(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The first time I saw the movie Psychomagic, I was overwhelmed by emotions. I was in the middle of heavy exam preparations and needed to experience something emotionally and intellectually liberating. So I put on the movie Psychomagic (2019) by Alejandro Jodorowsky. I had hardly heard of the man before. What did I see? A form of therapeutic work that I never thought was possible to carry out other than in dreams. Yes, because in dreams it is just such a therapeutic work we carry out – every single night. But making an entire movie – yes, many movies that are similar to dreams – is extremely demanding. It quickly becomes just fake imitations of your original dream material.
Jodorowsky's project is allegedly not to make dreams come true, but to make reality a dream. IN Psychomagic, which is a thoroughly realistic film about his therapeutic working methods, for example, a man goes through a living burial to be resurrected, freed from his previously anxious life, which was marked by neurotic family relationships. He is admittedly given a large transparent box over his head so that he can breathe, but otherwise the living burial is carried out to the letter. Afterwards, he expresses enormous relief over this daring and at the same time comical Lazarus project. This is truly something completely different than sitting and talking for years with some psychotherapist about their neurotic family relationships.
Join or turn off
Boken Jodorowsky's seven lives trying to cover the whole spectrum of his life and artistic work. It is about his upbringing in Chile, which was very chaotic, and his career in theater, film and as a cartoonist. Not least, his comics are widely presented. They are futuristic and often explicitly sexual.
Jodorowsky's project is both symbolic, surreal, political, therapeutic, gestural, aesthetic and playful.
Jodorowsky's psychomagic project involves a complete renewal of art, and a total fusion of art and life. His therapeutic art / life project is both symbolic, surreal, political, therapeutic, gestural and aesthetic, and playful as well as offensive to all bourgeois custom.
He uses theatrical, circus-like, violent and threatening sexual elements in his films. They are liberated from any classical narrative. He fuses religious, political and animal elements in his art. The films are demanding to watch, precisely because the spectator has to do most of the work himself. As a passive spectator, you are likely to be overwhelmed by an endless amount of dream-like sequences with no internal or external connection. You will have to either participate or turn off. If not, you will only be exhausted or provoked.
In the book, Jodorowsky is free to present himself through interviews. In other words, the text is not written in the third person, and not by an omniscient narrator, which means that you get the man in the middle of nowhere. His artistic project seems to be to shock people to recreate and awaken their repressed trauma.
The elements of horror, blood and violence are probably what strikes you most clearly the first time you see one of his films. As I sit and write this, I watch the movie Holy Mountain (1973), which is both a grotesque terror film against our senses and a film about our underlying religious visions: A woman with green hair dances with a snake around her neck. She is standing with a man in a red bathrobe, who is writing a strange report in the bathroom. Suddenly her snake turns into a cloth snake. And a machine that can give associations to something that has to do with nuclear war, hangs on the wall and starts beeping dangerously. Suddenly, the lady becomes American president. Slowly, the woman and the man enter a large hall, where the woman meets her political associates. Together, they plan to put the world to death with poison gas.
There are strong and dangerous emotional currents going on in Jodorowsky's films, for this man obviously denies himself nothing. But here is also great beauty.
Culturally created disease
Jodorowsky has visited a number of different artistic expressions. In 1962 he started the art group Mouvement panique, which pushed social, performative and artistic boundaries to the extreme, far beyond the boundaries of "traditional surrealism". Perhaps his greatest strength is the awareness that everything is performance art, where no boundaries are respected and nothing is left untested. The boundary between art and life is blurred. His theatrical activities represent a total fusion of soul and body. The art he must describe as a "metaphysical-therapeutic theater", where the goal is to heal man from the disease that culture has created, and which threatens to tear the world to shreds. His films are characterized by screaming sounds and colors, and many aesthetically unpleasant elements. The most unpleasant element is the underlying violence, which is constantly expressed symbolically, but which is at the same time completely concrete – and which is sewn together with religious and terrifying means.
In sum, Jodorowsky is presented as a man full of creative courage, boundless creative urge and completely without desire or ability to compromise with himself. He renews all the media he comes in contact with, but does not last long at a time. Only the comics, which he began to develop at the age of fifty, seem to be something he has endured all along. Here he does not have to adapt his expression to a bourgeois audience.
Most impressive is his therapeutic method, which can be described as a journey through man's inner, hidden mental regions, where so many unwanted and unrecognized processes take place. He can be described as a metaphysical techno-priest, who does not refuse any means to try to make you aware of your own mental processes. He can also be described as a Hermes Trismegistos for our time – a pseudonym for those who created the early Greco-Christian literature called Gnosticism. He insults and mocks absolutely everything that has been learned, absolutely everything that can be seen as being socially acceptable.
I recommend our readers to start with the film Psychomagic if one is unfamiliar with Jodorowsky's universe. As a mix of Nietzsche, Freud, Salvador Dalí and George Bataille, Jodorowsky squeezes and presses bodies in this film, freeing them from their trapped energies. He sends people out into nature on strange expeditions. Whether he has control over the therapeutic process is a question that is difficult to address here.
Many will probably think that his methodology is ethically unacceptable. He has no therapeutic education, but practices as a self-appointed and self-creating psychomagic. Those who come in contact with him, however, tell of a feeling of deep liberation after undergoing his treatment.
Throw yourself over the book that is indirectly mentioned here, or watch his films. Possibly he is brilliant. He has undoubtedly made Nietzsche's words his own: He is the chaos that creates a dancing star.
