunman known as El Topo, “The Mole,” was played by Jodo himself.
Lastly, both men make use of the theatrical device of “breaking the fourth wall” – ie. destroying the barrier that protects the artistic illusion – as a way of ending a film and commenting on the relationship between “fiction” and “reality.” Jodo does it in The Holy Mountain (see above) by exposing the technology of the medium to the audience. Terayama does the same in Throw Away Your Books and Run into the Streets, which was made two years earlier.
Back to the Zen master, Ejo Takata (1928-97). Apparently his father – like the father of the hero in Throw Away Your Books – was a heavy drinking ne’er-do-well. The way Jodo tells it, he would sometimes catch fireflies and sell them to rich folks in the city, as a kind of party entertainment.
Leaping out silently, he began striking the leaves violently with the long bamboo stick. The insects froze and fell to the ground, shining brightly like countless precious jewels. In order to collect as many as possible my father scooped them rapidly into his mouth. When it was so full he couldn’t hold any more, he would spit them into the covered net sack that I held open and then closed quickly…
Suddenly in the total darkness his cheeks began to shine. The insects inside his mouth were frantic and shone with such great intensity that the light lit up his cheeks like a red lantern. When he spat out his prisoners, a luminous jet spewed from his mouth. I gathered this stream of light into the net sack which became my soul. I imagined my father as a kind of demonic god, expelling his power into me, the transmission of a mysterious gift of knowledge.
From The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
It’s hard to believe it happened with such dramatic visual perfection. Nothing happens like that – except in films.
Reality is dead; long live illusion. Shuji Terayama, from The Book of the Dead.
There is no world but the world of dreams. Alejandro Jodorowsky, from Where the Bird Sings Best.