El Topo (1970)
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
El Topo decides to confront warrior Masters on a trans-formative desert journey he begins with his 6 year old son, who must bury his childhood totems to become a man.
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8 films that influenced El Topo
What critics say influenced El Topo
A grisly, lurid cross between "Psycho" and the Tod Browning-Lon Chaney "The Unknown" — for its circus setting and slicing off of arms — it offers a mishmash of religious and Freudian symbolism amid torrential bloodshed topped with Fellini flourishes.
The movie has echoes here of Godard’s “ Pierrot le Fou ,” in which the characters make their way out of a gangster movie and into a musical, and wind up against their will in a Western.
El Topo is a kind of cross between Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name in the Sergio Leone westerns and Luis Buuel's pious priest in "Nazarin."
As should be obvious, the movie is both pretentious -- it is divided into chapters named after sections of the Bible, such as "Genesis" and "Psalms" -- and comically if grotesquely iconoclastic: The ultimate Western hero, John Wayne, is caricatured as a man with no arms who carries a man with no legs in a sling on his back; this composite cowboy (the original "Master Blaster" from the third "Mad Max" film?) is dressed in an outfit similar to that worn by Wayne in "The Searchers."
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Jodorowsky seems to take particular relish in the exaggerated use of blood squibs, a then-new special effect that had been pioneered by Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch (1969).
Jodorowsky seems to take particular relish in the exaggerated use of blood squibs, a then-new special effect that had been pioneered by Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch (1969).
He has made his film a Western of sorts and he has put in more phony gore than maybe 20 years of "The Wild Bunch."
It is vastly better than the same director's "Fando and Lis," but vastly inferior to Arrabal's "Viva La Muerte," a work in the same tradition of surreal violence to which all other works in this tradition must stand comparison.
A tumultuous cause celebre at festivals, it paved the way for the director's rise from small-time poseur to big-time poseur with El Topo a few years later.
Like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which had earlier captivated counterculture audiences with its LSD visuals, enigmatic narrative, and heavy use of symbolism, El Topo is precisely what you make of it.