Alexandro Jodorowsky was born in 1929 in the small town of Iquique, Chile, from parents of Russian descent. After moving to Santiago and forming a theater of mime, he left for Europe in 1953 and became first an understudy and later a partner of Marcel Marceau, writing two plays, "The Cage" and "The Mask Maker" for Marceau. Jodorowsky moved to Mexico in 1960 and began his career as one of the foremost avant-garde directors in the theater in Mexico, directing over 100 plays including works by Samuel Beckett, Arribal, and Ionesco, and was also the author of three books and a comic strip. Jodorowsky quickly became disillusioned with the theater due to little audience interest, even less finances, and increasing censorship. In a 1970 interview, Jodorowsky summed up his feelings on the Mexican theater: 'We realize that we practice self-censorship and that our art is stunted. We directors know that we are in decadence since we are producing lukewarm work with no impact on the spectator. The reviews are decadent; they only protect a theater of actors who are assholes shifting words... I consider the theater in Mexico definitively dead.' While Jodorowsky continued to direct plays to feed his family, he focused his efforts on his first film, an adaptation of an Arrabal play called Fando Y Lis. The film was a bizarre and violent interpretation of Arrabal's story, including a scene in which an old man drew blood from the character Lis's arm and drank the blood, which according to the director was real: "Everything was real...the physical violence, each drop of blood." The film opened in Mexico amidst political turmoil in 1968, shortly after a bloody massacre of student protesters by the Mexican army in Mexico City. On its' premiere at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival, the film caused a riot, the festival was suspended, and the film was banned in Mexico. The film was cut and released in New York and received poor reviews, often compared unfavorably to Fellini's Satyricon, which had also just opened. But the notoriety Jodorowsky received from this scandal allowed him to find-backing for his next, much more controversial film, El Topo. Filming of El Topo began in 1970 with a budget of $400,000, using unknown actors in all roles except the main character, El Topo, who was played by Jodorowsky himself. The leading actress, Mara, was a woman who simply appeared on the directors' doorstep one day: 'Yes, the first woman came to my home one day. At one time in her life she had taken LSD in great quantities and had suffered. She had been in a hospital suffering from mental illness. I said, 'I will make a film with you. You will have the starring role.' After we filmed the movie, she left. I don't know where she is. She's never seen the movie.' El Topo was a brilliant melange of spaghetti western, buddhism, Zen, psychedelia, surrealism, and violence. The film begins with El Topo riding through the desert with his son Brontis. El Topo tells his son that he must bury his first toy and a picture of his mother because he is now a man. The two ride into a town where there has been a bloody massacre, and El Topo tracks down the group of bandits responsible, guns several of them down, and castrates their leader, who then commits suicide. The leader's woman, Mara, rides away with El Topo, leaving behind a rejected Brontis who will be cared for by the town's monks. El Topo and Mara ride through the desert to find, at Mara's insistence, the four master gunfighters who El Topo must defeat so he may become the master. The scenes with the four masters are far too complex to describe in a simple plot summary. In a web of Zen Buddhism, self-realization, and surrealism, El Topo confronts these masters one by one. Each master has less material possessions than the last, ending with the fourth master who simply has a pole for a house. But El Topo cannot defeat the fourth master, because he has nothing to take. El Topo replies, "But I could have taken your life." The master tells El Topo that life means nothing to him, and takes El Topo's gun and shoots himself and says to El Topo, "You lose." El Topo becomes completely crazed upon realizing that he is not a god, not even a master, but an ordinary defeated man. Mara, forced to choose between El Topo and a lesbian lover she has mysteriously picked up along the journey, endows El Topo with the stigmata, shooting him in both hands, both feet, and in the side. He is carried off on a stretcher made from branches by a group of cripples and retarded people, ending the first half of the film. El Topo awakens several years later in an underground cave, after being cared for by a group of deformed human beings who live under the city in the cave. El Topo is reawakened by sucking on a large black beetle in an ceremony resembling that of Egyptian scarabs. At this point, El Topo vows to go to town and make some money so he can excavate a tunnel from the cave to the city to free the underground dwellers. El Topo and the Small Woman, who cared for him, are forced to beg in the streets of the city for money. El Topo and the Small Woman are forced to make love in public, and she becomes pregnant. El Topo asks her to marry him, and they go to the town's church and find not the priest, but a grown-up Brontis, who vows to kill his father for deserting him years ago. Brontis decides to let his father finish the tunnel before he will kill him, but even then he is unable to kill El Topo, his own master. El Topo finishes the tunnel but warns the deformed people that they are not ready to go to town, but they ignore him and rush into town, where they are brutally gunned town by the evil townspeople. El Topo rushes to town and is shot several times, but does not feel the pain. Instead, he kills everyone in the town, pours kerosene over his body, and performs self-immolation. The Small Woman gives birth to El Topo's child, and, exactly like the opening of the film, Brontis, child, and the small woman ride away from the massacred town, continuing the spiral that is El Topo. Ben Barenholtz, the owner of the Elgin Theater in New York, saw El Topo at a private screening at the