The Jodorowsky Library: Book Six

Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky (born 17 February 1929) is a Chilean and French avant-garde filmmaker. Best known for his films El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973), and Santa Sangre (1989), Jodorowsky has been “venerated by cult cinema enthusiasts” for his work which “is filled with violently surreal images and a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation.”

Born to Jewish-Ukrainian parents in Chile, Jodorowsky experienced an unhappy and alienated childhood, and immersed himself in reading and writing poetry. Dropping out of college, he became involved in theater and mime, working as a clown before founding his own theater troupe, the Teatro Mimico, in 1947. Moving to Paris in the early 1950s, Jodorowsky studied traditional mime under Étienne Decroux, and put his miming skills to use in the silent film Les têtes interverties (1957). From 1960 onwards, he divided his time between Mexico City and Paris, where he co-founded Panic Movement, a surrealist performance art collective. In 1966, he created his first comic strip, Anibal 5, and in 1967, directed his first feature film, the surrealist Fando y Lis, which caused a scandal in Mexico and was eventually banned.

His next film, the acid western El Topo (1970), became a hit on the midnight movie circuit in the United States, considered the first-ever midnight cult film. The result of a $1 million financing deal brokered by John Lennon was The Holy Mountain (1973), a surrealist exploration of western esotericism. Disagreements with the financier led to both films failing to gain widespread distribution, although both became classics on the underground film circuit. After a cancelled attempt at filming Frank Herbert’s Dune, Jodorowsky produced five more films: Tusk (1980), Santa Sangre (1989), The Rainbow Thief (1990), The Dance of Reality (2013), and Endless Poetry (2016).

Jodorowsky is also a comic book writer, most notably penning the science fiction series The Incal throughout the 1980s. Other comic books he has written include The Technopriests and Metabarons. Jodorowsky has also extensively written and lectured about his own spiritual system, which he calls “psychomagic” and “psychoshamanism.” His son Cristóbal has followed his teachings on psychoshamanism, which is captured in the feature documentary Quantum Men.

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (8 May 1938 – 10 March 2012) was a French artist, cartoonist, and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim predominantly under the pseudonym Mœbius for his fantasy/science-fiction work, and to a slightly lesser extent as Gir, which he used for the Blueberry series and his other Western-themed work. He has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé.

His most famous body of work as Gir concerns the Blueberry series, created with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, featuring one of the first antiheroes in Western comics. As Mœbius, he achieved worldwide renown by creating a wide range of science-fiction and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative, surreal, almost abstract style. These works include Arzach and the Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius. He also collaborated with filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the comic-book series The Incal.

Mœbius also contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science-fiction and fantasy films, such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. Blueberry was adapted for the screen in 2004.

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