El topo

Plot synopsis:
El Topo is traveling through a desert on horseback with his naked young son, Hijo. They come across a town whose inhabitants have been slaughtered, and El Topo hunts down and kills the perpetrators and their leader, a fat balding Colonel. El Topo abandons his son to the monks of the settlement's mission and rides off with a woman whom the Colonel had kept as a slave. El Topo names the woman Mara, and she convinces him to defeat four great gun masters to become the greatest gunman in the land. Each gun master represents a particular religion or philosophy, and El Topo learns from each of them before instigating a duel. El Topo is victorious each time, not through superior skill but through trickery or luck.
After the first duel, a black-clad woman with a male voice finds the couple and guides them to the remaining gun masters. As he kills each master, El Topo has increasing doubts about his mission, but Mara persuades him to continue. Having killed all four, El Topo is ridden with guilt, destroys his own gun and revisits the places where he killed those masters, finding their graves swarming with bees. The unnamed woman confronts El Topo and shoots him multiple times in the manner of stigmata. Mara then betrays him and rides off with the woman, while El Topo collapses and is carried away by a group of dwarves and mutants.
El Topo awakes in a cave, to find that the tribe of deformed outcasts have taken care of him and set him up as a God-like figure, while he has been asleep and meditating on the gun masters' "four lessons". The outcasts dwell in a system of caves which have been blocked in — the only exit is out of their reach due to their deformities. When El Topo awakes, he is "born again" and decides to help the outcasts escape. He is able to reach the exit and, together with a dwarf girl who becomes his lover, performs for the depraved cultists of the neighboring town to raise money for dynamite.
Hijo, now a young monk, arrives in the town to be the new priest, but he is disgusted by the perverted form of religion the cultists practice. Despite El Topo's great change in appearance Hijo recognizes him and threatens to kill him on the spot for abandoning him as a child, but agrees to wait until he has succeeded in freeing the outcasts. Hijo grows impatient at the time the project is taking, and begins to work alongside El Topo to hasten the moment when he will kill him. At the point when Hijo is ready to give up on finishing the tunnel, El Topo breaks through into the cave. The tunnel has been completed, but Hijo finds that he cannot bring himself to kill his father.
The outcasts come streaming out, but as they enter the town, they are shot down by the cultists. El Topo helplessly witnesses his community being slaughtered and is shot himself. Ignoring his own wounds he massacres the cultists, then takes an oil lamp and immolates himself. His girlfriend gives birth at the same time as his death, and she and his son make a grave for his remains. This becomes a beehive like the gun masters' graves.
El Topo's son, girlfriend, and baby ride off on horseback, the son now wearing his father's clothes.

Tags: avant garde, murder, allegory, cult, violence, atmospheric, psychedelic, satire, revenge

Review:
I have seen three movies by Alejandro Jodorowsky - 'El Topo', 'The Holy Mountain' and 'Santa Sangre' - each are amazing, but 'El Topo' to me is the most successful.
I doubt whether anyone but Jodorowsky himself truly "gets it", but it is still the most watchable and entertaining of the three, and the best introduction to his work.Jodorowsky not only writes and directs he plays the title role (translates as "The Mole"), a mysterious black-clad gunfighter who claims to be God. I won't bore with a detailed retelling of the plot, but it initially involves El Topo's quest to find and fight the four masters of the desert, and ends up with him becoming part of strange community of outcasts who live underground.
I thought I detected more than a little of misogyny in the film-- --however, as Jodorowsky essentially told me--none has been intended, except that the world now, like in the past, has always brutalized women and men have insisted on brutalizing themselves.Seeing it with an audience in a theater also means you can discuss it with people of all types.
"El Topo" was one of the first midnight-movie cult hits because of its visually stunning, mentally exciting indulgence in gratuitous sex and exaggerated violence Avenging angel El Topomeant to be wise and mysticalrides into a town whose population has just been massacred He guns down some of the cruel and perverse bandits responsible and brutally punishes their leader He leaves his seven-year-old son with some monks and goes away with the gang leader's woman, Mara In the desert sands, El Topo and Mara make love, and she quickly falls in love with him After their frantic love-making, she tells him that he can prove that he's the 'best' by killing the Four Masters For no apparent reason other than to please Mara, El Topo begins his mission, defeating and killing each of the Four Masters The film has been quite controversial It lacks clarity and has painful emotions that make it quite compelling.
