Sarah Snider
posted 4 May 2007

We could say that El Topo (1970) is a psychedelic, mid-Fellini, spaghetti Eastern. It is psychedelic, not in the sense that one should see it while on an LSD trip, but that it is the trip itself. Mid-Fellini, in that it falls somewhere between Satyricon, with its phantasmagorical disjointedness and visual splendour, and I Clowns, and its fascination with circuses and the marginal characters therein implied. Spaghetti Eastern, in the sense that it harbours characters, as well as plot and camera techniques from the rich Western tradition, but nonetheless sports a leading man on a spiritual mission, replete with ritual and riddles, not to mention characters from Eastern religious practices.

This somewhat complex ‘genrification’, although performing an useful analogical function, severely limits the space for discussion of El Topo. It offers but one discursive point of entry into the film – that is, through the film’s situation in a history of film. An alternative would be to consider it as extending a myth: as an oedipal story, about a son who must bury his mother and his childish toys, become a man and eventually take the place of his father. We could also view the film through its visual repertoire of enthralling desert blue-on-beige, as part of a hefty tradition of landscapes. Due to its episodic nature, we might align it in a family of graphic novels and comic strips. El Topo can also be philosophy, as the Allegory of the Cave, albeit with an alternative ending. Or Christianity: act one enumerates the prophets and introduces us to the nameless, righteous avenger who will eventually suffer stigmata at the hands of a traitor; the second act constitutes a resurrection and a life that the souls of the outcasts. This reincarnation and the miracles in the first act nod to Eastern religious philosophies. We could also situate El Topo as the first of midnight cult films, maintaining a five-year run in a cinema in Greenwich Village and selling out often. El Topo is at the same time highly political, anti-capitalistic and in support of conscientious objection.

All of these kernels or points of origin in the film point to a specific lack in the notion of a film as a holistic production and experience. Depending on our individual knowledges, a film can be many things to many people – although, granted the 30-year long battle over the distribution rights with Beatles manager Allen Klein, El Topo has tended to be many things to not so many people. To reduce this film to any one particular path or trajectory would negate both the ambition and the intentions of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean actor, director, writer, mime, poet and psychomagician. He wrote, directed and starred in a magpie film, drawing on genres of film and systems of thought which are seemingly incompatible. Stepping back from the immediacy of these structures, Jodorowsky incorporated them all into a heroic depiction of what film can do.

Perhaps that is what constitutes the danger of this film. It is not the staged brutality, the violence or other transgressions apparent in this film. Nor is it the misogyny or the violence against animals. The maiming and murdering of inbred cripples is not the taboo in this film. These are all things that elicit laughter from the midnight audiences – that turn the film into satire or comedy. What made El Topo subversive enough to be deemed illegal in several countries was precisely the confusion between genres and modes of thinking, the incomplete allusions to allegory and myth, the heteroglot centres, the inclusion of the marginalised. The patchwork of El Topo does not merely consist of parts of old maps sewn together, it is a new form of geography.

One definitive feature of a cult classic is that it provides its own mythos. Many critics believe that this could be the film that Jodorowsky made for himself. Whether or not this is true, he has created a mythology that spans beyond his original work, to dialogue with a wider array of cultural objects. Jodorowsky’s masterpiece spans mythology and psychology, film, religion and politics to offer us a magical world in its own terms.