LA DANZA DE LA REALIDAD

Art is to heal our society.

Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in Tocopilla, Chile in 1929 to a family of Russian Jews exiled to South America. In Santiago,he became a circus clown and puppeteer. French by adoption, he studied mime with Marcel Marceau, crossed paths with Maurice Chevalier, and in 1962 founded the Panic Movement (in homage to the god Pan) with Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal. He directed his first films in Mexico. FANDO Y LIS (1968) is based on a play by Arrabal that caused an uproar when it was screened. EL TOPO (1970) is a baroque and bloody western, but also a metaphysical trip, in which pop art meets Artaud’s theater of cruelty, in a blend of mysticism and Latin religiousness. In 1970, John Lennon introduced the world to EL TOPO at the Elgin Theatre in New York at midnight thus birthing the Midnight Movie.THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973) is the Divine Comedy on acid, vaguely inspired by Mount Analogue by René Daumal, with its succession of shocking and grotesque images and vast poetic landscape.At the time, Jodorowsky declared himself “the Cecil B. de Mille of the underground”, perfectly defining his approach, which took the least initiated spectator by the hand and led them into the midst.