At 87, Alejandro Jodorowsky might be expected to take it easy.
Having essentially created the midnight movie with “El Topo,” launched a quasi-religion known as psychomagic, worked on a variety of intriguing aborted projects and even made a triumphant return with 2013’s “The Dance of Reality,” the Chilean-born hyphenate could easily have rested on his laurels.
Or, you know, spent his days writing comics and meeting with Kanye, as he did not long ago.
Yet it turns out Jodorowsky is approaching his senior years with the same non-sequiturish gusto he did in many of his earlier phases.
At the recent Cannes Film Festival, Jodorowsky debuted his new film, “Endless Poetry.” As with “Dance,” the movie is a whimsical rendering of its director’s own autobiography, the second of a planned five films that trace his development as an artist.
“Age is an illusion. In America, they don’t want to think about getting old,” Jodorowsky said one afternoon in a hotel suite at Cannes, dressed in his usual bespoke manner and with his signature white beard. “In reality, you are the same always. My exterior changed. That’s it.”
He offered his solution for keeping a youthful mindset: “I never look in the mirror.” Then he added, for no easily discernible reason, “Sexually, I have a woman 45 years younger [wife Pascale Montandon.] I can keep her satisfied.” The key, he added, is “I think of her pleasure, not my pleasure.”
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French actress Marion Cotillard leaves after the screening of “Juste la Fin du Monde” (It’s Only the End of the World) during the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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British director Ken Loach reacts as he receives the Palme d’Or award for his movie “I, Daniel Blake.”
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French Moroccan director Houda Benyamina poses with the Camera d’Or award for her movie “Divines.”
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Spanish director Juanjo Gimenez, center, receives the Best Short Film award for “Timecode” from French actress Marina Fois, right, and Japanese director Naomi Kawase.
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Iranian director Ashgar Farhadi, right, and Iranian actor Shahab Hosseini pose during the award winners photo call after they won the Best Screenplay award and the Best Performance by an Actor award for the movie “Forushande” (“The Salesman”).
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Canadian director Xavier Dolan with his Grand Prix award for “Juste la Fin du Monde” (“It’s Only the End of the World”).
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Filipina actress Jaclyn Jose with her Best Actress prize during a photo call at 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Romanian director Cristian Mungiu with his trophy during a photo call after he was awarded the Best Director prize for the film “Graduation” (“Bacalaureate”).
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Mel Gibson and girlfriend Rosalind Ross
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British director Andrea Arnold poses with her trophy during a photo call after she was awarded with the Jury Prize for the film “American Honey” at 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actress Marion Cotillard and director Xavier Dolan arrive at the screening of the film “It’s Only the End Of The World.”
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Singer Iggy Pop, left, and director Jim Jarmusch arrive at the screening of “Gimme Danger.”
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Actor Leonardo DiCaprio conducts an auction during the amfAR’s 23rd Cinema Against AIDS Gala.
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Faye Dunaway, left, and actor Kevin Spacey perform on stage during the amfAR’s 23rd Cinema Against AIDS Gala.
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French actress and singer Stephanie Sokolinski arrives for the screening of the film “It’s Only The End Of The World” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actress Valentina Acca, left, producer and member of the jury Valeria Golino, director Stefano Mordini, actress Marina Fois, actor and producer Riccardo Scamarcio and producer Viola Prestieri arrive for the screening of the film “Pericle (Pericle il Nero)” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Eric Anzalone, front, Ray Simpson, Jim Newman, Felipe Rose, Bill Whitefield and Alex Briley of the band Village People pose as they arrive for the amfAR’s 23rd Cinema Against AIDS Gala.
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Producer Harvey Weinstein and his wife, British actress Georgina Chapman, pose as they arrive for the amfAR’s 23rd Cinema Against AIDS Gala.
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Director Olivier Assayas, actress Kristen Stewart and actress Nora von Waldstatten attend the Cannes Film Festival screening of the film “Personal Shopper” on May 17.
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Milla Jovovich attends the De Grisogono party at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17.
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Kristen Stewart poses during a photocall for the film “Personal Shopper” at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday.
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From left, Inma Cuesta, Emma Suarez, Rossy de Palma, Adriana Ugarte and Michelle Jenner pose during the “Julieta” photocall at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday.
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From left, Viggo Mortensen, Annalise Basso, Nicholas Hamilton, Charlie Shotwell, Samantha Isle, Shree Crooks and director Matt Ross pose for photographers during the “Captain Fantastic” photocall at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday.
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French model Cindy Bruna arrives for the Chopard “Wild” party at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday.
