With Klein’s efforts, the film found commercial success and impressive exhibition for a low-budget film. This film would become a massive cult success and win favor with artists of all stripes, namely John Lennon who convinced Allen Klein, the Beatles’ manager, to help with the distribution of the film. Jodorowsky’s fame would arrive with El Topo (1970), an “acid western” which brought a dreamlike focus to the typical western story. Its initial screening was literally riotous and would lead the film to be banned in Mexico. The film displayed Jodorowsky’s occult sensibilities to full hilt, showing an odd couple engaging on a digressive quest for the city of Tar. His first feature, Fando y Lis (1968) was an adaptation of one of Arrabal’s plays, shot in black-and-white with a low budget. With Arrabal, Jodorowsky created the Panic movement, for which he created his first comic-strip Anibal 5. In France, Jodorowsky befriended the aging members of the Surréalistes, André Breton, Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal. In 1957, he made his first film, a short Les têtes interverties (Severed Heads), which earned praise from Jean Cocteau, an important influence on Jodorowsky and an artist with a similar range of interests. He would move to Paris and study under renowned mime Etienne Decroux alongside Marcel Marceau. His interests would digress towards theatre and then the circus. At Santiago, he would become interested in anarchism and would study psychology and philosophy at college. Poetry would be his first medium of expression, his first works would be published at the age of 16. At eight years of age, Jodorowsky’s family shifted to the country’s capital at Santiago where he would feel the early stirrings of his talent and interests. His early childhood in Chile was marked by troubled family life and his sense of being an outsider was strongly derived both from his discrimination as an immigrant by fellow Chileans and his discrimination as a Chilean by the American settlers who resided in Chile. Born in 1929 in Tocopilla Chile to Ukrainian-Jewish émigrés, Alejandro Jodorowsky would become an artist of several mediums and varied interests.

Los Borgia by Alejandro Jodorowsky