To mark the 20th anniversary of David Lynch's groundbreaking TV experience Twin Peaks, Battersea Arts Centre are hosting a "Lynch Lock-in" comprising installations, performances and a 30 hour all-nighter screening of the complete Twin Peaks!
More information here.
via Mei Yau Kan
Twin Peaks: How Laura Palmer's death marked the rebirth of TV drama
Twin Peaks was a sensation from the moment it first aired… and still, 20 years later, the influence of David Lynch's groundbreaking series can be felt in TV drama, from The Sopranos through to Lost. Here we relive its surreal appeal and ask six veterans of the show for their memories
Sheryl Lee as the dead girl, Laura Palmer, in Twin Peaks. Photograph: Rex Features
The El Topo and Holy Mountain director thrilled the 1970s counter-culture. Now his crazed visions are turning on everyone from Santigold to Kasabian
- The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009
- Article history
Alejandro Jodorowsky. Illustration: William Sweeney
Eyebrows, hopes and ceremonially lit bongs were all raised earlier this year with the news that Alejandro Jodorowsky was finally making another movie. The high priest of head-trip cinema, Jodorowsky blew the collective mind of the counter-culture with a handful of supremely odd movies in the 1970s, such as El Topo and The Holy Mountain, but despite continual promises and rumours, Jodorowsky's long-awaited return never seemed to materialise. In the meantime, his work has been seized upon by a new generation of hipsters desperately seeking out-there inspiration, as we shall see. This year, though, at the Cannes film festival, Jodorowsky announced he had raised the cash for his next movie. It would be called King Shot, and it would be a metaphysical western set in a desert casino, featuring a man the size of King Kong and Marilyn Manson as a 300-year-old pope.
So with some excitement, here's Jodorowsky on the line to tell us about it: "It's not happening. They didn't find the money," he says in his thick South American accent.
Oh. "But, I am making another movie instead! I have signed the contract already with some Russian producers. I will do Son Of El Topo – a sequel. It's a conflict between two brothers who need to come to a solution. I am about to start four months of preparation. I can tell you nothing today."
If you've never seen one of his movies, they're difficult to explain. You could start by throwing together Sergio Leone, Luis Buñuel, Hieronymus Bosch, and Buddha, and perhaps spiking their Kool-Aid for good measure. They're filled with wild beasts, cosmic symbolism, freaks, naked women and spiritual masters. Where else, for example, could you find a re-enactment of the conquest of Latin America with costumed frogs and chameleons? Or a geriatric hermaphrodite squirting milk from breasts that appear to be the heads of ocelots?
You could get away with that sort of thing back then. The original El Topo, made in 1970, was Jodorowsky's breakthrough, a wild mix of spaghetti western and eastern spiritualism. It became a favourite on the American midnight-movie circuit, and among its many fans were John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who persuaded Allen Klein, then the manager of Apple, to buy the rights to it. Lennon also put up $1m for Jodorowsky's next movie, The Holy Mountain, an extravagant psychedelic odyssey about a thief's quest for immortality. But Jodorowsky and Klein later fell out when he refused to make The Story Of O, an erotic movie. In revenge, Klein refused to show Jodorowsky's movies anywhere. The director had a brief resurgence with 1989's Santa Sangre, but otherwise Jodorowsky has languished in obscurity.
'These days a picture only has value if it makes a lot of money. I want to make a picture to lose money'
Painting from Alejandro Jodorowsky's latest exhibition"Movies are a commercial industry," he says. "Today a picture has value if it makes a lot of money. Myself, I declare I want to make a picture to lose money. Really! I want to lose money."
Why's that? "Because it is not the finality of art to make money. Today you make conceptual art. You try to astonish the people, but you are saying nothing deeper for the human soul. Nothing! I always think that art is a form of sacrifice." By now, it should be becoming clear why Jodorowsky has had such a hard time making another movie: as well as being unorthodox, he's utterly uncompromising. "You can search in order to find the way, or you can just wait for it to come to you. For example, Bodhidharma came to China from India and the only thing he did was to sit in front of a wall meditating and waiting for his disciples. And they came after eight years."
