There are many excuses to interview Alejandro Jodorowsky (Tocopilla, Chile, 1929).
He will soon fly to Los Angeles to inaugurate a joint exhibition with his wife (Pascale, with whom he has lived for 20 years) at the BLUM gallery.
There he will also attend the American Cinematheque, which is preparing a retrospective of his films, and will visit those responsible for the film adaptation of his comic masterpiece,
The Incal
.
Meanwhile, he is seeking financing for his next film,
The Essential Journey
.
His latest book,
From psychomagia to psychotrance
, has just been published in France, where it sold out in two weeks.
In May he will travel to Spain to present the book and give a talk at the TAI arts school in Madrid.
That is, it doesn't stop.
But to justify the talk perhaps the excuse is enough that, despite his lucidity and his agenda, his identity card says that today, Saturday, February 17, he turns 95 years old.
The creator of psychomagic receives in his Paris apartment, packed with mountains of books.
How is he?
“Mmmm… I am.”
What is he up to?
“I do what I want to do and not what others want me to do.”
Is he free, then?
“I am free, yes.
Until a certain point".
And he is happy?
Here the mambo begins: “Well, if I consider myself happy, then I am not happy;
I'm seeing myself, I divide myself in two.
Someone who observes himself is divided into two: he has not overcome his ego.”
What is he working on?
“I have 25 projects going!”
And how is your age?
“I'm 95 years old.
And I talk and I think!
"It's a wonder to be alive."
And at your age... do you think about tomorrow?
“At 95 you kick the bucket,” she says, and she is left thinking.
“Why that expression…?
Kick the bucket… you walk, you go somewhere else,” she reflects.
“It is possible that death does not exist, that it is our myth.
The truth does not exist on this planet, only the paths to the truth.
Why would I consider myself a person who is going to die?
Yes, I consider myself a person who is going to change.
But if I have developed a spirit, that can remain, and that can be eternal.”
And the question she asks out loud echoes in the room: “Why not dare to fight to conquer eternity?”
Why not.
Of all those projects in which he is involved, perhaps the one that has raised the most media impact is the film adaptation of
The Incal
(1980, scripted by him and drawn by Moebius) prepared by filmmaker Taika Waititi (
Jojo Rabbit
,
Thor: Love and Thunder
).
“In the end Hollywood is going to make it.
And I always spoke badly about Hollywood;
but now we have seen Hollywood decline.
They have fed on comics, but even the superhero trend has ended.
That's why the film can be made now."
With
El Incal
, Jodorowsky gives up the reins of his work to adapt it, but there was a moment when he was on the other side.
In the mid-seventies of the last century he prepared the adaptation of
Dune,
which was unsuccessful, but in which HR Giger, Pink Floyd and Dalí participated.
The best film that was never made, has been defined by many.
“Have you seen the documentary
Jodorowsky's Dune
?
I did what I wanted with
Dune
.
Now it's time for Waititi to do whatever he wants with
The Incal
.”
He is willing to go to the other side of the mirror: “
The Incal
is no longer mine.”
Jodorowsky, pictured at his home in Paris.
Samuel Aranda
Cinema, literature, comics, music, plastic arts.
But all of this gravitates around something else: the tarot.
Rediscoverer of the Tarot of Marseille, which he claims as the only true one, he has linked his life to the major arcana, which for him are “a method of knowledge and access to the unconscious.”
The mystic resonates: “I know things I don't know.
My brain is in the unconscious, in the union of all families, of all universes,” and he points to his head: “What we carry inside here is unimaginable.
It is what guides us.”
Does today's world turn its back on the unconscious?
“Even Freud gave it to him, who, however, made a terrible mistake: thinking that the unconscious was harmful.
Jung, his student, discovered something else: that he is united with everything.
“That there is a miracle in every being.”
Jodorowsky's work is inseparable from interdisciplinarity.
How do you define art?
“Art is not the truth, it is a search for the truth.
It is opening a little window to the unconscious.”
On that unconscious journey, psychomagic first came: “It is opening the limits, so that the wealth that you have appears in you.
And what to do with it to heal yourself, to eliminate suffering.”
“The tarot will explain who you are,” he says.
“When you abandon the illness of not knowing yourself, you enter psychotrance.”
It is the center of her latest book.
“Psychotrance is putting aside definitions.
The words, the languages.
Stop thinking without becoming an idiot.
To the point that he can achieve wonderful things: he can heal another being.”
The book exposes 80 cases of healing through psychomagic, her great discovery.
How do you define it?
“Psychomagic is the application of the unconscious to healing.”
She always practiced it for free, like tarot, which he threw for 10 years in the cafe under his house, to which people from all over the world made pilgrimages.
All kinds of personalities have come to learn from him, from Dennis Hopper to David Lynch, including Kanye West and Darren Aronofsky, proof of the mark he has left on the culture of the previous century and this one.
How do you see the world of the future?
Well, he is optimistic.
“Three years ago the catastrophe was felt.
But now we're out, I see a change in the youth.
Change is being prepared, a year of creativity is coming.
Human beings are improving,” he believes.
And personally, she repeats it: “Being alive is wonderful.”
Two hours of conversation (tarot reading to the interviewer through) summed up a life.
Would you have done anything differently?
"All!".
She left Chile at the age of 24: “It didn't suit me, it wasn't for me.”
She has lived in France, in the United States, in Mexico.
She highlights a very luminous fact: “At the age of 76 I met Pascale.”
She too has suffered the black sword of time.
“I have two dead children and two alive.
Life is hard, huh?
Things happen that you don't even suspect are going to happen.
But here we go.”
Here we go.
“I'm not sure I'll make it to my birthday,” he says, sarcastically.
The interview took place on Tuesday.
“Until 12 noon on Saturday is four days.
But those four days can be an eternity… until it arrives I will not be calm,” he laughs.
But Saturday, punctually, has arrived.
And Jodorowsky has reached 95. Given what we have seen, no one can rule out that he has another 95 left.
Poster for 'Jodorowsky's Dune', the documentary that tells the story of the ill-fated adaptation;
a design by HR Giger for his 'Dune' and the first page of 'The Incal', drawn by Moebius.
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