Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky (Spanish: [ale'xandro xodo'rofski]; born 17 February 1929) is a Chilean-French filmmaker. Active since 1948, in seventy years of his artistic career Jodorowsky has experienced it in almost all creative forms: writer (in his five facets: novelist, storyteller, poet, playwright and essayist), film director and producer, actor of cinema and theatre, playwright, theatre director, screenwriter, film editor, comics writer, musician, soundtrack composer, philosopher, puppeteer, mime, psychologist and psychoanalyst, draughtsman, painter, eventually sculptor and spiritual guru. Best known for his avant-garde films, he 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.

In regard to the making of El Topo, Jodorowsky stated:  "When I wanted to do the rape scene, I explained to [Mara Lorenzio] that I was going to hit her and rape her. There was no emotional relationship between us, because I had put a clause in all the women's contracts stating that they would not make love with the director. We had never talked to each other. I knew nothing about her. We went to the desert with two other people: the photographer and a technician. No one else. I said, 'I'm not going to rehearse. There will be only one take because it will be impossible to repeat. Roll the cameras only when I signal you to.' Then I told her, 'Pain does not hurt. Hit me.' And she hit me. I said, 'Harder.' And she started to hit me very hard, hard enough to break a rib...I ached for a week. After she had hit me long enough and hard enough to tire her, I said, 'Now it's my turn. Roll the cameras.' And I really...I really...I really raped her. And she screamed ... Then she told me that she had been raped before. You see, for me the character is frigid until El Topo rapes her. And she has an orgasm. That's why I show a stone phallus in that scene ... which spouts water. She has an orgasm. She accepts the male sex. And that's what happened to Mara in reality. She really had that problem. Fantastic scene. A very, very strong scene."  In the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, Jodorowsky states:  "It's different. It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It's like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to... to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love."  As a result of these statements, Jodorowsky has been criticised. Matt Brown of Screen Anarchy wrote that "it's easier to wall off a certain type of criminality behind the buffer of time--sure, Alejandro Jodorowsky is on the record in his book on the making of the film as having raped Mara Lorenzo while making El Topo--though he later denied it--but nowadays he's just that hilarious old kook from Jodorowsky's Dune!" Emily Asher-Perrin of Tor.com called Jodorowsky "an artist who condones rape as a means to an end for the purpose of creating art. A man who seems to believe that rape is something that women 'need' if they can't accept male sexual power on their own". Sady Doyle of Elle wrote that Jodorowsky "has been teasing the idea of an unsimulated rape scene in his cult classic film El Topo for decades ... though he's elsewhere described the unsimulated sex in that scene as consensual", and went on to state that the quote "has not endangered his status as an avant-garde icon".

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