Jodorowsky has never been one to sit still. He seems to have led a life as incident-filled and incredible as one of his movies. A Russian Jew who grew up in Chile and Paris, his career spans the Surrealist movement, mime, experimental theatre happenings, psychedelia, comic books and mystical therapy, and takes in figures such as Marcel Marceau, Dennis Hopper, Salvador Dalí, and Marilyn Manson, to name but a few. He's now 80 years old, although he seems a good deal younger, which he puts down to his lifelong abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee or an y other drug. Not to mention his 37-year-old girlfriend, an artist named Pascale Montandon. Writing comic books is still his principal way of making a living.
'Marilyn Manson is a very delicate, intelligent person. I see him a lot but he's always in disguise'
Scene from Jodorowsky's El Topo (1971). Photograph: AlamyLike Bodhidharma (who was a fifth-century Buddhist monk, by the way), Jodorowsky has also collected disciples along the way. Like Marilyn Manson, who called up him up out of the blue one day a couple of years ago. "He proposed me to work with him, and to marry him," he says. So Jodorowsky duly conducted the ceremony for Manson's wedding to Dita Von Teese. "It was in Ireland, in a castle," he recalls. "He took my measurements and made me a costume like the alchemist I play in The Holy Mountain. His wife changed costume five times. Three months later they split up!"
Manson was also trying to make a film expanding on his Holy Wood concept album, modelled on The Holy Mountain. "I said to him, you will never do it because you need $20m from Hollywood, and you want to destroy Hollywood!" They're still friends, though. "He's a very delicate, intelligent person. I see him a lot of times but he's always in makeup. He's always disguised as Marilyn Manson. I don't know who the real person is."
Another unlikely admirer was Erykah Badu, who invited him to her Paris gig last year and paid public homage to him. "She said she admired only two persons. I remember only me! Who was the other one? Oh yes, Elvis Presley." That's just the start: Jodorowsky has legions of disciples he doesn't even know about. He's become a well-spring of weirdness for anyone looking to out-alternative the competition. Now his name is being dropped and his movies referenced everywhere you look. That bit in MGMT's wonderfully psychedelic Time To Pretend video where they push all their money into a fire in the middle of the table? That's from The Holy Mountain. As is the premise of Santigold's LES Artistes video, the one with people gushing coloured fake blood when they're shot. The list goes on: the Mars Volta, Late Of The Pier, Empire Of The Sun, even Kasabian. Next thing you know, Susan Boyle will be warbling on GMTV in a bikini made of ocelots' heads.
Jodorowsky hasn't heard of any of these acts, and asks for links to some of their work. Last time I checked, he hadn't looked at them, though. He's been busy. He's been in Moscow, Florence, Barcelona, and last week he was in London opening an exhibition of his paintings with Pascale Montandon, as part of a month-long Jodorowsky celebration.
He even made his peace with his nemesis, Allen Klein, shortly before his death in July this year. "We were fighting for 30 years," he says, "then his son arranged a meeting in London. When I was walking to the hotel to knock on his door I was thinking, 'I will kill him! He will kill me! What will he do?' And then the door opened. He was an old man. White hair, like me. He say to me, 'But you are beautiful!' I say to him, 'You are like a spiritual master.' And we take each other in the arms. In a second the fight was finished. My father was a monster. And all the hate I had for my father I put into Allen Klein. Allen Klein hated his father also. For him I was his father and for me he was my father. This is the story of Son Of El Topo: two brothers who hate each other but in the end they become one."
Should we expect his next film to be as crazy as the original El Topo? "Of course! I am the same," he says. "I am still radical!"
