Alejandro Jodorowsky Looks Back on Career in New Book

Alejandro Jodorowsky has never believed in artistic borders. “No art is superior to another,” he told me when we spoke recently, moving fluidly between French, Spanish and English. “Theater, literature, film, they are all paths.” At 95, the Chilean-born polymath still resists easy definition: surrealist filmmaker, playwright, mime, comics architect, poet, mystic. To call him a director feels reductive. To call him a cult figure ignores the scale of his influence.

His 1970 acid Western El Topo ignited the midnight movie phenomenon in the U.S., with John Lennon among its champions. “He understood my work,” Jodorowsky says of Lennon. “He loved it.” The Holy Mountain (1973) remains one of the most audacious visual experiences put onscreen. His unmade adaptation of Dune — for which he enlisted the biggest sci-fi artists of the era including H.R. Giger, Moebius and Salvador Dalí — became one of cinema’s most mythologized projects, seeding ideas that would ripple through modern science fiction.

Now Jodorowsky has assembled what may be his most imposing creation yet: Alejandro Jodorowsky. Art Sin Fin, a monumental two-volume publication from Taschen that weighs 26 pounds and arrives housed in a sculptural plexiglass case. Part retrospective, part manifesto, the set draws from more than 70 years of archival material. It is less a book than an artifact.

The first volume is a visual torrent: foldouts, film stills, performance documentation, comic art, collages and rare photographs personally selected and arranged by Jodorowsky. “It is made of pieces,” he explains. “Poetic pieces. They form a unity.” Rather than follow chronology, he constructed what he calls a “sensorial narrative,” selecting images “one by one” to create something new from the past.

The second volume functions as a voiceover to the first, collecting his reflections and confessions on each image. In prose that is philosophical, mischievous and disarmingly direct, he reframes his own mythology. “Cinema is another form of expression,” he says. “But I prefer creation.” He has written more than 100 books and worked across theater and comics, yet insists he has no preferred medium. “I want to be an artist. Voilà.”

Our mind-bending conversation drifts from his early work with Marcel Marceau to dreams that inspired The Holy Mountain. “I wanted to create something that felt dictated by a dream,” he says. Even unfinished projects retain emotional charge. Of seeing later versions of Dune, he shrugs gently. “Each artist makes his own interpretation.”

True to his belief in cycles, Art Sin Fin ends not with a late-career triumph but with a photograph of Jodorowsky as a 6-month-old. “The end is the beginning,” he says. “It is a cycle.” In that gesture lies the essence of the book’s ambition: not a museum piece, but a renewal. For an artist who has spent a lifetime collapsing the distance between art and life, this director’s cut is both summation and fresh invocation.

This story appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.