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Former boxer Roberto Duran, left, and actor Robert De Niro pose for photographers at the screening of the film “Hands of Stone” at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.
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Jason Derulo performs at the “Harmonist” cocktail party at the Plage du Grand Hyatt during the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.
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Usher Raymond IV, left, Ana de Armas and Edgar Ramirez during a photocall for the film “Hands of Stone” at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.
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Edgar Ramirez, left, Robert de Niro and Usher Raymond IV at the “Hands of Stone” photocall.
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Adam Driver poses during a photocall for the film “Paterson” on Monday in Cannes.
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Actor Adam Driver, left, actress Golshifteh Farahani and director Jim Jarmusch after Monday’s screening of the film “Paterson.”
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Chris Pine, left, and Ben Foster share a laugh at a photocall for the film “Hell or High Water” on Monday.
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Salma Hayek Pinault attends Kering Women in Motion talk at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.
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Susan Sarandon, from left, Salma Hayek, Geena Davis and Kering CEO Francois-Henri Pinault arrive for the Kering Women in Motion Honor Awards during the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actress and jury member Kirsten Dunst arrives at the premiere of “Loving” on Monday.
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Mischa Barton on the red carpet at the “Loving” premiere.
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Actors Murielle Telio, left, actor Russell Crowe, actress Angourie Rice, actor Matt Bomer, actor Ryan Gosling, director Shane Black and producer Joel Silver pose upon arrival at the screening of the film “The Nice Guys” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actors Matt Bomer, left and Ryan Gosling and director Shane Black arrive for the screening of “The Nice Guys.”
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Actor Russell Crowe takes a picture at “The Nice Guys” premiere.
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Actress Geena Davis attends “The Nice Guys” premiere during the Cannes Film Festival at the Palais des Festivals.
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Actress Marion Cotillard poses as she leaves the screening of the film “Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon)” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Model Kendall Jenner poses for photographers upon arrival at the screening of the film “Mal De Pierres (From the Land of the Moon).”
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Actress Sonam Kapoor poses as she arrives for the screening of the film “Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon).”
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Actress Kirsten Dunst arrives for the Kering Women in Motion Honor Awards during the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actors Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough leave the “American Honey” premiere during the 69th Cannes Film Festival at the Palais des Festivals.
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Actress Aishwarya Rai poses as she arrives for the screening of the film “Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon).”
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Actresses Sonam Kapoor, left, and Araya A. Hargate pose as they arrive for the screening of the film “Mal de Pierres (From the Land of the Moon).”
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Actress Salma Hayek arrives for the Kering Women in Motion Honor Awards during the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Actors Gael Garcia Bernal, Salma Hayek and Diego Luna arrive for the Kering Women in Motion Honor Awards.
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Actor Shia LaBeouf poses for photographers during a photo call for the film “American Honey.”
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From left: Director Jodie Foster, actress Julia Roberts, and actor George Clooney pose together before leaving the Festival Palace after the screening of their new film”Money Monster” at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday night.
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Blake Lively on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Ma Loute (Slack Bay)” on May 13.
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Juliette Binoche arrives for the screening of “Ma Loute (Slack Bay)” at the Cannes Film Festival on May 13.
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Aishwarya Rai poses for the cameras at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Ma Loute (Slack Bay)” on May 13.
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Lily-Rose Depp poses at a Cannes Film Festival hotocall for the film “La Danseuse (The Dancer)” on May 13.
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Diego Luna, a member of the Un Certain Regard jury, waves during a Cannes Film Festival photocall on May 13.
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Juliette Binoche smiles during a Cannes Film Festival news conference for “Ma Loute (Slack Bay)” on May 13.
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Director Jodie Foster and actor Jack O’Connell discuss “Money Monster” in Cannes on Thursday.
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Julia Roberts of “Money Monster” at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday.
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“Money Monster” director Jodie Foster, center, with stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts at the Cannes Film Festival.
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George Clooney of “Money Monster” waves to photographers at the Cannes Film Festival.
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George Clooney and Julia Roberts at the Cannes photo call for “Money Monster.”
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Actress Vanessa Redgrave and director Jim Ivory of the 1992 film “Howard’s End,” which is screening in the Cannes Classics section.
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Director Woody Allen, actress Kristen Stewart and actor Jesse Eisenberg arrive for the screening of “Cafe Society”and the opening ceremony.
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Festival director Thierry Fremau, from left, producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, actors Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake and festival president Pierre Lescure at the “Cafe Society” premiere and opening night gala.
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Actors Corey Stoll, left, and Blake Lively arrive for the screening of “Cafe Society.”