Museum of Modern Art, and was fascinated by it, and persuaded the film's distributor, Alan Douglas, to allow the film to begin a midnight run at his theater. With virtually no press or advertising, El Topo premiered on December 18, 1970, and ran continuously until the end of June 1971. Through this run, the film received several reviews, which were mostly negative. One of the most highly noticed reviews came from Vincent Canby of the New York Times. Canby was utterly confused by the film, and out of his confusion came one of the worst, most ill-informed reviews of the film: 'Inventorying it is like sorting out the contents of a turkey buzzard's stomach: there is very little that's not there, but nothing much has been digested...there is only so much that nothing can mean...it's difficult, especially at three 'o clock in the morning, to admit that you've been conned...' Ironically, he had already explained his aversion to this highly complex film earlier in the review: 'I certainly didn't want to read my own ineptitude in the movie, nor was I exactly keen on seeing some sort of reflection of my mind's weaknesses.' And this is exactly what happened to Canby along with several other critics, among them Danny Peary and J. Coleman, who tried to analyze and compare El Topo in the same way they had done with previous films, not noticing the uniqueness of the film's style nor the original extreme vision and genius of its' creator. While the critics argued among themselves and tried to figure out just exactly what was going on in El Topo, Jodorowsky was hard at work on his new script, The Holy Mountain. His new film was based on man's continual search for enlightenment and the secret of immortality. Among the cast, Jodorowsky had hoped to star John Lennon in the film. Lennon had seen El Topo and been awe-struck by the film, and had persuaded the Beatles' manager, Allen Klein, to distribute the film and provide financing and distribution for The Holy Mountain. Lennon was not, however, available to star in the film. Jodorowsky gathered the cast for his new film, and they spent a month living communally in Jodorowsky's home taking Arica training, which was an amalgam of Zen, Sufi, and yoga, with additional philosophy derived from the teachings of Gurdjieff, alchemy, the Tarot, the Kabala, the I Ching, with a liberal dose of LSD and other psychedelics. Jodorowsky, his wife Valerie, and the main actors in the film also went a week without sleep under the training of a Japanese Zen master prior to shooting. After this ritual had been finished, the ritual of The Holy Mountain began. The Holy Mountain was shot entirely in Mexico and budgeted at $750,000. The plot of the film is even more complex than El Topo. The film begins with the main character, The Thief, crucified and covered with flies, being ridiculed by a group of Mexican children. He is helped by a legless, armless dwarf who shares a joint with The Thief, and the two wander into a decadent Mexican city. A truck drives by filled with butchered, bloody corpses. Soldiers rape women on the street. There is a massive procession of soldiers marching, carrying crosses with crucified lambs on them, each with their heart hanging out. Citizens are lined up and executed en masse, with blue blood flowing from them and birds flying from their wounds. Then, The Thief and the dwarf encounter the "Great Toad and Chameleon Circus" where the history of Mexico is acted out with frogs and lizards. As the reptiles tear each other apart, blood covers everything and the entire set is blown up, with reptile blood and guts flying. Soldiers get The Thief extremely drunk, and he is placed on a cross and covered with plaster, and hundreds of plaster Christs are made from his mold. He awakens in a hall of mirrors, surrounded by the Christs, screaming, and begins to smash the Christs. He wanders into a cathedral carrying a Christ, and stumbles upon the Pope, in bed with another Christ. The Pope shoves him out of the cathedral, where he encounters a group of soldiers wearing gas masks dancing with men dressed as nuns. A group of prostitutes pose in front of the cathedral, and an and tenderly hands it to prostitutes laugh at The old man walks up, takes out his eyeball, a young girl and kisses her hand. The Thief carrying a Christ, except for one girl, who is leading a small monkey, who bathes The Thief's feet. The Thief places the Christ on the ground and proceeds to eat off the face. The Thief ascends a large tower and finds Jodorowsky, the alchemist, inside, sitting at a throne flanked by two naked women with numerous symbols pained on their skin, and two stuffed goats. After these forty-five minutes of crazy surrealism, violence, and not a line of dialog, Jodorowsky utters the film's first line, asking the thief, "Do you want gold?" The Thief answers yes, and is handed a glass bowl in which he defecates. They move to the alchemical room, and the thief is enclosed in a large glass bubble. The pot of excrement is simmered over a stone fireplace, with the smoke filtered into the glass bubble. The Thief chokes, vomits, and appears to go mad as the smoke is filtered through his body, coming out in sheets of perspiration which is then poured back into the bowl to add to the excrement. Finally, Jodorowsky produces a chunk of gold from the bowl and presents it to The Thief: "You are excrement; you can change yourself into gold." The film then starts on the search for enlightenment. The Thief is paired with eight other individuals, each the most powerful people from each of the planets. The group, with Jodorowsky as their leader, venture to the Holy Mountain of Lotus Island, where the "immortals" live. Jodorowsky promises to find these immortals and wrest from them their secret of immortality. The group arrives on the shore of the island and are greeted by a wine-gulping man who says he will take them to the Holy Mountain. Instead, he takes them to the Pantheon Bar, where he says that holy seekers Mountain have always ended up. A man gobbling pills gives the group a sermon where he states that, 'the book of the dead is a trip...the philosophical stone of the alchemists is