Best known for his films El Topo , The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre , Jodorowsky 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". Born to Jewish-Ukrainian parents in Chile, Jodorowsky experienced an unhappy and alienated childhood, and so immersed himself in reading and writing poetry. Dropping out of college, he became involved in theater and in particular mime , working as a clown before founding his own theater troupe, the Teatro Mimico , in From onwards he divided his time between Mexico City and Paris, where he co-founded Panic Movement , a surrealist performance art collective that staged violent and shocking theatrical events.
In he created his first comic strip, Anibal 5 , and in he directed his first feature film, the surrealist Fando y Lis , which caused a huge scandal in Mexico, eventually being banned. The result was The Holy Mountain , a surrealist exploration of western esotericism. Disagreements with Klein, however, led to both The Holy Mountain and El Topo failing to gain widespread distribution, although both became classics on the underground film circuit.
Jodorowsky is also a comic book writer , most notably penning the science fiction series The Incal throughout the s, which has been described as having a claim to be "the best comic book" ever written. Jodorowsky has also extensively written and lectured about his own spiritual system, which he calls "psychomagic" and "psychoshamanism", which borrows from alchemy , the tarot , Zen Buddhism and shamanism.
Jodorowsky was born in in the coastal town of Tocopilla , Chile, to parents who were Jewish immigrants from Yekaterinoslav now Dnipro , Elisavetgrad now Kropyvnytskyi and other cities then in the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine. His father, Jaime Jodorowsky Groismann, was a merchant, [ 5 ] who was largely abusive to his wife Sara Felicidad Prullansky Arcavi, and at one time accused her of flirting with a customer.
Angered, he subsequently beat and raped her, getting her pregnant, which led to the birth of Alejandro. Because of this brutal conception, Sara both hated her husband and disliked her son, telling him that "I cannot love you" and rarely showing him tenderness. Nonetheless, he liked his local area and was greatly unhappy when he was forced to leave it at the age of nine years old, something for which he blamed his father. After dropping out, and having an interest in theatre and particularly mime , he took up employment as a clown in a circus and began a career as a theatre director.
