A guide to the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cinema is difficult to mistake for anyone else’s. His films move through tarot, circus, ritual, family trauma, religious imagery, surrealist humor, and extreme violence with the logic of a dream rather than a conventional screenplay. A scene may begin as a western, become a political allegory, and end as a spiritual ceremony.
That unpredictability can make his work seem forbidding, especially when encountered through reputation alone. Yet his films are also tactile, funny, visually inventive, and deeply interested in transformation. Costumes, painted sets, practical effects, music, and bodies in motion carry as much meaning as dialogue.
For viewers accustomed to algorithmically sorted streaming catalogs, Jodorowsky offers a rewarding reason to browse physically. The films are connected by recurring images and obsessions, but each has a distinct personality. Watching them in a thoughtful sequence reveals an artist continually reinventing his approach to myth, identity, and liberation.
Where his cinema begins
Jodorowsky was born in Chile in 1929 and began as a poet, puppeteer, mime, theater director, and performer before turning toward filmmaking. That background explains the theatrical intensity of his early work. His images often feel staged for a live audience, while his characters resemble figures from a grotesque pageant or an underground comic.
His first feature, Fando y Lis (1968), adapts a play by Fernando Arrabal and follows a couple traveling through a ruined landscape in search of the mythical city of Tar. It is fragmented, confrontational, and filled with cruelty. The film established Jodorowsky’s taste for allegory, ritualized movement, and provocative symbolism, but it is also among his harshest works.
The film’s premiere at the Acapulco Film Festival reportedly caused a riot, a fitting beginning for a director whose cinema would repeatedly divide audiences. Fando y Lis is best approached as an experimental theater piece captured on film rather than as a narrative road movie. It announces the themes that will become more expansive in his later work: pilgrimage, spiritual longing, sexual power, and the possibility that destruction can precede renewal.
The mythic western and spiritual revolt
El Topo (1970) transformed Jodorowsky into an international cult figure. He stars as a black-clad gunslinger who rides through a desert landscape, challenging masters of violence and confronting a world shaped by cruelty, religion, and masculine pride. The film borrows from the western, samurai cinema, biblical parable, and acid western, then bends all of them into a private mythology.
Its first half plays like a violent quest, while its second half shifts into a stranger and more compassionate story about marginalized people seeking freedom. The tonal change can feel abrupt, but it is central to the film’s design. Jodorowsky dismantles the heroic gunslinger archetype and asks whether enlightenment is possible for someone formed by domination.
The imagery remains legendary: amputees, blind prophets, desert duels, religious processions, and symbolic animals appear with little concern for realism. Viewers interested in the western genre should treat El Topo as an anti-western, one that uses familiar iconography to question revenge, conquest, and the fantasy of the solitary male savior.
The Holy Mountain and the limits of interpretation
If El Topo is a mystical western, The Holy Mountain (1973) is a baroque spiritual odyssey. A thief resembling Christ encounters an alchemist, played by Jodorowsky, and joins a group of wealthy, damaged seekers on a journey toward the summit of a sacred mountain. Their goal is supposedly transcendence, but the path is crowded with consumerism, colonial violence, military spectacle, celebrity culture, and religious hypocrisy.
The film is famous for its production design and visual excess. Every frame seems to contain a painting, an occult diagram, or a theatrical tableau. It is also deliberately comic. Jodorowsky mocks gurus, corporations, tourists, fascists, artists, and the audience’s desire to decode everything. The result is less a puzzle with a single answer than an invitation to observe how symbols acquire power.
Physical presentation matters with cinema this dense. Texture, color, shadows, and the imperfections of older source materials contribute to the viewing experience; this discussion of film grain at home offers useful context for why a carefully preserved disc can feel different from a heavily compressed stream. A strong transfer cannot make The Holy Mountain simple, but it can make its visual construction easier to appreciate.
| Film | Year | Primary mode | What to notice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fando y Lis | 1968 | Surrealist theater | Ritual, ruin, and destructive desire |
| El Topo | 1970 | Mystical western | Violence, ego, and transformation |
| The Holy Mountain | 1973 | Spiritual satire | Consumer culture, spectacle, and false enlightenment |
| Santa Sangre | 1989 | Psychological horror | Trauma, memory, religion, and performance |
| The Dance of Reality | 2013 | Autobiographical fantasy | Childhood, political history, and forgiveness |
A different kind of horror
After the ambitious but troubled Tusk (1980), Jodorowsky made Santa Sangre (1989), his most accessible and emotionally concentrated feature. It follows Fenix, the son of a circus performer and a fanatically religious mother, as he grows up amid murder, disability, performance, and psychological control. The film’s central relationship is horrifying because it is intimate: maternal love becomes possession, and memory becomes a stage on which old commands are replayed.
