Jodorowsky’s catalog ranks as one of the finest in the field, but most of these works were unavailable in English for decades.

But if anything comes near meriting such praise, it’s his 30-plus years of graphic novels. It’s difficult to vouch for the comparative consequentiality of most of that voluminous catalog beyond his film work. In Mexico City, he founded the Panic Movement with Fernando Arrabal, reviving the spirit of Surrealism with an additional coat of absurdity, and met Ejo Takata, a Buddhist monk who would become his long-term mentor. In Paris, he joined Marcel Marceau’s troupe and directed Maurice Chevalier’s music hall comeback. In his early years in Chile, he worked as a mime, clown, and theater director in Santiago. Born in 1929, he’s been engaged in artistic pursuits in Europe and South America throughout his life. In fact, in his 80-plus years, Jodorowsky has had seemingly no idle moments. Knowledge of his work beyond the cinema remains regrettably thin, even among Jodorowsky’s DVD-box-set-and-bootleg-owning hardcore fans. Yet, from film world coverage of Danza de la Realidad, one might easily get the impression that Jodorowsky has simply been unoccupied since his last film, 1990’s Santa Sangre. His latest film, Danza de la Realidad (2013), an adaptation of his autobiography, debuted at Cannes last month and, based on reviews, it’s a vital addition to his canon of film marvels. Jodorowsky is known primarily as a filmmaker, chiefly for the early 1970s psychedelic masterpieces El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). The Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky belongs in that company. It’s only a small number of polymaths - Marguerite Duras, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet among them - whose talents have been evenly spread between cinema and the page (not to mention the stage). A few novelists have directed films, but generally this has proven a diversion, and the only reason on earth to ever cite Michael Crichton, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag in the same sentence. But the author-director, producing work for the page and the screen? That’s a much rarer breed.

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