Alejandro Jodorowsky

<p><em>Dune</em> was to be his most ambitious film production: a personal adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel of the same title, published in 1965. The science-fiction saga was ideally suited to the choreography of transgressive visual and narrative genres of the sort in which the method of Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929 in Chile) partakes, and as it had been manifested in his films <em>El Topo</em> (1970) and <em>The Holy Mountain</em> (1973). Such an important project merited its own blank book. Hence, the word “DUNE” written in Art Deco-style typography is on the cover of a thick yellow notebook from 1974. Inside, however, there is not a single reference to the film (a premonition, perhaps, of the fact that it was never to be realized under Jodorowsky’s direction). The notebook, reproduced here in a selection of pages, was used for something else entirely, an investigation into one of the topics that concerns this director, cartoonist, composer, and visual artist: the history and use of the Tarot de Marseille.</p> <p>Jodorowsky has dedicated much of his life to exploring what he calls psychomagic, a divinatory, therapeutic practice and a kind of artistic research. Art is not art if it is incapable of healing. The power of the word along with an image from the tarot deck can bring out the individual subject’s unconscious desires, allow them to flourish, and help reach his or her most intimate facets. The cards—the images that they place before our eyes and the words that rest on their surface—help to establish a poetic, performative, and interpretative dialogue between Jodorowsky and the “patient” who consults the deck. This dialogue is geared toward grasping fears, stimulating spiritual grace, and breaking out of vicious circles…</p>