October 27, 2009
Source: Quiet Earth
by Ethan AndertonChilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky is a diverse artist with an eclectic background that includes being a scholar, playwright, composer, actor, comic book writer, historian and psychotherapist. The man is a chameleon. In May it was announced that Jodorowsky was going to work with acclaimed director David Lynch on King Shot which was described as a "metaphysical spaghetti western." Though he hasn't exactly been relevant in contemporary filmmaking over the past two decades, it looks like his work with Lynch has paid off as Quiet Earth reports that he now has the funding needed to make his dream project Abel Cain.
Jodorowsky calls the film "the sons of El Topo" (see above), a nod to his 1970 revisionist western El Topo. The story follows Abel and Cain who, upon the death of their mother, embark on a journey to bury her holy body next to their father's grave on a forbidden paradise island. But the island's treasures attract numerous kidnappers with different plans. While I'm not entirely familiar with his work, I do know that Jodorowsky is considered a groundbreaking filmmaker who, at his best, was worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as such visionary, abstract filmmakers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Bunuel and Federico Fellini. Impressive.
Producers Arcadiy Golubovich and Olga Mirimskaya, along with the help of Parallel Films are pushing the film along through pre-production, and I'm sure Jodorowsky couldn't be happier. We'll keep an eye on this one, if anything, out of sheer morbid curiosity, as well as Jodorowsky's other upcoming project King Shot.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's ‘Dune’: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was
17 September – 25 October 2009
Alejandro Jodorowsky's ‘Dune’: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was
takes as its departure point the cult Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempted 1976 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel ‘Dune’.
Chris Foss,The Emperor's Palace, in the centre of his artificial planet, 1975
Montage of line drawing with ink and acrylic paint on art board
Courtesy Chris Foss. © the artist
Vidya Gastaldon, You should never be in the
... 2009
watercolour, acrylic, gouache and coloured pencil on paper Courtesy Art:Concept, Paris
This exhibition includes production drawings made by Moebius, H.R Giger and Chris Foss alongside commissioned work made in response by three international contemporary artists Steven Claydon, Matthew Day Jackson and Vidya Gastaldon.
Following the release of his mystical Western ‘El Topo’ (1970) and his psychedelic quest movie ‘Holy Mountain’, Jodorowsky embarked on his ‘Dune’ project, gathering around him a group of collaborators that included the French comics artist Moebius, the Swiss artist H.R. Giger (who would later design the 1979 film ‘Alien’), the British sci-fi artist Chris Foss, and the British band Pink Floyd, who would provide the soundtrack. Among Jodorowsky’s proposed cast were Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali, the last of whom was to play the Emperor of the Universe, who ruled from a golden toilet-cum-throne in the shape of two intertwined dolphins. Unable to secure the money from Hollywood to create the ‘Dune’ of his imagination, Jodorowsky abandoned the film before a single frame was shot. All that survives of this project is Jodorowsky’s extensive notes, and the production drawings of Moebius, Giger and Foss. These reveal a potential future for sci-fi movie making that eschewed the conservative, technology-based approach of American filmmakers in favour of something closer to a metaphysical fever-dream. This was, though, a future that would never take place. In 1977, George Lucas’ ‘Star Wars’ was released, and the history of sci-fi filmmaking, and even mainstream cinema, would never be the same again.
H.R Giger, Dune IV, 1976
70 x 100cm, Acrylic on paper
Courtesy of www.hrgigermuseum.com© 1976 H. R. Giger
Dune’s themes of jihad, resource war and environmental degradation are especially pertinent to our current political moment and the exhibition also seeks to explore the notion of adaptation and counterfactual histories of film. The exhibition brings together production drawings for ‘Dune,’ alongside new works by Steve Claydon, Matthew Day Jackson and Vidya Gastaldon developed in reaction to Jodorowsky’s notes on ‘Dune’ - an extraordinary mixture of mystical pronouncement, philosophical speculation on the nature of authorship, cultural criticism and ‘70s film world gossip.
