SACRED FILM: THE SURREALIST DOGMA OF ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY

Alejandro Jodorowsky began his career with a simple, low budget short film titled La Cravate (1957). In fifteen minutes, Jodorowsky established himself as new kind of visionary; a surrealist auteur following in the footsteps of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, and Germaine Dulac, but with a uniquely personal and introspective bend. Over the next several decades, Jodorowsky would craft multiple masterpieces of the genre, including Fando y Lis (1968), El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). His personal life would blend into his later films Santa Sangre (1987) and The Dance of Reality (2013). Throughout his illustrious career, not only as a filmmaker but as a writer, a poet, a playwright, and a spiritual guru, Jodorowsky has been known to fuse personal experiences with the surreal and grotesque to unveil what he determined to be universal truths and ideologies.

While Jodorowsky’s aesthetic was undoubtedly heavily influenced by the surrealists who came before him, he used the same tenets and aspects in a different way. Surrealism is defined by its usage of abstract and grotesque imagery based on the inner workings of a human mind, bridging the gaps between dreams and reality, and the deconstruction of the artistic medium. In that same vein, Jodorowsky’s films are lucid cinematic compositions based on himself. They use Freudian dream symbolism and psychoanalysis to blend the spiritual, personal, and philosophical to create a window between himself and his audience. For those who understand the unwritten laws of Jodorowsky's symbols, his films allow an inside look into who the man behind the camera truly is and how he thinks. Throughout his films, he created his own surreal symbolic order of unorthodox imagery catering to the growing psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. To understand Jodorowsky’s films is to understand Jodorowsky; a remnant of auteur theory obscured by subjectivity.

In this essay, I will focus on Jodorowsky’s most popular works: his cult classic acid western El Topo and the experimental and deconstructive psychedelic head trip The Holy Mountain. Each film constitutes a distinct connection to one or more aspects of Jodorowsky’s ideology. He desired to make sacred cinema, and in a sense preach to the audience. What makes Jodorowsky’s films so unique, and at times difficult to analyze consist of his destruction of stereotypical cinematic conventions and artificial mélange of styles and imagery. It would be easy to call his films simply surrealist, but a deeper analysis of the films demands a multitude of analytical bases. His films contain aspects of surrealism, absurdism, Dadaism, and magical realism, so the films must be looked at from multiple aspects. I will be using psychoanalytic film theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, and surrealist art theory to examine how the films force interaction between the spectator, the screen, and the auteur as the films slowly uncover the spiritual dogma of the psychedelic surrealist.

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Surrealism, as an art form, was built from a disgust by artists of the early 1920s in the regimented artistic dialect that had become synonymous with fine art at the time. Before any surrealist picked up a camera, founder Andre Breton described the movement in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – the actual functioning of thought – in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” (n.p.). Surrealists attempted to exhume universal truths and worldly laws through the destruction of rationality and identifiable processes.

The movement eventually made its way into film through filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Germaine Dulac. Each artist brought their own aesthetic variation to the budding style, with films such as L’Age D’Or (1930), Un Chien Andalou (1929), La Coquille et Le Clergyman (1928) and Le Sang d'un Poète (1930). In truth, the surrealist film movement was brief, lasting only a decade, though its tenets would return later in the century with the dawn of the counterculture generation when filmmakers like Jodorowsky and David Lynch, with his experimental horror debut Eraserhead (1977), were beginning to come into public view.

Figure 1: Early surrealist film, like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, were laden with absurd and bizarre imagery that even with context were hard for audiences to understand.

In surrealism, the success of an artist’s work often lies in the success of their imagery. Not particularly in terms of how the imagery is understood, but in how it is perceived. Surrealist art, both in film and print, thrives on the usage of grotesque and absurd imagery to overwhelm the spectator’s senses to create mental impressions via an onslaught of visual stimulation. It is, in essence, a form of lucid dreaming. In his book Surrealism and Film, J.H. Matthews writes, “When surrealists talk of dreams and dreaming, they refer to their ambition to bring these forces to light. To them, dreaming means promoting an active program intended to facilitate the realization of distinctive aspirations” (18). Film, as a medium, can easily be compared to dreams, and the act of spectatorship a form of dreaming. Hallucinatory instances where a person can experience sights and sounds that are both situated in reality, yet entirely otherworldly. A spectator’s suspension of disbelief allows them to view films through a lens of personal identification, drawing meaning from their own experiences while creating new connections through the stories unfolding on the screen.

