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
Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.
I grew up in the north of Chile, and this is why there are a lot of religious symbols in my pictures: because the Catholic Church in Latin America is very strong.
I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I dont believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too old now; its from another century, its not for today.
All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.
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.