Alejandro Jodorowsky + Francesco Clemente

Through sights and sounds, films can take you around the world—or to fantastic and surreal places. They can also provide a complex glimpse into the minds of the filmmakers and viewer. A pioneering filmmaker of cinematic consciousness, Alejandro Jodorowsky is in town to celebrate the New York premiere of his latest film, Endless Poetry, on July 14. In this event at the Rubin, he discusses the influence of sound and music in his filmmaking with artist Francesco Clemente.

This program was originally scheduled for July 11, 2017.

About the Speakers

Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s career in theatre began at an early age and took him to the University of Chile, where he developed an interest in puppetry and mime and created his own theatre company. In 1955, he went to Paris where he studied mime and worked in both mainstream theatre and offbeat productions, developing his interest in the avant-garde and staging playwrights including Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, and August Strindberg. In 1967, Jodorowsky directed his first feature, Fando Y Lis in Mexico, and followed it with the cult classic El Topo, his most daring film The Holy Mountain, and others including Tusk, Santa Sangre, and The Rainbow Thief. In 2011, Jodorowsky went back to his hometown, Tocopilla, a coastal village on edge of the Chilean desert to shoot The Dance of Reality, a film based on his autobiography. Endless Poetry continues the story.

A true Renaissance man, Jodorowsky developed a successful career as a graphic novelist, collaborating with famous illustrators such as Moebius and Juan Gimenez. He has written about and is well versed in the art of tarot. From his practice as a tarot reader, his many years of working in the theatre, and his interest in psychoanalysis, Jodorowsky has developed a mixture of psychotherapy and shamanism that he calls “Psychomagic.”

Francesco Clemente was born in Naples, Italy. In contrast to leading conceptual art practices of the 1970s, Clemente refocused attention on representation, narrative, and the figure, and explored traditional, artisanal materials and modes of working. Since 1973 he has frequently resided and worked in India. In 1981 Clemente moved to New York City, where he currently lives with his wife, Alba. The artist has often engaged in collaborations, both in India with local craftsmen, and in New York with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, as well as with poets Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creely, and Rene Ricard. Clemente’s work has been the subject of a comprehensive retrospective, mounted by the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999″“2000), which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Balbao, Spain (2000). In 2011 he painted a series of tarot cards with figures from New York City’s art world as the major arcana, including Jasper Johns as the Pope and Brice Marden as the Hanged Man. Clemente’s exhibition Inspired by India was mounted at the Rubin in 2014, during which the artist appeared on stage eight times in conversation with different personalities: rocker and poet Patti Smith, theater visionary Robert Lepage, rapper-philanthropist Nas, Clemente’s spiritual teacher Gelek Rimpoche, chef Eric Ripert, architect Billie Tsien, The Sopranos creator David Chase, and film director Alfonso Cuarón. He also curated the Friday night Cabaret Cinema to point out his cinematic influences. One of these films was Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. “Jodorowsky is still scratching reality with his biting eye, and when I saw this film it really, again, I didn’t know that I was watching a film based on tarot cards; I didn’t know that I was going to paint my own tarot cards forty years later.”