Surrealism has rarely had a high level of commercial success, with most of its foremost figures operating on the outskirts of populist cinema, Jodorowsky included. In an interview with The Quietus, Jodorowsky said, “Industrial film is like having a relationship with a cigarette, you know? It loves you but kills you! (...) when it's finished you didn't change – you haven't improved – you are the same. You have escaped from yourself. But the real art is not to escape from yourself, it's to go inside yourself – to remember yourself. That is the real art.” Here, Jodorowsky outlines his intentions for his art, albeit his written works or cinematic, to coerce viewers into identifying truths within themselves. In that sense, Jodorowsky’s symbols act as a set of predetermined guides, connected to specific yet simultaneously subjective meanings. In other ways, they operate on the unwritten side of the symbolic order.

The symbolic order was first introduced by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to emphasize the importance of language to psychoanalytic thinking. In his seminar on "The Purloined Letter,” Lacan details the symbolic order as a third segment of the psyche behind the Real and the Imaginary. The Symbolic, according to Lacan, is primarily focused on language and narrative, and the desires of the spectator. What they perceive is personal, and the way they perceive is based on their internal connections to the symbolic order. (Lacan, n.p)

Jodorowsky’s films in particular make heavy use of intentional imagery to change audience perspective. In the director’s commentary for The Holy Mountain, he says, “If the person's going to go to the theater for two hours and eat popcorn, I don't want him to come out the same person. I want to make a picture that changes the human mind.” To change the minds of his spectator, his symbolism operates based off of his own personal outlook. Now, one could easily assume that any individual viewing the films would see the symbols the same ways. However, how the symbolic order works in absurdist surrealism is a bit different from other aesthetic variations. In his book Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules of the Game, Todd McGowan details how the symbolic order can be used to speak to some spectators, but not all.

“The symbolic order unites subjects not through what it officially proclaims but through unwritten rules that provide a secret code for those who belong and always trip up those who don’t. (…) The symbolic order excludes these outsiders in order to give the insiders a sense of belonging. Some must be cast out in order that some might be saved. The signifier creates identity through difference, and difference requires exclusion” (33).

Jodorowsky’s specific aesthetic approach to surrealism connects directly with McGowan’s theory for the symbolic order. While he, like many other surrealists, will use some easily understandable symbolism like basic religious icons and phallic symbols, Jodorowsky’s films thrive on his usage of symbols of his own experience. Those of personal tragedy, spiritual development, and shifts in philosophical and ideological perspective. While he may have begun using surrealist ideals in Fando Y Lis, and La Cravate, it was not until the release of El Topo that audiences began to discover the man behind the cinematic anarchy.

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El Topo is oft-cited as the film that jumpstarted the American Midnight Movie craze of the mid 70s, and for good reason. After the controversy caused by his previous film Fando Y Lis, and the subsequent rioting in Mexico due to the volatile content within, El Topo marked Jodorowsky’s first foray into semi-commercial filmmaking, and in some regards his most successful. El Topo was one of the first acid westerns, a budding sub-genre of western films which fused the philosophical and allegorical aspects of American westerns with the superfluity of Italian westerns and elements of the swiftly growing anti-establishment counterculture of the 1960s. The term, coined in a New Yorker review for El Topo by film critic Pauline Kael, quickly became synonymous with the aesthetic crafted by Jodorowsky. At times rapturously spiritual and others brutally violent, Jodorowsky’s film was a religious allegory masquerading as a western.

Figure 2: In El Topo, the titular gunfighter encounters four gun masters, each teaching him a lesson. In this scene, El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky) defeats the third gun master (Víctor Fosado), who taught kindness, by shooting him in his weak point, his heart. In reaction, El Topo experiences guilt for the first time.

