How Alejandro Jodorowsky changed the face of Mexican culture: “No cows on television!”
In keeping with a career that refuses to adhere to the concept of conformity, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the son of Chilean parents and Ukrainian parents, credits his mutually beneficial association with Mexico with having a transformative effect on both parties.
Long before he was crafting surrealist motion picture masterpieces that merged surrealism and absurdism with spiritualism and intentional provocation, he was already carving a unique path through life. An early interest in poetry evolved into a fascination with anarchy, something that would come to serve him well in the years to come.
He studied psychology and philosophy at college, dropped out to become a miner and a circus clown, and then founded his own troupe in 1947 and moved to Paris. From the outside looking in, his life seems like a random assemblage of interests and professions, but each one was key to eventually establishing Jodorowsky as the filmmaker and person he’d become.
In 1960 he moved to Mexico City, founding surrealist troupe Panic Movement along the way. Dabbling in cinema and even comic strips, Jodorowsky’s theatrical side continued evolving, to the point he ended up producing and directing over 100 avant-garde plays during his lengthy residency in the country.
How did that change the culture specifically? According to Jodorowsky, his unique combination of art and film was unheard of at the time, and the impact he made ushered in a bold and brave new era for Mexican creatives, shaking up the established status quo and placing him at the forefront of a sweeping movement.
“My life is an experiment in liberation from all kinds of cultural prejudices,” he said. “In Mexico, I helped to let cinema out of all its technical cages. As an industry, the cinema has become saturated with technicians, laborers, producers, money. In industrial cinema, the most important person is not the director; it’s the producer. Everything is organised around making big bucks. But that is not the goal of art.”
He remained in Mexico for 17 years, even if he admitted “they really wanted to kill me” because “they thought I was so weird”. Still, he made a point of being unequivocally Jodorowsky. “I changed the culture,” he insisted to Bomb. “Now all their museums want to do a retrospective of the work I did there. I became a legend.”
One of his most famous televised appearances saw him destroy a piano, but he wasn’t done there. As was his desire, Jodorowsky was planning to interview a cow next. “The director of the channel said to me, ‘No cows on television!'” he recalled. “I said, ‘There are a lot of cows making telenovelas’. He banned me forever. Now I have a huge audience there.”
Jodorowsky constantly found himself “fighting against the system” when he was in Mexico, but because of his ironclad beliefs in both art and his interpretation of it, his self-proclaimed obsession was “to give you something different”. He managed that and then some, with the outsider blowing through the nation like a hurricane and ensuring things would never be the same again.
