Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky is a French and Chilean film and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright, actor, author, poet, producer, composer, musician, comics writer and spiritual guru. Best known for his avant-garde films, he 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"...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth17 February 1929
CityTocopilla, Chile
CountryChile
My grandfather was a very mystical guy who travelled from Argentina to Chile, across the mountains with a donkey, carrying the Torah.
If the picture is not an artistic picture, it's show, like television. Television series are very funny, but it's a collective production. An industrial art. A car is not made by a person, it's made by a group of creators, only to go to the market to buy your cigarettes. That is a car - they are not a big art, they are a little art.
All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.
Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.
In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.
I say, 'If somebody steals something of yours, then it's good; he loves what you do.'
My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.
Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.
We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.
Society feeds terror and is in turn terrorized; we are afraid to lose, so we consume.
Life is beautiful, what do you think? In the morning I say, 'Ah, I am alive still!' All my friends die already. I am alive. It is fantastic.
The Arabs have a God, the Jews have another, and the Catholics have another! And they're all fighting to maintain that they worship the one real God. Idiots!
Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.
Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.