The film depicts a titular gunslinger, played by Jodorowsky himself, in a two act epic. The first act follows El Topo in a journey to defeat the four gun masters and become the greatest gunslinger on Earth. In the film’s commentary, Jodorowsky states, “All masters represent something.” The four masters provide the framework for the first act’s primary goal, which is to establish El Topo as a selfish father figure in the midst of a spiritual awakening. According to Jodorowsky, the masters were in part based off of his own experiences as part of a surrealist poetry scene in Chile, where he had four teachers who each taught him in a distinct way. While those masters influenced his art, the masters in El Topo serve as catalysts for El Topo’s slow but distinct maturation. With each master he defeats, he gains their strength but also their weakness. They each symbolize a different religion or ideology: the first represents Hindu philosophy, the second a symbol for Islam, the third Confucius-like figure embodying kindness, and the final Zen-influenced master.

Jodorowsky, as a child, was no stranger to religion. In the aforementioned commentary, he discussed how his father, a staunch atheist, would condemn any religious symbols and teach the young Alejandro that God does not exist. As a child, he says, this scarred him. As he grew, Jodorowsky would go on to study many religions, learning from each, to discover a remedy to the spiritual wounds he received as a child. Eventually, he would come to call himself an ‘Atheist Mystic’ and create the pseudo religion known as psychomagic. However, it is the previous studies that come into play in El Topo. Symbols relating to eastern religions and supposed mystic ideologies are not commonplace to the average film spectator, but instead speak to a specific demographic. Lacan’s theory for the symbolic order may be based in language, but language is not simply dialogue. Language, in this instance, can be seen as both visual symbolism and narrative symbolism. For the uninitiated, the masters are simply teachers of broad themes, but with a closer analysis for those that understand Jodorowsky’s ideology, the spectator can gain a greater level of appreciation.

In some ways, El Topo mirrors Jodorowsky’s own journey through religion and identification, both as a mystic and an artist. This is not an aspect of filmmaking inherent to Jodorowsky or surrealism, but instead a common theme in psychoanalytic film analysis. Freud’s original theories for psychoanalysis emphasized the importance of what the subject says, not what they say they intended to mean, and how fantasies are based upon constructs of an individual’s existence. In Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning, Freud posits:

An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued but men as precious reflections of reality (Freud 305).

Freud’s theory is based on the constructs of an individual based on their own idealistic views of their works. Through life experiences, artists are given knowledge and events that can be used to continue to convey themes to future spectators and audiences. Jodorowsky, as cited earlier, viewed art as a vehicle for personal reflection both for the artist and the spectator. As such, one can conclude that his symbols are reflections of his own ideology.

Figure 3: El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky) stands off against the corrupt colonel (David Silva). Jodorowsky saw the colonel as both a father and God figure, and El Topo’s castration of the colonel amounted to the theft of the man’s power and ambition.

Throughout the film, Jodorowsky uses near constant symbolism linking back to multiple facets of surrealism, which is partly why the script is often devoid of dialogue. In regards to his use of sound, Jodorowsky recounts, “I only make the actors talk in my films when I can’t show what I want to visually.” Much of his work involves using evocative symbols, both outright and subtle, to discuss deep truths within the world, and the medium of film itself. In the first part of the film, El Topo conflicts with a colonel character, who Jodorowsky views as a surrogate for a father figure. The two do battle, which concludes with the castration of the colonel and a declaration by El Topo that he is God. In the film’s commentary track, Jodorowsky first describes the colonel as a God figure, and an evil figure, a symbol for the corruption and disguise of power. He then states, “Metaphorically speaking, the colonel is El Topo’s father. (...) Every son has to psychologically kill the powerful father, castrate him.” This concept could be taken literally, seeing as Jodorowsky’s relationship with his own father was tumultuous, but the addition of the God parallel adds in a stronger thematic element. In killing and castrating God, El Topo declares he is God, overtaking the dominant figure in power and statute which spurs the journey to overtake the masters, concluding in the symbolic crucifixion via gunfire by the Woman in Black, or El Topo’s feminine self. By searching for power, corruption overtakes El Topo and sends him toward his eventual fate. The pilgrimage is fraught with complications and deprecations in El Topo’s psychological state, a condemnation of pride and gluttony, yet the end result is a joyous one. El Topo’s final resting place, stuck in meditation, is a state idolized by the counterculture that so praised Jodorowsky’s films, and brought them in to understand the symbolic codes the director composed on screen.