Santa Sangre belongs to horror, but it also draws from the giallo, circus melodrama, Freudian fantasy, and Mexican popular culture. Its shocks are carefully composed rather than merely sensational. Jodorowsky uses blood and spectacle to express buried trauma, while the circus becomes a metaphor for a family that cannot stop performing its own catastrophe.
The film is a useful entry point for viewers who find the symbolism of The Holy Mountain overwhelming. It remains strange, but its emotional through-line is clearer. Fenix’s struggle to separate his own identity from the roles imposed on him gives the movie a human center beneath its grotesque imagery.
Later films and unfinished dreams
The Rainbow Thief (1990), starring Peter O’Toole, Christopher Lee, and Omar Sharif, is a comparatively restrained fantasy about two brothers and a servant caught in a struggle over inheritance. It lacks the visual extremity of the earlier films, and Jodorowsky later expressed dissatisfaction with the producer-controlled result. Even so, it is valuable as evidence of how his imagination changed when working inside a more conventional industry structure.
His long-held adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune never reached production, but the project became one of the great unrealized visions in film history. The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), directed by Frank Pavich, explores the proposed collaborators, concept art, and influence of the abandoned production. It is essential viewing for understanding the scale of Jodorowsky’s ambition, though it should not be mistaken for a Jodorowsky-directed film.
Decades later, he returned to autobiographical filmmaking with The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016). The first revisits his childhood in Tocopilla, Chile, through a mixture of family memory, political history, fantasy, and direct address. The second follows his youth in Santiago and his escape into poetry and avant-garde art. Both films are colorful and theatrical, but they are also gentler than his earlier provocations, emphasizing reconciliation over annihilation.
How to watch without solving everything
Jodorowsky’s films reward attention, but they do not require a complete symbolic key. A hand, mask, animal, religious statue, or repeated color may carry several meanings at once. Instead of pausing to identify every reference, notice patterns: who controls a body, who performs for an audience, who is excluded from a community, and when a character’s apparent power begins to dissolve.
The films also benefit from the right viewing conditions. A physical DVD or Blu-ray allows you to choose a pace, revisit an image, and explore essays or interviews without the interruptions and inconsistent availability common to streaming. Packaging can be part of that experience too; collectors may enjoy this look at movie poster inserts, especially when approaching films whose visual identities extend beyond the screen.
For viewers in Seattle, Jodorowsky’s work fits naturally into a broader culture of independent exhibition, repertory programming, and serious home viewing. The city’s relationship with movies includes local stories as well as international cinema, as shown by the Seattle film canon. A neighborhood rental store can place an intensely personal filmmaker in conversation with westerns, horror films, surrealist classics, and world cinema.
A rewarding viewing path
There is no mandatory order, but a gradual route can make the filmmaker’s evolution easier to follow. Begin with Santa Sangre if you want a narrative-driven horror film, or start with El Topo if you are drawn to westerns and myth. Move to The Holy Mountain once you are comfortable with his use of satire and symbolic excess.
Then return to Fando y Lis as a raw early experiment, followed by The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry to see how his ideas about family and transformation changed over time. Save Tusk and The Rainbow Thief for later, when curiosity about his uneven and compromised productions becomes part of the journey.
- Start with Santa Sangre for the clearest emotional narrative.
- Choose El Topo for a violent, philosophical take on the western.
- Watch The Holy Mountain when you want maximal visual and symbolic ambition.
- Pair the autobiographical films to trace memory, art, and family reconciliation.
Jodorowsky’s filmography is small enough to explore in full yet varied enough to support different entry points. Browse the shelves at Rain City Video for a disc, pair it with a film that sits outside your usual habits, and give the images time to work on you. His cinema is most rewarding when treated less like a test to pass than a strange, challenging encounter worth revisiting.