This is my first venture into Jodorowsky's territory and I can safely say that I'm highly impressed."El Topo" is one of the most bizarre and impressive movies you'll ever see.It features plenty of interesting,weird characters,lots of religious symbolism and extremely violent gun-fight scenes.One of the producers of this one is Mexican horror veteran Juan Lopez Moctezuma("Alucarda","Mary,Mary,Bloody Mary").I urge you to see this masterpiece right now.Simply breathtaking!.
Shot in Mexico, El Topo (or the mole in English) is a gunslinger (played by Jodorowsky), who, dressed completely in black leather, rides on his horse with his seven-year-old son through the desert; until they come across a massacre of people.
I think that is a totally closed mind of approach to this fascinating film.Even if you hate it,you have to admit the power of the film, great imagery.Alejandro did a great job,this movie is a real labor of love,it deserves rediscovery.One of the greatest films of the seventies,unforgettable is the only way to sum it up..
Thematically, the story hints at the connection between Taoist concepts of acting through inaction and mystical aspects of some western religions - simultaneously suggesting that only God can know the mind of God and that if no god exists, humans must acknowledge their dependence on the forces that govern the universe and seek harmony by yielding to them.Like most westerns, there is a great deal of killing and gun play in El Topo, and the death scenes are often grueling and over-dramatized.
Unlike most westerns, however, none of this violence is pointless, and it is not the central action of the story.Jodorowski is a deeply spiritual film-maker, but is also intensely critical of organized religion and the demystification of religious ideas.
Notably, Jodorowsky never makes any statement whatsoever about science.The meta-narrative of El Topo can be read in many ways, and is the level at which the film achieves high art.
Each thoughtful viewer will take away a different message.Gender is a major theme in El Topo, and although the main story is clearly presented from an androcentric perspective, Jodorowski adds a lot of details which effectively deconstruct this, and, in some cases, unmask it as an arbitrary convention of patriarchal religious doctrine.
This is a man who didn't have a happy childhood with his father trying to force him not to have children to not carry on the family name and eventually being gay, it's an interesting choice to have the main character kill off a manifestation of his father early in the film.Many people that i know probably know who director Alexandre Jodrowsky is, especially if they are Marilyn Manson fans since that dude practically worships him.
First, the entire film is a biblical allusion (Old and New Testament), which would be great...BUT Jodorowsky's religious references are so blatant and redundant that they become annoying, tired and expected (like moral ground in a Disney cartoon geared toward a six year old).
Well, a lot of films don't have any interesting message, and you watch, just to be entertained, This movie even doesn't have that.
Out of Jodorowsky's films, it is "El Topo" of 1970 which is most treasured by cult-cinema lovers, and for good reasons.
While "El Topo" looks like a (highly unusual) Western at first, it can not be attributed simply to this genre, as the film goes way beyond the borders of traditional film genres.
The film's beginning is already bizarre and unique, and it gradually gets more surreal.El Topo (played by director Jodorowsky himself), a grim-looking, full-bearded gunfighter dressed all in black leather rides through the desert with his seven-year-old naked son (played by the directors son, Brontis Jodorowsky).
Eccentric Characters like they can not be found in any other film, such as four 'masters of the desert', demented bandits or sadistic townspeople, appear in an unreal and demented world of weirdness, violence, symbolism and insanity.
Jodorowsky's weird symbolism comes along with an incomparably surreal atmosphere, and it is not easy, no, not possible to determine what it all means - and it does not need to be - 'What the hell is going on?' is a question that one might ask oneself multiple times while watching "El Topo" - but in a manner that could not be more fascinating.
A film filled with all kinds of beautiful people and unique individuals and it comes across like a bad LSD trip.
What's interesting is the stunning visuals Jodorowsky produces:   El Topo rides into frame on a white desert dressed all in black (black horse, black umbrella, black hat, a savage black beard) with sidekick "Hijo" (Brontis Jodorowsky), a small profoundly naked boy wearing only a hat, as if to announce the film's recurring theme, the duality of man; knowing v.
domineering) in which the lesbian context is not left to imagination, especially after they dispatch el Topo in a gunfight culminating in an allegory of crucifixion, after which the protagonist is reborn in a Brahma-like state, assigned to free outcasts from a cave (by digging a tunnel: hence "the mole" metaphor), only to release the outcasts into an "American" western town whose citizens worship only money (note the ubiquitous triangle containing a single eye) with yet more devastating consequences.
