‘Soon I will die. And I’ll Go With a Great Orgasm: The Last Rites by Alejandro Jodorowsky | Alejandro Jodorowsky

THere’s an apocryphal story of Orson Welles introducing himself to guests in a half-empty city hall. “I am an actor, writer, producer and director,” he said. “I’m 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 dreams of Welles’s psychedelic cousin, he’ll likely have the air of Alejandro Jodorowsky: quiet, white-bearded with a crocodile grin, presiding over a specialized group of disciples. He has been – in various ways, and often simultaneously – a director, actor, poet, puppeteer, psychotherapist, tarot card reader, and fantasy author. At 96 years old, Jodorowsky estimates he has lived 100 different lives and embodied 100 different lives. “Because we’re different people all the time,” he says. “I died many times but then I was reborn. Look at me now and you will see that I am alive. I am happy about this. It is wonderful to be alive.”

Jodorowsky recently completed work on Taschen’s two-volume monograph Art Sin Fin. This is another rebirth, he says, though it also functions as an archive, a repository, and a bulge of countercultural strangeness. And of course, Art Sin Fin covers Jodorowsky’s brief reign in the 1970s as the “King of the Midnight Movie,” creator of the stunning classics El Topo and The Holy Mountain, beloved by Dennis Hopper and John Lennon alike. But the retrospective wanders much further afield, taking us past raucous stage productions, bizarre comic book panels and designs for major productions (such as his long-awaited adaptation of Dune) that never saw the light of day.

Jodorowsky selected the images and artwork along with book editor Donatien Grau of the Louvre. But the accompanying prose is uniquely his own and mixes metaphors and similes with devilish skill. On one page, his brain looks “like a canary that roars like a whale.” On the other hand, it became “two wheels of a bicycle fighting like dogs.” Jodorowsky’s work can be provocative, grotesque and sometimes deliberately shocking, directed at themes of sex and death. But it always had a touch of downright silliness, too.

In the beginning, before anything, there was Tocopilla, he says; A small coastal town on the rocky coast of northern Chile. This is where he grew up, the square son of a Ukrainian Jewish shopkeeper, constantly dreaming of escaping somewhere else. “Okay,” he explains. “First I was a single cell in my mother’s belly. Then I’ve been working with my father since I was seven, working behind the counter of this general store. I was the little genius who helped him every day. Now I’m the little genius who talks to you.”

It turns out that Tocopilla couldn’t contain it for long. He jumped first to Santiago and then to Paris, where he studied mime with Marcel Marceau and directed Maurice Chevalier in the Music Hall. His first feature film in 1967 – the surrealist Fando y Lis – sparked riots when it premiered at the Acapulco Film Festival. “In Mexico they wanted to kill me,” he says. “A soldier came and put a gun to my chest.”

Jodorowsky shares part of Art Sin Fin with his second wife, Pascal Montandon. The pair like to paint together under a shared pseudonym, PascALEjandro, and produce a series of delightful watercolors that are one part Dalí to two parts Paula Rego. Montandon joins Jodorowsky on the Zoom call as well, graciously chipping in to translate questions or correct her husband’s English.

“That’s because I’m an old person,” he says. “Listen to this – I’m almost 100 years old. I’m going to die soon, that’s the law of this planet. And maybe other planets too. But my wife, she doesn’t have to die. She’s only 50 years old.”

“I’m 54 years old,” Montandon says.

“She’s fifty,” he repeats. “That means she’ll live for another 50 years. She’ll be here and thinking about me when I’m gone.”

“You’re not dead yet,” Montandon says. “I may die before you. People don’t know anything.”

Jodorowsky insists that he is an artist, not a teacher, which means that there was no message or moral in his work. If his multi-hyphenate career is linked to anything, it is to the principles of a therapeutic practice he calls “psychomagic,” which evokes Freud’s theory of the unconscious with elements of shamanism and tarot. For many years, Jodorowsky hosted regular free psychic sessions throughout Paris, where he lived, preaching the gospel and healing the afflicted. Nowadays, he counsels his patients via Zoom and sometimes wonders if he has enough time to complete all his bookings. “Today,” he says. “Listen. There are 8 million people waiting for my help.”

“Eight million,” Montandon repeats. It’s not quite a question.

“Yes,” he says firmly. “Eight million people, that’s right.”

Among the many black-and-white photographs in Jodorowsky’s collection, one shows a wide-eyed teenager with his face painted white. He leans into the arms of a raven-haired woman. The caption reads: “My first pantomime in Chilean theatre.” “I’m 17, shaped like a 90-year-old old man, having an orgasm in the arms of death.”

The artist stares at the picture. He is older today than the man he played as a boy. “Another planet,” he says. “Another Jodorowsky. But maybe I’m still the same person, deep down. Maybe I just look different because I’m in a different body.”

He frowns, shakes his head, and puts the picture aside. “Soon I will be in the arms of death,” he says. “I’m ready to die and I’ll go happily, with a great orgasm. But listen, I’ll tell you, I’ve always been this way. Life for me is an adventure. We live in an eternal present. Life is work, work, orgasm, and we experience that all the time.”

Endless Art: The Ages of Jodorowsky

El Topo
“It’s not Western, it’s Eastern,” Jodorowsky said of his 1970 breakthrough, a fantasy Mexican epic that deliberately loses itself in the desert. The director plays a violent gunslinger searching for enlightenment while dragging his infant son Brontes along for the ride. El Topo’s US distribution was financed by former Beatles manager Allen Klein, who later, with John Lennon’s encouragement, agreed to finance Jodorowsky’s 1973 epic, The Holy Mountain.

Endless hair (main photo)
“My father was a monster, and so was my mother,” says Jodorowsky, who fled Chile for Paris and never saw his parents again. In his 80s, he belatedly returned to film a pair of acclaimed magical realist memoirs, The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016), in which he played a guardian angel to his younger self and arranged for his father to be captured and tortured by the Nazis. “People say I’m the last crazy artist in the world,” he says. “But I’m not crazy. I’m just trying to save my soul.”

Marseille Tarot Research
Jodorowsky was first transformed into the Tarot de Marseille by French surrealist André Breton. He went on to produce his own interpretation of the original Tarot family alongside designer Philippe Camoin. He says his deck of 78 cards is the “alphabet of the soul,” with its main pillars (the Fool, the Conjurer, the Devil and others) corresponding to individual human qualities. Instead, he says, it is “a system of self-discovery and psychological healing.”

Theo Jodorowsky
Jodorowsky’s son Theo – who played a dancing bandit in the 1989 film Santa Sangre – died of an overdose at the age of 24. This family tragedy led to his father’s experiments with Tarot-based psychotherapy and was later recast in Bas Alejandro’s cheerful portrait of the acrobatic Teo perched on the shoulders of the Grim Reaper. “Happy, my son is going down to his grave. I’m crying,” reads Jodorowsky’s accompanying caption.

The abuse
The Incal — the centerpiece of Jodorowsky’s brilliant comic book — is a sprawling 1980s space opera, made in collaboration with artist Moebius and charting the adventures of John Devol (“The Idiot”), a claymated private eye. Its slick cyberpunk style influenced The Matrix and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. An official big screen adaptation, directed by Taika Waititi, is currently in development.

Alejandro Jodorowsky: Art Sin Fin was published by Taschen on February 6 and is available for pre-order now.