The Chilean film-maker’s psychedelic work earned him the title ‘king of the midnight movie’, and a fan in John Lennon. Now the 96-year-old is ready for the end – but first there is more living to do
T
here is an apocryphal story of an ageing Orson Welles introducing himself to the guests at a half-empty town hall. “I am an actor, a writer, a producer and a director,” he said. “I am a magician and I appear on stage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?”
If a fantasy author were to dream up Welles’s psychedelic cousin, he’d likely have the air of Alejandro Jodorowsky: serene and white-bearded with a crocodile smile, presiding over a niche band of disciples. He has been – variously, often concurrently – a director, an actor, a poet, a puppeteer, a psychotherapist, a tarot-card reader, an author of fantasy books. At the age of 96, Jodorowsky estimates that he’s lived 100 different lives and embodied 100 different Jodorowskys. “Because we are different people all the time,” he says. “I died a lot of times but then I’m reborn. Look at me now and you see I’m alive. I am happy about this. It is fantastic to live.”
Jodorowsky recently finished work on a two-volume Taschen monograph, Art Sin Fin. That’s another rebirth, he says, although it also serves as an archive, a repository, a bulging bestiary of counter-cultural weirdness. Naturally, Art Sin Fin covers Jodorowsky’s brief 70s reign as the “king of the midnight movie”, the creator of the head-scrambling cult classics El Topo and The Holy Mountain, beloved by Dennis Hopper and John Lennon alike. But the retrospective roams much farther afield, leading us through riotous stage shows, outlandish comic-book panels and designs for grand productions (such as his long-cherished adaptation of Dune) that never saw the light of day.
