El Topo (1969) Acid Western by Alejandro Jodorowsky

To the 95th anniversary of the great magician of the cinema screen. Alejandro Jodorowsky, who was born on February 17, 1929 in the Chilean town of Tocopilla, is rightfully called the magician of the cinema screen. And this is not a strained comparison, because his achievements in theater, literature, music, comic art, psychomagy developed by him, and, of course, cinema, certainly make him a great Master who would adorn any century. He paved new paths in art, blowing up conventional ideas. And the esoteric western El Topo shot by him in Mexico (1969) demonstrates this to the fullest.

A cowboy in all black and his little son are riding a horse through the desert, which in the very first scene will have to part with the attributes of childhood – a teddy bear and a portrait of his mother. He turns seven years old and his father announces that he is now an adult. This first initiation ceremony (captured in many multilingual posters) becomes the forerunner of others that his father, the main character of the tape, who is nicknamed El Topo, in Spanish meaning “El Topo Mole”, will experience on the screen. This unusual western can also be defined as a road movie through the desert of reality, manifesting and testing everything inherent in the human heart. We don’t know who this stranger in black is, who even calls himself god in one of the initial episodes.

Yes, this is not so important, because empathizing with what is happening on the screen, we ourselves follow the hero’s path of self-knowledge. The assumed mission of establishing justice and seeming nobility, when he saves the inhabitants of an Indian village from bandits reveling in outrage, soon do not pass the test of passion and selfishness. After all, El Topo strives to surpass anyone with his ability to shoot, besides, Mara, saved by him from the rapists (note that her name very symbolically coincides with the name of the demon who tempted the Buddha on the way to enlightenment) encourages him to duels with four great masters of weapons. In the images of these champions of the rate of fire, influential religious and philosophical approaches to understanding reality are presented. El Topo is not capable of defeating these super-shooters in an honest way, and by marching by deception, he is increasingly moving away from the perfection he originally aspired to.

The way each episode of the duel with these gurus, who send bullets to the target almost by the power of thought, is built up to the smallest detail demonstrates Jodorowsky’s magnificent mastery of the art of mise en scene, honed by many years of work in the theater. Alejandro acquired the art of pantomime and storytelling without words back in the fifties in Paris, where his mentor was the great mime Etienne Decroux, the teacher of such titans of the French gesture theater as Marcel Marceau and Jean-Louis Barraud. However, most of all, the Panic Movement influenced the creative handwriting of Jodorowsky, which is visibly represented in this tape and in subsequent ones. With its name, this group, created in the early sixties, referred to the ancient Greek god Pan, fusing horror and laughter, confusion and randomness together. Many scenes of the “El Topo” seem extremely shocking and, at the same time, necessary and cinematically perfect. The shock experienced by the audience is not an end in itself, but a means of consolidating those experiences that they consistently experience after the hero. One could even say that this shock, in its summation, is necessary for the cathartic effect in the finale of the tape.

The second half of the story “El Topo”, after the betrayal of Mara and the almost inevitable death of the main character, serves as a direct explanation of his nickname. In the world of cripples and the poor, who have buried themselves in deep caves and have forgotten the way up, the El Topo saved by them finds that divine reverence, which he seemed to have originally aspired to, but now he is burdened by it. It is shame that motivates him to truly serve those who have already come to terms with their social plague.

And up there, where the destitute wretches, played by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s hero, are trying to get out, there is a cowboy town. Values triumph there in an inverted form: hunting people and branding slaves right on the streets of the city, worship to the All-seeing eye in the form of the sacrament of Russian roulette with a blank cartridge, public debauchery, for the refusal of which you can get a sheriff’s bullet, etc. That’s where El Topo and his assistant go to entertain the public, raising funds to rescue the captives of the cave. We will not further spoiler, but we will say that to an attentive and erudite viewer, the author of the film gives a lot of references to the events of the recent past – the shooting of student demonstrations in the capital of the 1968 Olympics, the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in Saigon, captured in a photograph that shocked the whole world and many other events.

Ben Berengolts turned out to be one of such spectators who empathized and experienced the final catharsis during a closed show at the world-famous Museum of Modern Art. At his own peril and risk, to be subjected to litigation from all sorts of insulted people, he began to show the “Zen Buddhist western” by Alejandro Jodorowsky in his New York arthouse cinema. It was there that John Lennon saw him and returned with Yoko Ono more than once to relive this parable story in the form of a western. Moreover, Lennon will become one of the producers of Jodorowsky’s next tape “The Sacred Mountain”, which will take its author to the cinematic Olympus and give him a contract for the film adaptation of “Dune”, where the two central roles were to be performed by the brilliant Salvador Dali and Orson Welles. But this is a completely different story.

Invented and embodied on the screen and in the soundtrack of Jodorowsky’s “El Topo”, whose fans have become such movie and music stars as David Lynch, Dennis Hopper, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Marilyn Manson, is perceived as the emblem of the so-called “acid western”. This rare Western subgenre will receive another masterpiece incarnation at the very end of the 20th century – Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man” starring Johnny Depp. But this is also a completely different and no less interesting story.