El Topo

El Topo
September 23, 2010 at 7:00 pm

   "El Topo is Jodorowsky’s head-bending “Acid Western” that first drew attention to the director’s hallucinatory vision and ability as a filmmaker. With some of the most radical imagery committed to film, cult-cinema enthusiasts filled theaters on its release and a new culture of midnight screenings was born. The movie opens with the solitary black-clad figure El Topo (played by Jodorowsky himself) riding through a remote village to find its streets soaked in blood and residents massacred. The figure in black vows to avenge the slaughter and sets off to kill those responsible. In a freewheeling sequence of events the man meets and frees a captive woman, and then undertakes a series of contests with four gun masters, defeating each one. The second half of the film picks up some years later, El Topo now living among a community of cripples who have been sealed in a mountain by the townspeople who regard them as derelict and deformed. The gunfighter leads the effort to tunnel out, before meeting a dramatic end." 


http://madmuseum.org/DO/Calendar/201009/el_topo.aspx


Jodorowsky has said several times that he does not care about political revolution (e.g. compared to Godard’s counter-cinema), but rather about spiritual revolution on a personal level. “We can only change our oppressors. It is impossible for people to liberate themselves from oppressors”, Jodorowsky says. “People have to change themselves.”

[- Jodorowsky in Demby. In El Topo, for example, the eponymous mole metaphor entails an upward search for “the blinding light” of spiritual enlightenment. This can be taken either negatively (i.e. “when you find your ideas, your life is over”) or positively (i.e. becoming blind means no longer needing to see the light, thus collapsing the duality), according to Jodorowsky in El Topo: The Book of the Film, pp. 110–11.]
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/jodorowsky/#24