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Eva Longoria on the red carpet at the premiere of “Cafe Society” at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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The scene outside the Cannes Film Festival’s opening night gala.
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Actress Kristen Stewart and actor Jesse Eisenberg arrive for the screening of “Cafe Society” and the opening ceremony of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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From left, actresses Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon and Naomi Watts pose for photographers at the Cannes Film Festival screening of Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society” on Wednesday.
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Cannes Film Festival jury member Donald Sutherland attends the “Cafe Society” premiere and opening night festival gala at the Palais des Festivals on May 11.
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Actress Gong Li arrives at the opening ceremony of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Actress Jessica Chastain smiles as she arrives at the opening ceremony of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Actor and festival juror Mads Mikkelsen appears on stage during the opening ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Actress and festival juror Kirsten Dunst waves to the crowd during the opening ceremony of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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George Miller, president of the Cannes Film Festival jury, fourth from right, poses with jury members, from left, Arnaud Desplechin, Kirsten Dunst, Laszio Nemes, Vanessa Paradis, Donald Sutherland, Katayoon Shahabi, Mads Mikkelsen and Valeria Golino at the 69th edition of the festival in France on Wednesday.
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Actress Anna Kendrick, left, and Justin Timberlake, right, arrive by boat to the photocall for “Trolls” at the 69th annual Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Among those attending the “Trolls” photocall at the Cannes Film festival Wednesday, are, in front row, starting second from left, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Justin Timberlake, director Mike Mitchell, Anna Kendrick and director Walt Dohrn.
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Actress Kristen Stewart attends a photocall for the film “Cafe Society” at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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From left, director of photography Vittorio Storaro, director Woody Allen, and actors Jesse Eisenberg, Corey Stoll, Blake Lively and Kristen Stewart attend the “Cafe Society” photocall during the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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Actress Blake Lively poses Wednesday during a photocall for the film “Cafe Society” at the 69th Cannes Film Festival in France.
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Jury member Vanessa Paradis arrives at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
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Cannes Film Festival jury member Valeria Golino arrives in southern France for the festival.
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Jury Director George Miller poses for photographers upon arrival at Cannes for the 69th international film festival.
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Jury member and actor Mads Mikkelsen at the 69th Canness Film Festival.
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Jury member Donald Sutherland arrives at the Cannes Film Fetival.
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A beach artist creates an image with sand on the beach in front of the entrance of the Festival Palace in Cannes.
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Jury members actress Kirsten Dunst, left, actress and director Valeria Golino and actress and singer Vanessa Paradis on the balcony at the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez.
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Iranian producer and jury member Katayoon Shahabi arrives at the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez.
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Hungarian director and jury member Laszlo Nemes arrives at the Grand Hyatt Cannes Hotel Martinez.
(Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP/Getty Images) Joy of another kind (mostly) marks his latest movie. The dramatized and often Felliniesque film, with a wall-breaking intro from the director himself, picks up where “Reality” left off. The young Alejandro (played by the director’s 46-year-old son, Adan), angers his father by saying he wants to be a poet. What follows, then, in the Spanish-language (or, perhaps, Jodo-language) picture is a series of loosely connected adventures around Santiago, Chile, circa the mid-20th century. The on-screen Alejandro, through his 20s, struggles to figure out his identity, consorting with a host of artists, navigating the bohemian Cafe Iris and with the red-wigged seductress Stella (Pamela Flores).
It is a trajectory filled with many of the surrealist Jodorowsky flourishes: spontaneous singing, random dwarves, all-around weirdness. But for all the film’s gleeful abandon, “Poetry” also provides an emotional undercurrent, a sense that the director is giving access to his life in a way few iconic filmmakers — and certainly few iconic filmmakers known for their colorful externalizations — ever do.
“A literary editor once said to me, ‘In order for you to grow [in popularity] they need to know you,’ ” Jodorowsky recalled. “And I said to myself, ‘You’re right.’ Why was I creating stories that were the mask of the history of my life when I could make my history?”
He wrote “The Dance of Reality” as a graphic memoir in 2001, with several more works of camouflaged confession following. That exposure perhaps reaches its zenith with “Endless Poetry,” as it follows a young man caught between his own murky ambition and his family’s unambiguous expectation, a dilemma in which he says he found himself.
Long an auteur of the absurd, Jodorowsky showed an early, intense interest in the circus and performance art. In his early 20s, alienated from his family and seeking broader horizons, he moved from Chile to Paris, then to Mexico to study and practice various performance crafts. (He would shuttle between Paris and Mexico for years; for the past decades, he has lived primarily in France.) Along the way, he helped launch the so-called Panic Movement, wrote and directed a wide range of plays, inaugurated a set of spiritual-behaviorist practices, penned a number of graphic novels and other illustrated works and, of course, directed films.