Released the same year as "Fellini Satyricon", the Fellini-esque "El Topo" was hailed as a masterpiece by a small group of undoubtedly stoned New Yorkers (ah yes, the 70s, mea culpa), and can only be appreciated by a handful of hard-core film buffs willing to endure a video copy of a video copy of a badly overexposed print with bad sound; but still the film is interesting as a cultural artifact, the progenitor of western genre influencing the superior "Dead Man" (1996, dir.
Prior to my viewing El Topo I had given Jodorowsky's other movie Holy Mountain a ten.
Jodorowsky as writer, director, producer, has this attitude of 'why not' in his unique form of gonzo cinema, where it's more about taking in individual scenes, images, sights, like a manic freak-show with lots of harsh violence (for its time at least).
Jodorowsky plays El Topo, a lone, odd gunman who stops a group of wildly deranged bandits (a sign of things to come, making Leone's bandits look like playground kids), lets his naked son off with a group of monks, and sets off to defeat the four best gunmen in the world.
OK, if that may give an idea as to what the film is about, keep in mind that this was made in 1969/1970, at a time when a director like Jodorowsky was not only accepted but needed by movie fans who were looking for films that shook the culture.
But to say it's as exceptional is really about as subjective as you can get.Going into the film, all I really had to go on what to expect came from a documentary on midnight movies (where El Topo found its first audience as the first of its kind), and the clips shown and Jodorowsky's own words on it had me excited to see it- though not with the highest of expectations.
In a way, it's too much fun to be a dull, pretentious work- the filmmaker seems to be too talented to really force feed all of this to some amorphous blob of an audience.So, is it a little dated, sure; does it have an entire midsection where certain scenes involving El Topo and his female tag-alongs that jump ahead and misses any conventional logic, of course; does it skate along the edge of being almost a very bad movie, absolutely.
But as a fan of westerns, and surrealism, the two do merge well enough for the film El Topo, especially for the fact that it accomplishes what each do- it gives action and daring-do like the westerns, and it provides a level of humor and no-holds-barred outrageousness that marks the tops of surrealist works.
i quite like this film, which is called 'El Topo' which i believe translates in English to 'Al Topper', the name of the main man in the movie whose adventures we follow.
This flick is one of those that is definitely more than a mere 2D light show: There's something about the experience of it that makes it very, very personal; psychedelically like your presence in the theater, watching it, is very much a part of the reality of the film.
"The top" or second film by the cultured director Alejandro Jodorowsky brings the viewer a Western mystic with surrealism and religious metamorphoses, but interesting, very well directed, hypnotic and captivating, with the same mysterious air.
Technically, Jodorowsky conducted his western in an excellent way, with clear inspirations in Sergio Leone, Jodorowsky does not leave anything out in his western that here, escaping from the traditional does not pass old Mexican and not American, and even this never being explicit, fans of the good western repair the details of the western created by Jodorowsky, a mystical and lonely western, we feel bad like the scenery, it is like something wrong, it is a construction of the scenery, the use of open plans All the moments to demonstrate a grandiosity of nothingness, an almost inhospitable environment and cruel to be human, as well as making a wonderful costumes, great sound tracks that are a 70's face, that half sadistic melody that complements our journey well, of course, the good performances, especially of Jodorowsky as "El topo where we perceive that the character has the knowledge of his character, he can also, just live his character, with his solutions and objectives, a highlight also for Mara Lorenzio.
Jodorowsky's El Topo is an extreme and surreal vision of what Mr. Leone did with the traditonal western.The violence and it's execution is botyh intriguing and disgusting at the same time and there is plenty of the director's unique visual iconography.
(Jodorowsky, as a filmmaker, is a master at crafting bizarre ideas and symbolism into filmed images.)The plot is...um...weird.
I won't tell you the plot, because it's honestly a good deal better in the execution than in the planning--this is why I think nobody but Jodorowsky can film the movies he's done.On a side note, it seems most copies of El Topo are taken from Japanese laserdiscs, meaning several things:  one, there is a loss in quality, as the minimal transfer is master film; film reel used for LDs; master cassette; tape you get.