LSD...Genesis describes a mescaline experience.' Jodorowsky and the group do not buy into these pleasure-seekers, and they set out on their own. As they leave, the wine- drinking man utters a line that proved to be prophetic of Jodorowsky's career: "Come back...you could have made history...and already we are forgetting you!!" The group continues on their quest, but after the mysterious re-appearance of the prostitute leading the monkey, Jodorowsky marries the woman and The Thief and tells them to go back to his tower, to his alchemical rooms, and, "change the world." The rest of the group ascends to the top of the Holy Mountain to find that the group of immortals are stuffed dummies. They take all of the cloaks off of the dummies, and when they pull the last one off, it is Jodorowsky. He promises them the secret of immortality, and he begins to speak: "If we have not obtained immortality, we have obtained reality. But...is this life reality? No, it is a film. Zoom back camera!" The camera zooms back to reveal the set, crew, and technicians filming atop a large platform. "We are images, photographs," continues the master, "we must break the delusions! Peace on Earth! This is Maya! Enough for the Holy Mountain, real life awaits us." The group topple the set and walk off as the screen dissolves to white, and the credits roll. The Holy Mountain was completed in 1973, and was shown in that year's Cannes Film Festival, where it was largely ignored. Critical reviews mostly ranged from indifference to contempt. Michael Goodwin begins his review with an overwhelming bias: "One has to admit that The Holy Mountain is a whole lot better than El Topo. On the other hand, it could be better than El Topo and still be pretty lousy. Such is the case." He goes on to condemn the ending, which he says, "is so obvious you can see it coming from miles away," and ultimately says that the film is "nothing" and "shit." The film was released on a very restricted basis by Allen Klein in order to "protect Jodorowsky from the critics," and in some major markets such as Los Angeles, the film was never released at all. The Holy Mountain did, however, have successful runs as a midnight movie in several theaters, including the Waverly in New York, in which it ran continuously for sixteen months. But The Holy Mountain as well as El Topo have since vanished from the theaters and not returned, partially due to Klein's insistence that the films always be booked together, and are only obtainable through pirate video versions which unfortunately are often of dubious quality. Why these two films are unavailable, forgotten, and omitted from almost all literature on the history of cinema are questions that many who follow Jodorowsky and his career to this day continue to ask. Film critic Jules Siegel, after witnessing the shooting of The Holy Mountain, interviewing Jodorowsky, and viewing an advance screening, summed up his advice for future viewers of the film: 'Nothing in their educations or experiences can have prepared them for The Holy Mountain. Here is a film completely outside the entire tradition of motion picture art, outside the tradition of modern theater, outside the tradition of criticism and review. Criticism is irrelevant.' Both of these films do make criticism irrelevant. To criticize them only proves that you do not understand and identify with the films, and this does not necessarily reflect on the capacity of your intellect, simply that your interests lie elsewhere. But, for the viewers who are tuned in to Jodorowsky's vision, both films strike undeniable emotional, intellectual, and philosophical chords. It is somewhat confusing to try to place Jodorowsky in a cultural context. He was born in Chile, from Russian decent, has lived in Paris, Mexico, and the U.S., and has made movies in India, Mexico, and the U.S., using both English language and French. When asked of his heritage, he refers to himself as "Jodorowskian" and has felt somewhat out of place wherever he went: 'My parents were Russian...I was born in Chile...the (Chilean) children didn't accept me because I was "Russian"...the young men (in Santaigo) didn't accept me because I was a "jew"...the French didn't accept me because I was a "Chilean"...the Mexicans didn't accept me because I was "French"...the Americans think I am "Mexican"...after ten years, I will move to another planet. They wont accept me because they will think I am an "American." ' It could be said that Jodorowsky does not make movies from a singular cultural perspective, rather, he selectively combines elements that he is interested in from all cultures. His films are kaleidoscopes that encompass the many diverse elements, beliefs, dreams, and experiences of his consciousness as he represents them for the viewer. After The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky spent over a year working on the film Dune, after which time the American backers pulled out of the project. Jodorowsky's Dune was to star Brontis Jodorowsky, Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, and Gloria Swanson. After this fiasco, he left cinema to write a comic strip for the cartoonist Moebius, only to return with his least-well received film, Tusk, in 1979. Tusk was a French production that Jodorowsky shot entirely in India. It was a story about a girl and an elephant who were born on the same day, and the way their lives mirrored each other. Allen Klein termed the film "unreleaseable", and it was in fact never released in the U.S. The film is only obtainable today as a pirate video version in French language with no subtitles. After a ten-year hiatus, Jodorowsky returned to cinema in 1989 with the brilliant Santa Sangre. The film is a surreal nightmare of a young circus performer who, after seeing his father cut off his mother's arms and then slit his own throat, is committed to a mental hospital. He escapes to find his mother still alive years later, and joins her in her extremely bizarre lounge act. While the film does contain more structure and traditional plot elements than the earlier films, it is an intense psychological thriller and a welcome return for Alexandro Jodorowsky.