Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky is a French and Chilean film and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright, actor, author, poet, producer, composer, musician, comics writer and spiritual guru. Best known for his avant-garde films, he has been "venerated by cult cinema enthusiasts" for his work which "is filled with violently surreal images and a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation"...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth17 February 1929
CityTocopilla, Chile
CountryChile
Alejandro Jodorowsky quotes about
In Mexico, when we want to speak deep secrets, we drink pulgue together. It is a drink made from the cactus plant, and when you take the bottle from your mouth, it leaves a string behind, between the mouth and the bottle, like a spider's web. It shows that the truth sticks inside.
Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.
Every person, every artist makes his life an artwork.
We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.
Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.
I say, 'If somebody steals something of yours, then it's good; he loves what you do.'
In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.
Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.
All my life, I have never found a person who really loved this world. Every person hates the world, how he is.
Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
Maybe if literature was prohibited the same way as cocaine, people out of pure curiosity would try to get a couple of lines
The apocalypse is now! Americans know this, that the only hope is the flying saucers. Do you know how I see the world? Like a person who is dying. It's a worm who is dying to make a butterfly. We must not stop the worm from dying, we must help the worm to die to help the butterfly to be born. We need to dance with death. This world is dying, but very well. We will make a big, big enormous butterfly. You and I will be the first movements in the wings of the butterfly because we are speaking like this.
What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.