EL TOPO Movie Review

The Gopher
The Mole

It's sometimes tempting—especially when sitting through one of the glut of mediocre, machine-tooled Gen-X entertainments that often pass for “cutting edge” visions in today's art houses—to think back to the “good old days” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it seemed that a committed, new generation of filmmakers truly was reinventing the cinema. But then you remember El Topo, and you snap right out of it. Alexandro Jodorowsky's surrealistic, self-aggrandizing fantasy was not just the first official “cult film” of the 1970s, but seemed conceived and born as a fully formed religious cult in and of itself. Divided into sections with names like “Genesis,” “Psalms” and “Apocalypse” (mustn't leave that one out—it was 1970), El Topo is the story of a mysterious character (played by Jodorowsky) and his seven-year-old son, who first appear on horseback in a mysterious desert landscape. After telling the boy to bury his first toy and a picture of his dead mother, El Topo (the mole) and his son ride off to embark on numerous symbolic adventures involving disemboweled animals, turtle eggs, fat decadent generals, master gunfighters, and a dwarf. After two hours of this El Topo immolates himself (you may be tempted as well), but his son rides off into the sunset, ready for further self-discovery. El Topo is less interesting for what it is (its director/star/writer unintentionally summed it up when he said “El Topo is endless”) than for what it began in the world of movie exhibition. Run only at midnights, seven nights a week at New York's now-vanished, then-seedy Elgin Theatre, El Topo attracted SRO audiences comprised of reverential repeat business, would-be hipsters, and the merely curious, mostly via word-of-mouth (there was almost no advertising). The “midnight movie” as we know it today was officially born, and the way was paved for Pink Flamingos, Eraser-head, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show to add a new, “private club” dimension to the moviegoing experience for a generation.

NEXT STOP … The Holy Mountain, Billy Jack, The Last Movie

1971 123m/C MX Brontis Jodorowsky, Alfonso Arau, Alejandro Jodorowsky; D: Alejandro Jodorowsky; W: Alejandro Jodorowsky; C: Rafael Corkidi; M: Nacho Mendez, Alejandro Jodorowsky. VHS NYR