Figure 4: In the final scene of the film, El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky) douses himself in oil before committing self-immolation. Ritual suicide often correlates with protest or reaching enlightenment or spiritual awakening, when a monk has found that they have met the end of their experiences in life.

The symbolism continues into the second, shorter act of the film, which depicts El Topo’s resurrection and redemption. While the first act of the film is subtly religious, the second act is overtly so. From commentary on society and culture through the use of religious cults and masochistic acts of sacrilege, to personal reflection via meditation and physical transformation, the latter part of the film showcases El Topo’s eventual enlightenment. Earlier in the commentary, Jodorowsky remarks, “I used to ask, ‘Why is it acceptable in literature to have the gospels, the sutra, and why can’t film be as important as a sutra or sacred text.’ Why not?” In some regards, this final act is the answer to Jodorowsky’s question. The pure depiction of personal spirituality in El Topo’s finale is a sum of all the parts of the film; how spiritual awakening and expeditions toward enlightenment can result in a form of unhindered clarity and finality. While El Topo began the answering to his quandary, his next film The Holy Mountain would truly close the gap.

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On the commentary for The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky refers to the film as a sort of pseudo sequel to El Topo. “It isn’t a continuation of the story in a literal sense, but it reflect my evolutionary process. El Topo is a self-portrait of my soul, and in The Holy Mountain you can see that there is a greater awareness.” In other words, The Holy Mountain is a continuation, and in a sense the realization, of the goals of El Topo. While the former film was a film first and a sacred work second, The Holy Mountain is first and foremost a piece of spiritual art. Not devoted to any existing religious doctrine or system of thought, the film operates upon the religion and philosophy of Jodorowsky himself; a sacred, cinematic creed that brings together illusion, reality, and mysticism in a collage of personal identification.

Figure 5: In this scene, the Thief is used as the mold for countless figures of Christ. After destroying the majority of the figures, he finds one which he relates to, and in it he sees the pure and holy figure that he hopes to become. The desecration and commercialization of religion plays a large part in the opening section of The Holy Mountain.

In his essay Alejandro Jodorowsky: Reiterating Chaos, Rattling the Cage of Representation, Robert Neustadt writes, “Each of Jodorowsky’s works constitutes a metaphysical foray into the confusion of space and subjectivity. Jodorowsky’s art, in other words, perpetually explores psychic conundrums that revolve around ‘place’ and ‘identity’” (56). The Holy Mountain is a vast epic told within personal fables of self-identification, and Jodorowsky acts as the characters’ teacher. The thief, played by untrained actor Horacio Salinas, acts as a surrogate for the audience. Representing the tarot character of ‘The Fool,’ the thief begins the film in a drunken stupor. Over the following twenty-six minutes, he undergoes a full primal awakening, discovering violence, guilt, hatred, betrayal, greed and pain. This first act is the equivalent of fantastic reality, used to depict Jodorowsky’s views of the faults of modern society. Various sequences use heavy surrealist symbolism to depict themes such as the commercialization of religion, the terrors of western colonialism, and what the director, in the film’s commentary, calls the “pedophiliac perversion of society.” It crafts a framework for how Jodorowsky views the world, to which the rest of the film provides the answer.

While Jodorowsky has stated his film disregards any sort of narrative structure, the film is easily divided into three major phases. The first of the three is the previously detailed surrealist representation of society. The second and most aesthetically heavy of the three consists of the lessons of the Alchemist, played by Jodorowsky himself, as he teaches the Thief the mystic ways of tarot and guides him along the path to the summit of the Holy Mountain. The final phase of the film is radically different than the rest, replacing the carefully constructed mise-en-scene of the Alchemist’s tower with a cinema vérité inspired documentary. The film, as a whole, subverts spectator expectations through the abandonment of typical cinematic conventions in favor of stream-of-consciousness style mimetic movements and tarot based imagery.

