ABKCO Films‘ “Alejandro Jodorowsky: 4K Restoration Collection” is a magnificent, grotesque sandwich. For the bread: “Fando y Lis” and “Psychomagic, A Healing Art.” For the fillings: “The Holy Mountain” and “El Topo.” Of this quartet, the latter pair of films is the most immediately recognizable, but the former pair of films is arguably more essential for understanding the Chilean master as both an artist and a human being, insomuch as Jodorowsky can be meaningfully “understood” the way that we understand the cinema of other celebrated auteurs. Much like his films, Jodorowsky defies comprehension through stubborn force of will. He wants to be understood by his audience, and yet he studiously neglects to make himself accessible.
This is part of his charm and the joyful challenge of experiencing his cinema. Typically, a Jodorowsky movie is traversed alone and without a guide’s aid. “Alejandro Jodorowsky: 4K Restoration Collection” has assembled four: Virginie Sélavy, Michael Atkinson, Bilge Ebiri, and Mark Pilkington, a cast of critics and journalists each contributing essays to the set that interpret, contextualize, and personalize the movies through the twin lenses of Jodorowsky’s background and career. Unpacking the essence of the man in long-form is a tall order even for these authors because unpacking Jodorowsky’s Jodorowsky-ness is a feat that even Hercules would politely decline. It’s an impossible task, and ABKCO’s team does their best by filtering Jodorowsky through not only academic examination but their own experience with his work.
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But there’s no better way of interpreting Jodorowsky than with one’s own eyes. Take the essays as life preservers: Without them, we’d drown. Granted, the most we can do with them is stay afloat, gently bobbing in the ocean of his embedded neuroses and idiosyncratic life philosophies, but this is preferable to walking into all four of these films without, for instance, an understanding of the Panic cinema movement, or knowledge of the connective tissue binding Jodorowsky to the works of French and Spanish artists, surrealists, and playwrights like Antonin Artaud, Fernando Arrabal, André Breton, Roland Topor, and of course Luis Buñuel, whose “L’Age d’Or” had arguably the greatest influence on him as a filmmaker. Without that detail, “Fando y Lis” becomes that much more elliptical; without recognition of “El Topo” as the first Midnight Movie, its bizarre gravity becomes that much more suffocating. Whether one reads these texts before or after watching the movies they’re about is up to the individual, but read them one must.
“Outside substances are wholly unnecessary.” says Eibiri in his piece on “The Holy Mountain.” “The movie is the drug.” This sentiment applies broadly to the other films as well, which each function as their own trip. Taking the set in as a whole, that trip lasts about 430 minutes, not including the time it takes to get through the supplementary materials. Only viewers with stronger constitutions should take that challenge on, and if that isn’t you, try thinking of “Alejandro Jodorowsky: 4K Restoration Collection” less as a dare and more as a portrait of who Jodorowsky is—as a man, as a thinker, and as an artist.
“Fando y Lis”
Jodorowsky at his rawest, “Fando y Lis” may be one of the two best reasons to pick up “Alejandro Jodorowsky: 4K Restoration Collection”; while easily the least pleasant film to sit through in this particular stretch of his oeuvre, it’s also the least seen, and perhaps the most instructive. Here, the groundwork for everything Jodorowsky explores in his cinema is laid, as Fando (Sergio Klainer) and Lis (Diana Mariscal) make their way across a barren black and white wasteland to the fabled city of Tar in search of true enlightenment: Religion is exposed as a cannibalistic charade, love is defined as a brutal psychosexual dance between partners, style becomes substance, nothing is literal, and the costumes are bonkers. You also will not want to eat hard-boiled eggs for a few weeks, and you may never look at a peach the same way again. Everything Jodorowsky is raw, of course, but “Fando y Lis” is coarse, unrefined, jagged at the edges that makes the film both urgently compelling and infinitely harsher than the rest of his work.
“El Topo”
And here’s the second-best reason for snagging a copy of the set: The 1.85:1 widescreen version of Jodorowsky’s acid Western. ABKCO provides the film in its original 1.33 aspect ratio, too, because what consumer doesn’t like options, but if you’ve seen “El Topo” before, watching it with the same visual scope as a Sergio Leone picture is an essential, sumptuous treat. Even lacking the polish of Leone’s work, “El Topo” gains breathtaking sweep in widescreen, which balloons the shimmering anti-reality of the plot and makes its unrelenting aberration doubly intoxicating. Atkinson, in his accompanying essay, describes the film as a “nipple twist” to the Western genre. Everything Jodorowsky does twists the nipples, but “El Topo” directly warps one of the medium’s most well-worn genres through absurdist delirium. Wandering through a desert without water and food for an indeterminate period of time would make anyone lose their sanity. Watching “El Topo” doesn’t quite impart the same effect, but the grander scale of the 1.85:1 format is persuasive enough to make an audience temporarily slacken their grip on their wits.
“The Holy Mountain”
If “Fando y Lis” is raw Jodorowsky, “The Holy Mountain” is pure Jodorowsky, a heady distillation of his various psychoses as perfected over five years of making movies and several decades spent writing poems, studying psychology, training as a mime, and practicing Buddhism, among many, many other pursuits. (The man worked non-stop.) As the alchemist, an enigmatic sage-cum-monk, he gets perhaps the coolest introduction of any character in movie history: He cuts an imposing figure sitting still and silent on a chair with goats for stiles, flanked on his left by a camel and his right by his silent, naked assistant (Ramona Saunders), set at the end of a dazzling rainbow hallway. The thief (Horacio Salinas), Jodorowsky’s Christ stand-in, stalks along the kaleidoscopic space, a tunnel of sorts that leads him to inevitable transformation, because why else does one visit an alchemist other than to be transformed? Unsurprisingly, the same question may be posed to Jodorowsky’s viewers; his films are transformative, assuming the viewer allows them to transform them, and there’s no better motive for watching them than to undergo spiritual change. And that’s what “The Holy Mountain” does better than any of Jodorowsky’s other films: It changes you, not necessarily for good or for ill, because its interpretive lens makes the world appear ghastly and complicated, but undoubtedly forever.
“Psychomagic, A Healing Art”
Point blank, if Alejandro Jodorowsky offered to relieve the scars, both psychic and physical, left on you by life, would you say yes? Maybe not. Or maybe you’re one of the people he treats on screen in his most recent movie, and maybe you’re unaware of his greatest infamies as a man and as a filmmaker, notably his claims that he actually raped his “El Topo” co-star Mara Lorenzio on-screen. Jodorowsky admitted much later that this was a lie told for publicity’s sake, and while this seems truthful, it’s also disgraceful that he’d tell it in the first place. Who does that? Maybe a guy who buries a patient up to their head and covers their shallow grave with raw meat for the vultures, that’s who. Mercifully, “Psychomagic” studiously avoids making a hagiography of Jodorowsky, which makes the film’s parade of bizarre performance art-as-medicine palatable. In fact it makes the string of filmed treatments, coupled with clips from his own movies—“The Dance of Reality” and “Endless Poetry,” notably—downright engaging. But the important part of “Psychomagic” is what it says about Jodorowsky and his art. Here’s a filmmaker who believes that exposure to all manner of stimuli, from the repugnant to the sublime. Exploding lizards, swarming tarantulas, severed testicles, burning pianos, gory transubstantiation, and gleeful genocide all staged using classical compositions and supreme fluency in cinematic language. That’s Jodorowsky, take him or leave him.
The complete “Alejandro Jodorowsky: 4K Restoration Collection” is being sold by ABKCO and can be found on the company’s website.
