Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Surrealist Auteur Who Tried to Film a Fourteen-Hour Dune Epic
In short: From mime artist to cult filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky has spent decades blending mysticism, violence, and surrealism into a unique body of work. His career includes the first-ever midnight movie, a legendary failed adaptation of Dune, and a self-developed spiritual system known as psychomagic that continues to influence his creative output.
Born in 1929 in Tocopilla, Chile, Jodorowsky’s early life was marked by a difficult relationship with his family and a deep-seated disdain for the colonialist attitudes he observed around him. After dropping out of university, he moved to Paris in the 1950s, where he studied mime under Étienne Decroux and performed with Marcel Marceau. This background in physical theater informed his later transition into cinema, where he became known for his provocative, surrealist style that often challenged conventional narratives.
His film career reached a turning point in 1970 with the release of the acid western El Topo. The film became a sensation on the American midnight movie circuit, earning the support of John Lennon, who helped finance Jodorowsky’s follow-up, The Holy Mountain (1973). However, a legal dispute with distributor Allen Klein eventually led to both films being pulled from public circulation for over three decades. During this period, Jodorowsky also attempted to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune, a project so ambitious it required a 14-hour runtime and featured a cast including Salvador Dalí and Orson Welles, with music by Pink Floyd.
Beyond film, Jodorowsky is a prolific comic book writer, creating the expansive 'Jodoverse' through series like The Incal and The Metabarons. He also developed 'psychomagic,' a spiritual system incorporating tarot, Zen Buddhism, and shamanism. In recent years, he has returned to his roots with autobiographical films like The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016), which reflect on his youth in Chile. Despite the commercial hurdles and the collapse of his most ambitious projects, Jodorowsky remains a singular figure in avant-garde art, consistently prioritizing his own surrealist vision over mainstream expectations.
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