Figure 6: Tarot images and symbols are omnipresent in The Holy Mountain. In this scene, the Alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky) places the four objects, or suits, of tarot on the Thief (Horacio Salinas). Each objects symbolized one aspect of life: the wand represents sex, the sword represents intellect, the cup represents heart, and gold symbolizes life. These four objects form the foundation of tarot ideology.

If the primary influences for the symbols in El Topo were of religious origins, The Holy Mountain is inspired by spiritual mysticism. That is not to say there are no religious or Judeo-Christian symbols in the film. However, the main concept of the film goes beyond religious ideals. In the Alchemist’s tower, the Thief is introduced to the tenets of tarot and psychomagic, including chakras and mimetic physicality. According to Jodorowsky in the commentary for the film, “The tarot is a visual language, an encyclopedia of symbols. Once I memorised it, understood it, and was able to use it, once I became a tarot master, my perception of the world changed. I started the perceive the world differently and to think in symbols.” Symbols from the tarot ideology and psychoanalysis are ubiquitous in the film and serve three primary purposes: the expansion of Jodorowsky’s exclusive rules for the symbolic order, a furthering connection with surrealist psychoanalysis, and the deconstruction of the cinematic format itself.

Figure 7: In this scene, the Thief (Horacio Salinas) is guided through his rebirth by the Alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky. Painfully, he releases excrement which is transformed into gold. In Freudian psychoanalysis, gold and excrement are equivalent. Both, according to Freud’s dream symbols, are worthless, so one can symbolize the other (Hall, n.p.)

Early in second section of the film, the thief experiences a form a rebirth through the transformation of his excrement into gold. After being rid of his past through chakra manipulation and psychomagical rituals, the Alchemist leads the Thief through the process of spiritual reincarnation. In the audio commentary, Jodorowsky discusses how Freud considered birth to be the greatest sin, and how Buddha saw birth as the greatest tragedy, behind old age, illness, and death. He then disowns both those ideas saying, “I am against psychoanalysis and against Buddhism. Stop it! It’s wonderful to be born! It’s wonderful to be ill, because the illness becomes your master. It’s wonderful to grow old because it makes you wiser. And it is wonderful to die, because being immortal would be so boring!” Jodorowsky uses common psychoanalytic symbols, yet disavows their meaning, creating new symbols disconnected from the written rules of the symbolic order. Freud’s psychoanalytic dream symbols have become widely recognized, however they only work when the spectator interprets the symbols in the same way. According to C.S. Hall, “Dream symbols are visible representations of conceptions. In order for an object, activity, or scene to serve as a symbol, it is necessary that the dreamer's conception of that object, activity, or scene be identical with his conception of the referent object” (n.p.). In avoiding the stereotypical recognition of the object, and by decrying the ideologies said recognitions are based, Jodorowsky creates a new dogma, one that speaks to his followers alone. While the gold and excrement are equivalent, the scene presents the gold as the proper form of excrement. After the transformation, the Alchemist remarks, "You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold." Jodorowsky uses the same symbol to demonstrate positive transformation in spite of the negative connotations, a form of self-acceptance through personal outlook. The exclusivity of the symbolic order, as discussed by McGowan, is expanded, and he creates a new yet derivative set of images.

Figure 8: In this scene, the Alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky) forces each of his disciples to cast their money into the flames. This sequence capitalizes on the casting away of one’s desire, and in extension their ego. The concepts of desire and ego are integral to both surrealist art and psychoanalysis.

In the tower, the Thief is introduced to seven individuals, each representing one of the planets and, more specifically, the negative traits of the planets. Planetary astrological symbols, and their connected societal aspects, are commonplace in tarot, particularly in terms of the analysis of individual energies. The thief himself represents the Moon, and each of the planets barring the Earth are given their own surrogates. The Alchemist represents the Sun, and his assistant, Mercury. Their negative connotations relate almost exclusively to their desires. For example, Venus correlates to narcissism and self-gratification, and Jupiter correlates to the over commercialization of art. The idea that men are driven by desire is a founding ideal in surrealism. In her collection Surrealism: Desire Unbound, Jennifer Mundy states, “In the surrealists’ meditations on poetry, freedom, and love – the three watchwords of this international movement that aimed to ‘change life’ – desire was seen as the authentic voice of the inner self” (11). Jodorowsky’s film follows that dogma in presenting each of his disciples as being filled with desire and a burgeoning ego, but unlike other surrealists who presented it as an inescapable truth, Jodorowsky posits that the ego, and furthermore desire, can be controlled. In the commentary, he says, “When your ego is what you want to be, and not what others want it to be, you have succeeded in molding it and now it is at the service of your essence.” In that sense, The Holy Mountain presents a theoretical system of enlightenment and growth based upon established spiritual paradigms.

