Tag: Alejandro Jodorowsky

El Topo

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

My first encounter with the films of Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was a complete accident. Stumbling around Bestival on the Isle of Wight as a young and impressionable teenager, I walked into a tent at midnight just as The Holy Mountain (1973) was about to begin. I had absolutely no idea what to make of the movie; all I knew was that I was in the presence of something completely unique and utterly brilliant. The random nature of this encounter felt Jodorowskian in and of itself, a bizarre coincidence that later left a huge filmmaking impression.

The deranged nature of Jodorowky’s films almost invites the viewer to be somewhat under the influence (like I was then, although just rum and not psychedelics!) when watching them. His breakthrough hit, El Topo, is no exception, a bizarre romp through the Mexican desert that shocks and beguiles in equal measure. Filled to the brim with endless rituals, symbols, animals, dwarfs, deformed people and highly mannered performances, it can be a difficult film to interpret. Seen with an open mindset however and El Topo is a highly cathartic experience, an expiation of sin through brutal violence.

Jodorowsky stars at the eponymous hero, a black-clad gunfighter wandering the desert with his naked son (played by Jodorowsky’s own son Brontis Jodorowsky). He is on a mission to defeat four gun masters to become the finest fighter in the land. With just this basic description El Topo sounds like a traditional Western, or at least a Spaghetti Western — violent deconstructions of the genre filmed by Italians directors like Sergio Corbucci or Sergio Leone — yet Jodorowsky has a completely different aim in mind, using the power of the desert’s almost endless plains to investigate the nature of human morality.

El Topo

It’s ultimately a deeply religious film, albeit one that explores ideas of spiritually and faith through extreme violence. El Topo can easily be read, like the star of The Holy Mountain, as a type of Jesus-like figure, especially when he finds himself in a cave filled with outcasts who have become deformed through incest. He even quotes New Testament scripture when he asks “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” right before his hands are shot, forming wounds like that of the stigmata. Both blasphemous yet oddly affecting, it foreshadows the intense exploration of Christianity found in the films of Martin Scorsese, especially The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Yet the film cannot easily be interpreted as a one-for-one Christ allegory. As Roger Ebert mentions: “He makes not the slightest attempt to use them so they sort out into a single logical significance.” Unlike the similarly mannered films of Sergei Parajanov, which can probably be interpreted correctly with a degree in Eastern European studies or specialist knowledge of pre-Soviet Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian culture, Jodorowsky’s films cannot be solved through specialist knowledge as many of the symbols more or less contradict each other. This is the key pleasure of Jodorowsky’s films and what makes them such iconic Midnight Movies. You just simply have to go with the flow, bring your own perspective to what they offer, and enjoy the experience. Intoxicants are optional.

A restoration of El Topo is in selected cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 10th.

Endless Poetry (Poesía sin Fin)

Posted on by victorfraga

Where Jodorowsky’s 2013 The Dance Of Reality documented his small town childhood, Endless Poetry deals with his subsequent life in Chile’s capital city Santiago. His conservative family wants him to study medicine while he proclaims himself a poet and moves in with the two Cereceda sisters who love art above all things. The older Carmen sculpts while the younger Veronica dances. The latter gives him some money and tells him to go out and find his muse.

He runs into poetess Stella Diaz, played by actress Pamela Flores who also plays his opera-singing, housewife mother Sara. Both women are confident, dominant figures, but where Sara is a devout Catholic, Stella paints selected parts of her body and thinks nothing of, say, exposing her breasts to a male stranger as an excuse for punching him in the face. As they embark on a relationship, Stella proves the dominant force and in time Alejandro leaves her.

Alejandro then meets and befriends the poet Enrique Lihn (Leandro Taub). Their ensuing provocations include walking over a parked lorry and through both an old woman’s house and an underground car park in order to traverse the city in a straight line.

Aiming more at poetic effect than linear, autobiographical narrative, Jodorowsky not only directed but also wrote and designed both productions. At key moments he appears onscreen too as his present day self to offer advice to his younger self (played in Endless Poetry by his son Adan who also contributes a memorable score). His relationship with his father (Jodorowsky’s elder son Brontis) is explored via both an earthquake where father encourages son to be confident however difficult the circumstance and a final parting on a Santiago pier where son is movingly reconciled with father by shaving off the latter’s hair.

Further equally unconventional imagery is thrown at us just as Jodorowsky and Lihn pelt a bourgeois poetry audience with meat and eggs. A man lacking hands instructs male party-goers to use their hands to caress his lover’s body. Jodorowsky has sex with his best friend’s dwarf girlfriend. Maria Lefebre (famed dancer Carolyn Carson) does a tarot reading utilising a naked teenage boy who sports a growing erection. Staged with panache, such unusual scenes deliver a stream of consciousness awash with colourful characters to make for arresting viewing. Yet infuriatingly Jodorowsky’s true self may be hidden behind such autobiographical artifice, compelling though it is.

Endless Poetry was out in cinemas in January 2017, when this piece was originally published. It has now been made available on DVD, Blu-ray and VoD. It’s on Mubi in December 2020.