El Topo

WED May 19 2:30 pm Konvikt / film hall / free admission

THE MOLE
El Topo
Mexico 1970

director Alejandro Jodorowsky
screenplay Alejandro Jodorowsky
director of photography Rafael Corkidi
editor Federico Landeros
music Alejandro Jodorowsky, Nacho Mendez
cast Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Jose Legarreta,
Alfonso Arau, Jose Luis Fernandez, Alf Junco, Gerardo Zepeda


“If you are enlightened, El Topo is an amazing film. If you don't understand it, you are a dumb idiot.”

 

 

A legendary psychological Western movie, the masterpiece of the 1970s American wave of midnight flicks. El Topo, a righter of wrongs without a past, undergoes a series of ordeals aiming to expose him to temptation. Setting for the journey with no return, he leaves behind his son, wandering through the scenery and traps of the desert and his own mind to get to a final sinister and bloody encounter. El Topo is more than a mesmeric Western story, more than violent and a breathtaking visual metaphor. The plot features, among others, torturing of Franciscan monks, iguanas asked to a dance, lesbian temptation in the middle of the desert, four ordeals of gunmen and the mystery of meditation and Zen... And all this happens along the mystic way leading toward temptation.


Jodorowsky lifts his symbols and mythologies from everywhere: Christianity, Zen, discount-store black magic, you name it. He makes not the slightest attempt to use them so they sort out into a single logical significance. Instead, they're employed in a shifting, prismatic way, casting their light on each other instead of on the film's conclusion. The effect resembles Eliot's The Waste Land, and especially Eliot's notion of shoring up fragments of mythology against the ruins of the post-Christian era.

Despite the frequent classification of the film as a psychological Western movie, it is rather an anti-Western story. Rather than boundless psychedelia, it evokes existentialist and disillusive philosophy, evil and pointless violence, a crisis of values: a surrealist vision of the world where people blow their noses into holy books and where the torturing of Franciscan monks by a gang of filthy and drunk bumpkins is accompanied by glorious music. People are cowardly worms and slobbering dogs, animals deserving to be trodden into the sand, limbless cripples and midgets. The images correspond with the content. The shining red blood reflects off the snow-white sand, and a chain of disconcerting images of appalling beauty referring to religion and (pop) culture trots on in a wildly slow tempo.