(I believe copies of The Holy Mountain are the same, but I have yet to pick one up for myself.)In any case, El Topo's a film for people who enjoy bizarre, violent films, and probably just as good an introduction to Jodorowsky as you can find..
The title character is also the director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, who at the beginning, looks like Zorro, dressed in black, riding a horse with his naked young son on board trekking through the desert of Mexico.
I watched Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain on the come down of an acid trip and I enjoyed that very much and I imagine that this movie would also pair wonderfully with said substances..
It has been said that Jodorowsky's "El Topo" is like a Spaghetti Western directed by Luis Bunuel and who am I to argue, but you may find the excessive blood-letting, copious displays of nudity, (including a seven year-old boy), emphasis on all kinds of physical deformity and some girl-on-girl action more in keeping with an exploitation picture albeit one dressed up in some very fancy new clothes, (at least of the emperor's variety).
What is a cult movie?in my point of view is a movie that makes an impression in you for so many years that you want to watch it over and over again and is hard to find, it turns into a legend.I watched El Topo in its original version in spanish a couple nights ago, i own a VHS taken from what it looks to be a DVD because before the movie begins there´s a screen menu with some options; anyway, let me explain you some things about the spanish spoken version that makes it unique.
El topo legend will continue when Jodorowsky finds money to film it "the sons of el topo" is called.El topo is an interesting example of how to make good movies with low budget especially in countries where the cinema industry is so bad like in Mexico product of the lack of interest in it.
While I didn't love it I can at least respect what the director was going for, which was pure madness.I think the best thing that can be said about the film is that it has a unique look that isn't like any other movie ever made.
I have had the great good fortune to see this movie in a local cinema, and I have to say I don't think I've ever spent so long with my mouth hanging open.Almost every reviewer has made some comparison to other works just to try and describe El Topo, and so here's my take: imagine a Western co-written by Lewis Carroll and the Monty Python team, co-directed by Terry Gilliam, Sergio Leone and Ingmar Bergman, and with design by Salvador Dali and Heironymous Bosch.
So a good attempt and I'd recommend this movie to others interested in bizarre films; however its not one of the greatest ones I've seen.
Knowing that he wrote and was the director for the film, one could assume that he also thought he was powerful because he was "the guy making the film" and thus pedestrian-like people who are weak-minded look up to him and will do whatever he says and be ok with it.In the version that I saw the scene may have been cut but from everything that I've read, consensual sex happened.
As with films like Embrace of the Serpent from South America, you feel that Jodorowsky is both critical of the bizarre Christian symbolism he mixes with the native peoples of those parts.
Writer, director, and actor Alejandro Jodorowsky's definitive cult Western is not a film that should be missed.
The film is an experience like no other, even if it is difficult to decipher just what it all means.Personally, I was awed by El Topo, but I didn't like it as much as Jodorowsky's next film, The Holy Mountain.
I can't wait to watch El Topo a few more times to collect the interpretive meaning of the film in my mind.
Later on the film takes a very different turn and feels a lot less like a western.
We only feel the story cutting back together as El Topo reunites with a character earlier in the movie.The film has a superb visual flair and is littered with many types of religious imagery and symbolism.
While watching Alejandro Jodorowsky's cult classic "El Topo," one would think this is a film David Lynch would have taken Dennis Hopper to on a date.
While it would be easy to dismiss El Topo as an exercise in surreal film-making (the kind one would expect from a filmmaker in 1970), it is undeniable that many of the scenes land with striking resonance, and will stay with you long after the movie has ended.
Jodorowsky' use of animals is reminiscent of movies like "4" and the fact that whenever an act of violence occurs in this film an animal noise or cutaway to a beast is shown.
If one were to teach a cinema class about where film was going during the 60's and 70's (and where it ultimately didn't go thanks to people like Lucas, Spielberg and Coppola) "The Last Movie" and "El Topo" would be required viewing.
This one certainly isn't like anything I saw on Saturday mornings growing up.Alejandro Jodorowsky is definitely a surrealist, and incorporates many different religious themes in this film.
El Topo was director Alejandro Jodorowsky's second feature film - following the low-budget surrealist parable Fando and Lis in 1967 - and, as a result of its violent content and scenes of grotesque symbolism, was the first film to bring him to the attention of a western audience.