The final act of the film, with its passive cinema vérité style, shifts the concepts of the film from a carefully constructed artistic realm to pure realism. In The Holy Mountain, almost all of the characters are played by untrained actors; only the character of Venus is played by someone with experience. Here, they cease being characters and become individuals, guided by Jodorowsky himself. In the commentary, Jodorowsky discusses how the actors were all given psychotropic mushrooms and guided on a vision quest, and instead of playing purely from a screenplay sense, he took from their individual experiences and fears. In one of the latter sequences, the Alchemist leads each of his disciples to confront their greatest fears, whether it be spiders, castration, or androgynous individuals. While the images are inherently surreal, the concept behind this act is closer related to Dadaist values.

Figure 9: In the final shot of the film, the Alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky) breaks the fourth wall and reveals that what audiences are viewing is a carefully constructed film. He then instructs his disciples, and the spectator, to leave the holy mountain, as “Real life awaits us.” The ending of the film follows Dadaist ideas of deconstruction.

According to Rudolf Kuenzli, Dadaist film “disrupt the viewers’ expectation of a conventional narrative, their belief in film as representing reality, and their desire to identify with characters in the film” (7). Surprisingly, by approaching the film through a more identifiable lens, Jodorowsky twists The Holy Mountain into something that is difficult to identify with. He deconstructs the cinematic format by presenting two wildly different styles in the same film, and breaks down the suspension of disbelief by creating a disconnect between the sections. The ending only emphasizes this disconnect by breaking the fourth wall, as the Alchemist looks to the camera and declares that it is nothing but a film, a text crafted to teach audiences a lesson in Jodorowskian thought. He spoke to this fact in the film’s commentary, saying, “I wanted my films to have an emotional impact on people, to cause an unconscious reaction, so people would leave the theatre changed, charged with a new energy, with some revelation.”

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The Holy Mountain would end up being Jodorowsky’s final piece of sacred filmmaking for decades. Through the end of the century, El Topo and The Holy Mountain were the equivalent to meeting Jodorowsky for filmmakers. Considered lost films and available only on bootlegged copies, the films quickly gained cult notoriety as Jodorowsky faded into obscurity. His future film exploits were wrought with problems. His ill-fated, yet ambitious 1975 attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s science fiction masterwork Dune ended in failure, as his goals to change the world through a 14-hour film were too lofty for any producer to sign on. In 1980, he created the children's film Tusk which showed little of his usual imagery and never gained a wide release. In 1987, he found a bit of success with the experimental mimetic horror film Santa Sangre, yet even with its critical success, the film never reached the heights of his religious opuses. He found more success in other industries, amassing a bibliography of twenty-six graphic novels, thirteen directed stage plays, and over fifty-one pieces of published literature over the course of his life. However, it was not until the films’ re-release in 2007 that brought Jodorowsky back into the limelight, which would result in his eventual return to film with The Dance of Reality (2013), his most blatantly personal film.

Figure 10: The Dance of Reality is the first of Jodorowsky’s autobiographical films, followed by Endless Poetry (2016). In this scene, he presents a close and realistic look at the relationship between his mother (Pamela Flores), his father (Brontis Jodorowsky), and his younger self (Jeremías Herskovits).

The Dance of Reality is a distinct outlier in Jodorowsky’s filmography, an unabashed autobiography detailing his childhood in the small town of Tocopilla, Chile. The overt surrealist symbolism and constant religious themes are still there, but they lie in the background. Instead, Jodorowsky chooses to focus on facts of life and themes inherent to his growth as a child. He details the problems with his parents, his introduction to mysticism, his discomfort and lack of self-acceptance, and progression toward a life as an artist. The film is more magical realism than it is surrealism, and in some ways that allows the film to succeed in ways his other films did not. The Dance of Reality is not an allegory or scripture, but a documentation of the artist steeped in fantasy.

