At 96 years old, the legendary Chilean film-maker and artist Alejandro Jodorowsky is contemplating his final curtain call with characteristic flamboyance. The creator of midnight movie classics like El Topo and The Holy Mountain has just completed a monumental two-volume retrospective, Art Sin Fin, published by Taschen. In a candid interview, he discusses a lifetime of creative rebirths and his readiness to embrace death with ecstatic acceptance.
A Century of Lives in One
Jodorowsky, often dubbed the 'king of the midnight movie', estimates he has lived a hundred different lives. His career is a tapestry of roles: director, actor, poet, puppeteer, psychotherapist, and tarot master. Art Sin Fin serves as a sprawling archive of this counter-cultural journey, curated alongside Donatien Grau of the Musée du Louvre. It spans from his infamous, riot-inducing 1967 debut Fando y Lis to his unrealised adaptation of Dune and his influential comic book series The Incal.
The prose within is pure Jodorowsky, blending metaphors with reckless abandon—describing his brain as 'like a canary growling like a whale'. His work, while provocative and fixated on sex and death, has always carried a thread of deliberate silliness. He reflects on his origins in the Chilean port town of Tocopilla, the square-peg son of a Ukrainian-Jewish shopkeeper, and his eventual escape to the artistic hubs of Santiago and Paris.
Psychomagic and the Present Moment
Central to Jodorowsky's philosophy is 'psychomagic', a therapeutic practice mixing Freudian psychology, shamanism, and tarot. For years, he held free sessions in Paris, and now consults patients globally via Zoom, claiming an astonishing eight million people await his help. He insists he is an artist, not a teacher, and that his work carries no prescribed message. Instead, it is an invitation to experience life as a continuous, adventurous present.
Joined on a Zoom call by his second wife, the artist Pascale Montandon—with whom he paints under the name PascALEjandro—Jodorowsky confronts his mortality. 'Soon I will die, that is the law of this planet,' he states. Yet, he views this inevitability not with fear, but with anticipation, famously declaring: 'I will go with happiness, with a great orgasm.'
Legacy of Endless Art
Art Sin Fin also functions as a family album, touching on profound personal tragedy. It includes work commemorating his son, Teo Jodorowsky, who died of an overdose at age 24 in 2021. This loss deeply influenced his turn towards tarot-based psychotherapy. The monograph celebrates key milestones like the 'eastern' western El Topo (1970), bankrolled by Allen Klein on John Lennon's recommendation, and his later autobiographical films, The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016).
His influence stretches far beyond cinema, shaping the visual language of films like The Matrix and The Fifth Element through The Incal. A new film adaptation of that comic, directed by Taika Waititi, remains in development. As he nears a century of life, Jodorowsky's perspective remains vibrantly, stubbornly alive. 'Life for me is an adventure,' he concludes. 'We live in an eternal present. Life is action, action, orgasm, and we experience it all the time.' Alejandro Jodorowsky: Art Sin Fin is published by Taschen on 6 February.
