The Jodorowsky Collection

The discs include an exhaustive wealth of extras, and benefit from the close collaboration throughout of Jodorowsky himself, now in his mid-seventies. All the films are made available on DVD for the first time in the UK, and have been digitally remastered and restored under the director's personal supervision. El Topo and The Holy Mountain have also been made available as separate discs.

Jodorowsky's black-and-white debut Fando y Lis was 'rediscovered' and made available in the US in 1999 by Fantoma Films, but the remastered version presented here is a marked improvement, as the split-screen comparisons in the accompanying restoration featurette make amply clear. Although they are better known than his debut, El Topo and The Holy Mountain have been in limbo for decades, available only in poor quality bootleg versions, owing to a 30-year feud between Jodorowsky and the films' producer Allen Klein. Jodorowsky and Klein patched up their differences in 2004, allowing these films to get their long-awaited 'official' dvd release. The results will not disappoint: the painstaking restoration process has produced a kaleidoscope of brilliant colours that do full justice to Jodorowsky's psychotropic visions.

Disc one comprises Fando y Lis, and is accompanied, like all the features in this collection, by a recently recorded director's commentary. In heavily accented English (with English subtitles), Jodorowsky talks about his childhood and the many arts (poetry, mime, theatre) that he practised before turning his hand to cinema; tells plenty of wild anecdotes about his non-professional cast and the production; describes the film's scandalous reception in Mexico; relates how he divided Fando y Lis (and later El Topo) into shorter headed sections to get around laws requiring union involvement in all Mexican feature-length films; and mentions his abiding hatred for leading man Sergio Kleiner ("I tortured him during the shoot").

And, this being Jodorowsky, there are plenty of throwaway observations calculated to provoke and shock, like "the biggest serial kiler, we know, is God", or "every one of us is raped by this world", or "this is a paedophile civilisation". Amen to that. The first disc also includes La Cravate (20 minutes, colour), a rare short film starring Jodorowsky (who also co-directed it with Saul Gilbert and Ruth Michelly) in 1957. An adaptation of Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads, La Cravate is a charming if undistinguished piece of dialogue-free whimsy in which the pantomime skills that first brought Jodorowsky to Paris (where he would go on to design many of Marcel Marceau's performances) are shown off to good effect. Both this short and the main feature are accompanied by brief featurettes illustrating their digital restoration.

Disc two comprises El Topo, as well as a full audio commentary (in Spanish, with subtitles), a shorter piece (seven minutes) by Jodorowsky on the film, and the original theatrical trailer. "I was inspired by rabbis, by Zorro, by Elvis Presley," Jodorowsky states near the beginning of the commentary, offering some insight into the film's infuriating eclecticism. The anecdotes come thick and fast: the man playing the bandit with the foot fetish is none other than Alfonso Arau (who would go on to direct Like Water For Chocolate); Mara Lorenzio (Marah) was permanently out of her mind on acid, and Jodorowsky's attack on her in the film was authentic ("I really hit her…. that was my time of chauvinism"); Jodorowsky wore black silk underwear, with a red heart emblazoned on the rear, throughout the shoot; Jacqueline Luis (who plays the small woman) is now a Zen master; one actress was dubbed with a boy's voice, another with a bird's cawing. Jodorowsky also decries the moral simplicities of mainstream American cinema – when, that is, he is not telling the story of a surrealist friend of his who used to rape the grilled chicken at family dinners. As the filmmaker puts it in the shorter featurette: "Terrible things, beautiful things go together."

Disc three is The Holy Mountain, fully uncut and uncensored for the first time, along with full audio commentary (Spanish, subtitled), a five-minute featurette on the film's digital restoration, another five-minute featurette on Jodorowsky's interest in tarot as "an encyclopaedia of symbols" and "an optic game" as well as on his interpretation of the ancient Marseille tarot. There are also six minutes of deleted scenes with director's commentary, and the original theatrical trailer.

In the audio commentary, it becomes clear just how rationalised the film's various symbologies were in the mind of the director, who carefully thought through each image that he employed.

Along the way, Jodorowsky also discusses: the difficulties of chameleon wrangling, or of teaching a chimpanzee to sit in the lotus position; the enduring habit of Americans to regard non-Americans as mere "aspects of tourism"; his film setting the trend for wearing black nail polish or Kaballah tattoos; the death threats he received during production in Mexico; ex-Beatle George Harrison's very real interest in playing the Thief (until Jodorowsky refused to remove the scene in which the Thief's anus is washed by hand in close-up); how Guadalupe Perullers, who played Berg's wife, has no belly button ("like Eve!"); the crazily ingenious idea that "if all mankind shitted from a two-metre high toilet, we would have all the electricity we wanted"; the near castration of one of the cast members when a drug-addled actor misconstrued Jodorowsky's direction to "cut!"; his hatred of all architects (except Gaudí); and his three-decade dispute with producer Allen Klein after the film was completed. It is a fever dream of a commentary, stimulating, entertaining, and bewildering.

Disc four comprises Loius Mouchet's 1994 feature-length profile La Constellation Jodorwosky, previously available on Fantoma Films' edition of Fando y Lis and Anchor Bay's two-disc edition of Jodorowsky's later film Santa Sangre. Its low budget is all too apparent, there is far too much footage of Jodorowsky writing at his desk, and the final sequence, in which Jodorowsky subjects Mouchet to a tarot reading, is less edifying than the documentary-maker evidently imagines. Still, Jodorowsky always makes for a fascinating subject, and here we get a whirlwind tour of his entire career: his mime and theatre work in Paris, his films, his work in graphic novels and as a lecturer, and his more recent role as a 'psycho-magician' using art as therapy. There is even a tantalising glimpse of Moebius' storyboards and JR Giger's designs for Jodorowsky's quixotic, and ultimately abandoned Dune film project of the Seventies, which was to have had a soundtrack by Pink Floyd and to have starred both Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí. It is better, apparently, to dream of making Frank Herbert's sprawling SF epic onto a film than actually to make it - David Lynch's subsequent experiences with Dune almost led him to quit cinema altogether.

Discs five and six are CD soundtracks for El Topo and The Holy Mountain. The former, by Jodorowsky and Nacho Méndez, has previously only ever been released on vinyl by Apple in 1971, while the latter, by Jodorowsky, Don Cherry and Ronald Frangipane, has never before been released in any format.

"Cinema is making people stupid", Jodorowsky asserts in the audio commentary to The Holy Mountain. "I didn't want to do that – I wanted to wake people up." Whether you are a long-time fanatic or a wide-eyed novice to Jodorowsky's heady brand of filmmaking, this is an exquisitely packaged collection of the early works of one of cinema's most idiosyncratic individualists. Get it, and prepare yourself for some artistic shock and awe from the high priest of esoteric surrealism. Of course, the films themselves have always been wonderful, but they have never looked - or sounded – better than this.