While The Dance of Reality might not precisely follow El Topo and The Holy Mountain, the film acts as the last piece of the puzzle that is Jodorowsky. Instead of assumptions for what the symbolism could mean, he gives direct correlation and commentary; a voice of reason to give context to the absurd. Jodorowsky appears in the film as an omniscient figure, providing insight to moments in the younger Alejandro’s life. He speaks directly to the camera, enlightening spectators to how he became the artist he is. The film, which acts as the third part of the doctrine begun in El Topo, could be considered the final piece of Jodorowskian dogma, and in retrospect gives new meaning to his former films.

Figure 11: In The Dance of Reality, Alejandro Jodorowsky plays himself as an omnipresent being commenting and following his younger self. In this scene the elder Jodorowsky stops his younger self from throwing himself to the sea, stating, “Everything you are going to be, you already are. What you are looking for, is already within you. Rejoice in your sufferings. Thanks to them, you will reach me.”

The three films follow the Freudian concepts of id, ego, and superego, and they detail Jodorowsky’s ideals for overcoming each. El Topo involves the id, a man set forth by his primal instincts only to first descend into madness before overcoming those instincts and being reborn into enlightenment. The Holy Mountain concerns the ego, a story built around the surpassing of one’s desires in reality and becoming one with the individual’s internal essence. The Dance of Reality finishes the cycle, providing Jodorowsky’s doctrine concerning the superego. The elder Jodorowsky is the moral compass of the film, offering reason and comfort to what was at that time traumatic experiences, and how staying true to oneself will lead to eventual enlightenment despite worldly suffering. While the former films were introspective, The Dance of Reality is retrospective, offering a true look into the life of the mystic.

In the commentary for The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky states. “I didn’t make films to earn money or fame. I made them to change the world. That is the truth,” Many surrealists sought to change the world in some way through their art, but Jodorowsky did not stop at simply reinventing the format he used. Throughout his filmography, he dealt with large social issues, problems with identity and self, spiritual and religious idiosyncrasies, and the successes and failures of modern ideological constructs. His films disregard prior conventions to craft a unique and personal set of symbolic pieces that could only be constructed on the screen. While he might not have succeeded in changing the world through his artwork, he did accomplish his original goal; he may be the only director to make truly sacred cinema. It may not be regarded as such by existing religions, but for those that view Jodorowsky as the mystic he believes himself to be, his films provide an elaborate web of philosophical ideas and symbols, a sacred creed, providing a path to personal enlightenment.

Works Cited

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1969. Print.

The Dance of Reality. Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky. Perf. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Jeremías Herskovits, Pamela Flores. ABKCO Films, 2007. DVD.

El Topo. Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky. Perf. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Víctor Fosado, and David Silva. ABKCO Films, 2007. DVD.

Freud, Sigmund, and Peter Gay. The Freud Reader. New York: Norton, 1999. Print.

Hall, C. S. “A Cognitive Theory of Dream Symbols,” in The Journal of Colonel Psychology. Vol. 48. p169-186.1953. Web. 09 May 2017.

The Holy Mountain. Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky. Perf. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas. ABKCO Films, 2007. DVD.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro. Audio commentary. El Topo. Dir. Jodorowsky. Perf. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Víctor Fosado, and David Silva. ABKCO Films, 2007. DVD.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro. Audio commentary. The Holy Mountain. Dir. Jodorowsky. Perf. AlejandroJodorowsky, Horacio Salinas. ABKCO Films, 2007. DVD.

Kuenzli, Rudolf E. Dada and Surrealist Film. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001. Print.

Lacan, Jacques, and Bruce Fink. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton,2006. Print.

Matthews, J. H. Surrealism and film. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. 1971. Print.

McGowan, Todd. Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules of the Game. New York: Bloomsbury Academic,2015. Print.

Mundy, Jennifer. Surrealism: Desire Unbound. Princeton University. The Trustees of Princeton University,2001. Print.

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Un Chien Andalou. Dir. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. Les Grands Films, 1929.