His first movie was the provocative “Fando y Lis” in 1967, which he followed with the career-making “El Topo,” an acid-western that solidified his fantastical, comic and at times violent style. Over the decades that followed, his movies would sometimes tend toward the kind of personal works that solidified his cult status (1973s “The Holy Mountain”) as well as misbegotten commercial projects with which he has expressed frustration (1990s “The Rainbow Thief”).
His philosophy was, and remains, that the line between truth and absurdism is thin. The latter, far from cloaking the former, can help reveal it.
“Reality is an illusion. Art needs to find the illusion and have the joy to exist,” he said, in his own crypto-logical way.
In some ways, the magical morbidity that fills Jodorowsky’s pictures — skeletons are a big theme in “Poetry” too — are not so much an escape from his humble beginnings as an ode to them, a kind of caricaturish working-out of bad memories.
And while viewers might wonder how some of his more Surrealist touches are true to anyone’s life, Jodorowsky disagrees. Often they stand in for real fears and hopes. Sometimes, he says, they’re even literal representations.
“You see dwarves in my movies and you say, ‘How could there be dwarves?’ But there were mines when I was growing up, and people lost limbs or had birth defects because of them. Dwarves were real.”
Among the filmmaker’s greatest pop-culture innovations was the midnight movie. When “El Topo” first arrived in theaters (after making a splash at Cannes, in 1971), it was poorly received.
But that was far from the last word. The film’s blood-dark comedy helped it become a word-of-mouth sensation. Soon it was discovered by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who loved the film and encouraged attendance. (“For some reason, I always appeal to the rock stars,” Jodorowsky said, almost wistfully. “Kanye West came to see me and said, ‘Read my Tarot.’ I don’t know why Kanye came. But I did it.”)
Theaters owners were soon booking packed midnight screenings for “El Topo,” and the film became one of the first late-night cinematic events. If you’ve passed your local multiplex and seen teenagers lining up for “Paranormal Activity 33,” the phenomenon owes a huge debt to Jodorowsky.
Ditto for a number of modern filmmakers: Nicolas Winding Refn, whose upcoming Amazon movie “Neon Demon” caused its own stir at Cannes, cites the director as his one true influence; many genre practitioners of dark or whimsical comedy are channeling Jodorowsky without even realizing they’re channeling Jodorowsky.
Cult director is not a mantle most young artists seek out, however. Partly as the result of his own dogged vision, partly as the result of some bad industry luck, Jodorowsky has had an unusually large share of commercial disappointments. A feud with the polarizing late Beatles and Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein resulted in some of his films failing to gain distribution exposure.
Jodorowsky’s skepticism for the American entertainment machine remains.
“There’s such a thing as the industrial picture. And like all industries, there’s only one goal: to make money. When the goal of the work is to make money, you have the life of one week. This one picture is … but it made money for one week, so it’s a success. When you love movies, when it’s an art, the life is 50 years.”
His own work, he said has been guided by that north star, a beacon of, essentially, following a muse far from audience expectation.
“It’s honest. It’s not fake. I’m not afraid of going where I need to go,” he said. “I have a little beautiful dwarf in a picture, and she wants to be naked but then she says she has a problem, she is menstruating. And I say ‘no problem, I’ll put it in the script.”
He continued, “There’s no place in art we can’t go, unlike industrial art where they can’t go places because they’ll lose people. And I always answer immediately, ‘Why worry about that?’ ”
Even the current superhero focus on darker themes is, he believes, motivated by financial interests. “Everything you do, if you’re an industry — the stars, the story, the action — is to make money. When you try to make art, it’s different. You don’t want to show antiheroes. You want to show human beings.”
He said that he will continue trying to do that with upcoming work. He is helped in this by a following, accumulated over many years and powered these days by social media, that validates his approach. (“I have 1,200,000 [Twitter] followers,” the director said with a hint of satisfaction.)
He is raising money for the third film, which will trace his move to Paris in 1952 and the time there, while the fourth will focus on his subsequent time in Mexico.
And the last film?
“It will be about how I have a wife who’s 45 years younger than me and I can still satisfy her.”
ALSO:
Welcome to the mad circus of the Cannes market
‘I, Daniel Blake’ wins Cannes’ Palme d’Or as a jury goes its own way
How George Miller’s Cannes jury got it wrong
Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT
