Format: Cinema

Screening at: BFI Southbank

Date: 6-19 April 2007

Also available on DVD

Release date: 14 May 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cast Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky,Mara Lorenzio, David Silva

Mexico 1971

124 minutes

The first thing that needs to be said about El Topo is, it has its longueurs but it’s a lot of fun. I had always been led to believe that this ‘metaphysical’ western, reportedly bursting with weird imagery and extreme violence, was ‘difficult’. In the end, I think there’s a danger of talking up ‘difficult’ into ‘inaccessible’, which it certainly isn’t. What El Topo certainly has been is unavailable. Applying the equation, ‘cult’ equals ‘reputation’ over ‘availability’, El Topo must score pretty highly. But there’s a danger, after such a long time in limbo, and with so much ink spilt in the meantime, that the freight of expectation could become something of an albatross.

How do you pitch El Topo? The original tagline plumps for zany and freakish: ‘See the naked young Franciscans whipped with cactus. See the bandit leader disemboweled. See the priest ride into the sunset with a midget and her newborn baby’. All of which you will indeed see í¢â‚¬â€ though I’m inclined to think the bandit leader, having been de-wigged and stripped to red silk boxer shorts, is actually castrated rather than disemboweled. At any rate, the tagline may be one way of selling the film, but it hardly does justice to the way slapstick merges seamlessly into dispassionate cruelty. And none of this explains where the ‘metaphysical’ side comes in. The dialogue does feature an element of explicit philosophising, but the mise en scí­Â¨ne seems if anything more important: vivid events, whether philosophical or silly, or both, are set against the same vast, empty and indifferent landscape. In the opening frames, a heat-blurred black spot gradually comes into focus out of the blazing expanse of desert. Once in the foreground, the bearded gunslinger clad in stylish black leather, punctuated by a less obviously heroic black umbrella, dismounts and bids his naked 7-year-old son bury his childhood í¢â‚¬â€ in the form of a teddy bear and a photo of his mother. So the solemn and the ridiculous are intertwined from the start, and this is key to Jodorowsky. If the film has anything as simple as a moral, it is arguably that El Topo has to learn to accept the ridiculous with humility. Presenting the film as either chin-scratchingly intellectual or trashily sensational misses the point of a very personal vision that marks no such distinction.

The first half of the film charts El Topo’s fall, which dates roughly from the moment he grandiloquently proclaims, ‘Soy Dios’, by way of justification for castrating the colonel. Taking oneself for a god may be a natural hazard of riding about in the desert in black leather avenging the downtrodden, especially when the opposition is so flatteringly mediocre. The problem is not just that El Topo has come to believe his own PR: he has also done too good a job of impressing the seductive but demanding Mara (Mara Lorenzio). She first persuades him to desert his son to the Franciscans, and then insists he must prove himself by defeating four ‘masters’, a succession of mystical hermit gunslingers. As he is not in fact God, he has to do so through low trickery rather than skill, cheered on enthusiastically by the results-obsessed Mara. But El Topo is tormented by the superiority of his opponents even in death, and repents at the very moment of success. At this point Mara transfers her affections to El Topo’s rival in love, the mysterious and sexy woman in black (Paula Romo), who promptly shoots loser ex-boyfriend in the belly. Left for dead by these dreadful harpies, he is found by a passing band of midgets and dragged away on a litter.

In the second half, he awakens years later under a mountain where the midgets (the deformed outcast offspring of incest, imprisoned under the mountain by the wicked townsfolk) mistakenly revere him as a god. By this point he is a dead ringer for Matthew Barney in Cremaster 3, with white candy floss hair, doll-like rouge and powder make-up, and an outsize nappy. Once restored to his senses and apprised of the plight of his new people, he embarks on a Mosaic quest to tunnel a way out for them. In the meantime, with the help of a lovely midget played beautifully by Jacqueline Luis, he earns money by clowning for the vicious, hypocritical folk of the town at the foot of the mountain; not an easy gig, given that they hunt and brand slaves for entertainment and worship the all-seeing eye from the Great Seal of the United States.

Viewed in terms of allegory, the film is quite moral, even religious. And it is the allegorical structure that feeds speculation over the film’s ‘meaning’: the two halves, as is often remarked, could correspond to Old and New Testament; each of the ‘masters’ teaches El Topo a valuable life lesson; the film ends with a sort of redemption, and a holocaust from which only a woman and El Topo’s two children escape. On the other hand, you might just as well say this last element is reminiscent of The Alamo. In any case, the ‘allegorical’ aspect is as much formal and aesthetic as anything else. As in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or classic Japanese children’s TV series Monkey (Saiyûki) for that matter, baroque monads remain patiently seated in their pavilions in the midst of a wasted landscape, waiting only for the fated challenger to happen along. The sheer lack of context makes them uncanny. There is nothing to suggest how, for example, the second master and his fortune-teller mother í¢â‚¬â€ chubby folk swathed in furs and accompanied by a lion í¢â‚¬â€ can subsist in the meantime in their hollow of bleached-out clay. The third master’s bunny farm is likewise less symbolic than visually redolent of discomfitingly improbable life.

These ‘metaphysical’ encounters also follow on from, and may to some extent be punitive replays of, the burlesque first encounter with the bandits. El Topo’s hubris is to declare himself God when all he has done is overcome a band of cackling murderous cretins straight out of Spaghetti Western. All-too human, these small-time incompetents display their grotesquely misplaced sensuality by slavering over ladies’ shoes amongst the desert scrub, dancing romantically with monks (before riding them bare-back with cactus whips) and, a little later, barking and begging like dogs for a taste of a real lady (Mara). The bandits foreshadow the town of the second half of the film. There, desire lost in the wilderness has likewise been forced to expose itself as makeshift fetishism, all the more monstrous for being carried out on a civic scale. Only a collective perversion can enthusiastically embrace a religion based on Russian roulette as a legitimate form of Christianity. The town dignifies its worst excesses with a morality summed up in the puffed-up grimace of respectability worn by the matrons of the community (probably superannuated whores), whether checking up on their husbands in the saloon in the guise of the league for decency, or applauding the torture and murder of slaves. There is perhaps another, less ‘metaphysical’ and less discussed, context at work here; Mexico’s role in the scramble to carve up the Americas, and its violent entanglement with the USA in the lawless prosecution of its ‘manifest destiny’. I found myself at some points thinking of Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-violent and sort-of metaphysical Blood Meridian, and wondering what Jodorowsky might make of it. Brutish figures decked out in outlandishly ill-assorted costumes í¢â‚¬â€ each garment the document of a murder í¢â‚¬â€ would do him very well. But in the end I think Jodorowsky would want something with more kindness and a little bit of clowning thrown in. There is some fairly brutal violence in El Topo. There are also landscapes of crystal-bright unnerving desolation. And there are some rather sweet and silly moments. All of this, mixed up but somehow cohering, is what makes Jodorowsky.

Stephen Thomson

Format: Cinema

Screening at: BFI Southbank

Date: 5-14 April 2007

Also available on DVD

Release date: 14 May 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cast Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horí¡cio Salinas, Zamira Saunders, Juan Ferrara

Mexico/USA 1973

105 minutes

After years of disappointing transfers which drained the original print of colour and used optical fuzzing to cover over the film’s frequent recourse to nudity, Jodorowsky’s legendary third feature gets a UK DVD release and we can finally experience, albeit on the small screen, the glory of his first foray into cinemascope. The legend itself is well known – John Lennon and Yoko Ono liked El Topo so much they stumped up the money for The Holy Mountain which at $1,500,000 made it the most expensive Mexican production to date. Allen Klein, the Beatles manager, produced though he refused to relinquish legal rights to the film hoping to profit financially from its re-release in the eventuality of the director’s death. Jodorowsky and Klein have since made up however, and a restored print was shown (along with El Topo) at Cannes in May 2006.

Many reviewers of The Holy Mountain have thrown up their hands in dismay at its lack of unified narrative but this is merely indicative of an end-obsessed culture with an infantile craving for punishment and reward served up for years by an impoverished cinematic diet of suspense and delay. I remember the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage explaining this was one reason he dispensed with his camera altogether and began making films just by manipulating the film stock and running it through the projector. And anyway there is narrative in The Holy Mountain if you want it and plenty of it if you really do want it that badly. Its prologue (also the title sequence) might have caused some of this anxiety. In it a black-clad figure, possibly a High Priest, ritually washes and shaves the heads of two blonde women over the soundtrack of chanting Tibetan monks. This ‘scene’ however is broken into by a series of static abstract arrangements of arcane imagery (eyeballs, peacock feathers, pearls, a snake, a Magritte-like vignette of recumbent statues above a cocooned butterfly) much of it in a striking palette of blues and greens. What to do with all this? The bringing together of a pearl and an eye reminds us of Ariel’s speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘Those were pearls that were his eyes’ says the spirit of Ferdinand’s drowned father; ‘Of his bones are coral made…/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange.’ I can think of no two better words than ‘rich’ and ‘strange’ to describe much of The Holy Mountain, which like the drowned man is also about the magic of transformation. In effect the prologue offers up a series of images through which we are invited to view the rest of the film and thematically metamorphosis is a central preoccupation of much that follows.

The main narrative concerns a figure whom we later learn to be a thief. We first encounter him lying unconscious on a dusty road, his face obscured by flies. Brought round by a limbless dwarf (a recurrent trope in Jodorowsky’s films) he undergoes a journey through an unnamed South American city where his physical resemblance to Christ causes him to be subjected by various unscrupulous parties to well-known scenes from the gospels and to which he initially succumbs. One of these is his own crucifixion by a group of naked pre-pubescent boys though it’s typical of Jodorowsky to have his journey begin with this event (thus reversing the Christian myth) and to have him free himself and smoke a fat spliff with the dwarf! After a further series of gruesome trials, including one in which he awakes to find himself surrounded by hundreds of life-sized casts of his crucified form – Christ awakening to the nightmare of history one might say – the thief recognises the corruption of the Church and renounces his collusion in what he realises is essentially nothing more than a theatre of cruelty.

Thus ends what might be called the first section of the film. The thief is subsequently drawn to the lair of an alchemist who impresses him by metamorphosing his shit into gold. Evidently still in thrall to the lure of worldly wealth, the alchemist tells him: ‘You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.’ He then shows him a sequence of grotesque satirical vignettes of the lives of seven other wealth-obsessed industrialists and politicians, all thieves in a different guise – a maker of cosmetics, a weapons manufacturer, an art dealer, a toy maker, an architect, a chief of police and a presidential financial adviser. Each figure points to the industrial-military complex as an illusory impediment to what the alchemist calls ‘the true alchemical work,’ the transformation of the earthly self through spiritual enlightenment. After this presentation (which shows Jodorowsky’s background in theatre – each vignette is a kind of celluloid masque-show) the alchemist summons the figures and together with the thief they all embark as pilgrims on another journey this time to the eponymous Holy Mountain where according to the alchemist they will find the secret of eternal life by seeking out and killing the Nine Masters of the Summit.

This, the third section of the film if you like, shows us the trials and tribulations of their journey as they all seek to cast off their earthly limitations. The journey is one of the overarching structural tropes of The Holy Mountain and in many cultures its physical side is imbued with a rich spiritual dimension. Interviews with Jodorowsky reveal his abiding interest in the latter. His fascination with the Tarot is well known – he even designed his own Tarot pack – and The Holy Mountain is, unsurprisingly, saturated with its esoteric symbology. At the beginning of the film beside the prostrate body of the thief we see two twinned cards of the Major Arcana, The Fool and The Crocodile. Later the Tower makes an appearance which the thief scales to reach the alchemist. The alchemist is himself an avatar of The Magician.

Knowledge of the meaning of this complex symbology is not however strictly necessary for the uninitiated (like myself) coming to The Holy Mountain. I’d argue that Jodorowsky’s placing of the image of a golden Key towards the end of the prologue is a provocation for us to see its arcane imagery as unlocking some obscure meaning at the heart of the film. Besides, Jodorowsky is as concerned with immediate historical and political context as he is with any ‘timeless’ spirituality. The city the thief wanders through at the beginning of the film is swarming with uniformed militia, reminders of South America’s turbulent colonial and post-colonial history. They parade the streets holding aloft standards bearing flayed animal carcasses. Scenes of physical violence are insanely photographed by tourists including a husband who gleefully films his wife as she is raped by a soldier. This is not simply a broad satire of the madness of consumption but also evidence of a mind acutely attuned to the erotics of power. One of the most memorable scenes is a chameleon and toad circus which depicts the Conquest of Mexico. Filmed in close-up, it’s a glorious orgy of amphibian slow motion with toads (the invading Spanish) dressed in monk’s cowls and armour clambering over gaudily dressed chameleons (the Aztecs) before the whole set (a scale model of an Aztec city complete with ziggurats) is blown to bits, all played out to a Nazi marching tune.

Part of the appeal of this scene – and part of its sophistication – is the slippage between what is played out before our eyes and what we hear. There’s no need for ‘comment’ on what’s happening as two historical eras are brought together and it ‘works’ through disjunction. It’s what the Russian Formalists called ostrananie or ‘making strange.’ It’s a concept Jodorowsky would have found as a theatre student from his reading of Brecht and Artaud and it’s a much used device throughout The Holy Mountain. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the film’s handling of violence. Rather than attempt to portray it naturalistically (as for instance in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, released four years before The Holy Mountain) Jodorowsky emphasises its strangeness. A group of young protesters are shot and have buckets of blood thrown over them. Another line of protesters are shot and bleed in yellows, blues and greens. A dead man has a length of ribbon drawn from his chest, another a chicken pulled from his stomach. In another scene a woman’s head drips blue, not from a wound but from the metal piping quite visibly attached to her temples. This is all much more surprising – much richer and stranger – than the sublimity Peckinpah was reaching for in his use of slow motion to depict on-screen carnage. It aims not for empathy – what’s the point? – but for understanding.

It is also Jodorowsky’s very evident sense of humour that should warn us not to take the film’s spirituality too seriously. Witness the camp, lederhosen-clad gatekeeper who welcomes the pilgrims to the island of the Holy Mountain – it’s Tiny Tim meets The Sound of Music! Plus the mountain itself looks more like something off a cheap alpine postcard than a possible seat of the Gods. Perhaps it’s also a light-hearted nod to Leni Riefenstahl and Arnold Fanck’s 1926 paean to Aryan health and fitness also called The Holy Mountain. It’s the very end of the film however that reveals Jodorowsky’s tongue is firmly in his cheek. As the pilgrims reach the top of the mountain the alchemist reveals that the Masters of the Summit seated at their magic round table are nothing more than lifeless, hooded manikins at which point he begins to laugh and cocks a snook at everyone. It’s infectious and laughter breaks out amongst all the assembled. He then utters the following which is worth quoting in full:

‘I promised you the great secret and I will not disappoint you. Is this the end of our adventure? Nothing has an end. We came in search of the secret of immortality, to be immortal like the Gods and here we are, mortals, more human than ever. If we have not obtained immortality at least we have obtained reality. We began in a fairy tale and we came to life, but is this life reality? No, it is a film. Zoom back camera. We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here prisoners. We shall break the illusion. This is Maja. Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us.’

The camera zooms out accordingly to reveal all the hidden paraphernalia of film – the lights, the sound boom, the crew. It’s the world of Fellini’s 8 1/2.

However it’s also the world of the theatre again. The alchemist’s words echo the magician Prospero at the end of The Tempest as he breaks the spell that has kept the audience confined in a magical state of suspended disbelief for the duration of the play. Just as Prospero breaks his staff and casts his magic book into the sea, the alchemist overturns the Summit Masters’ round table. It’s just a prop. What we are brought back to at the end is that we have been watching a film and in this film about the dangers of illusion we must remember that what we are seeing is also an illusion. The alchemist has of course been played all along by Jodorowsky himself. He’s the director as alchemist and magician and thinking back to his initial meeting with the thief, turning shit into gold is also what the film-maker does. It’s a metaphor for many aspects of the cinema (certainly for the industry as Hollywood sees it) and a reminder that film-making is about chemical transformation. However it’s also about transforming the viewer who leaves the cinema a changed person and the end of the film is the signal for the audience to carry on its work in the world outside of the theatre. This new DVD release will enable a new generation of viewers to take it up again, as rich and strange as it was over a quarter of a century ago.

Jeff Hilson

Format: Cinema

Screening at: BFI Southbank

Date: 6-10 April 2007

Also available on DVD as part of the Jodorowsky Box Set

Release date: 14 May 2007

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Based on the play by: Fernando Arrabal

Cast Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal

Mexico 1968

95 minutes

Maker of fabulous worlds, Alejandro Jodorowsky is himself a wondrous, many-tentacled, creature. Born in Chile of Russian Jewish parents, he first moved to Mexico and later to France. Best known as a film-maker, he has also worked as a circus clown, stage actor, mime artist, puppeteer, author, avant-garde theatre director, graphic novelist, Tarot reader and psycho-shaman… Belonging nowhere, unfettered by the constraints of any one art form, Jodorowksy has been free to let the wildest visions sprout out of his extravagant imagination for the last forty years, distilling visceral images, provocative spirituality and lashings of abrasive humour into a head-turning bootleg firewater.

Greatly influenced by Surrealism, Jodorowsky travelled to Paris to meet André Breton in 1953 and was a fervent reader of one-time Surrealist author Antonin Artaud – one of many artists expelled from the movement by the narrow-minded, doctrinaire Breton. Artaud’s revolutionary manifesto ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’ provided the foundation for Jodorowsky’s conception of his own art. Believing that theatre had lost its emotional power, Artaud called for a violently expressive, physical theatre that would ‘restore an impassioned convulsive concept of life to theatre’. Rejecting the traditional reliance on the written text, the Theatre of Cruelty would use movement, gesture, shouts, rhythmical pounding, puppets and masks in order to transmit meaning through an urgent physicality. Shows would be like ‘exorcisms’, aiming to revive the magic, ritualistic function of theatre. Artaud’s radical views and anarchic spirit permeate all of Jodorowsky’s films, and nowhere is this clearer than in Fando & Lis.

In 1962 Jodorowsky founded the Mouvement Panique with Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal and French artist Roland Topor (author of the novel that inspired Roman Polanski’s The Tenant). The official Jodorowsky website explains that the name was chosen ‘in allusion to the god Pan, who manifests himself through three basic elements: terror, humour and simultaneity’. An anti-movement rather than a movement according to Arrabal, it brought together a bunch of contrary, irreverent individuals who embraced chaos and excess, intuition and the irrational, savage sexuality and dissent as a way of life. Billed as a Panic film, Jodorowsky’s first feature Fando & Lis was a loose adaptation of a play by Arrabal, which Jodorowsky had directed in Paris. True to Artaud’s precepts, Jodorowsky based the film solely on his recollection of the play in order to avoid following the text too closely. It premiered at the Acapulco Film Festival in 1968, soon after the massacre of peaceful demonstrators by the police in Mexico City. In the resulting tense climate, the blasphemous provocations of Fando & Lis proved too much for the audience and a riot broke out in the auditorium, forcing Jodorowsky to flee the theatre. The film was subsequently banned in Mexico.

Forty years later Fando & Lis is still as inflammatory as cinema can get. It’s a scream, a punch in the guts, an eye-gouging journey through what looks like nothing less than the lowest circles of Dante’s Inferno. On a quest to find the mythical paradisiacal city of Tar, the splenetic Fando pushes his paralysed lover Lis on a four-wheel cart through a hellish world of derelict towns and barren mountains peopled by decomposing corpses, mad priests and drag queens. Bodies writhe in mud before standing up, as if emerging from the primal matter, staring at Fando and Lis like dead-eyed zombies. Jarring sounds add to the disquieting images: buzzing flies convey the stench of the rotting corpses, percussive instruments beat as loud as a panicked heart. Going round and round in the wasteland, the lovers are unable to find a way out of their nightmares, mere puppets whose strings are pulled by a cruel god-like puppeteer not unlike the one played by Jodorowsky himself in a scene from Lis’ past.

On their way to Tar, Fando and Lis come across a group of sophisticated ladies and gents drinking cocktails and playing jazz amid the rubble of a razed town. While the dapper men mock Lis’ infirmity the ladies take Fando as their sexual play thing and thoroughly humiliate him. Later a mob of towering, sullen women armed with watermelons play bowling with Fando as the pin. A crowd of sinister worshippers gather around Lis’ coffin and cut off pieces of her flesh, which they consume in a blasphemous parody of the Catholic host. A herd of drag queens carry a protesting Fando away and dress him up as a woman. Jodorowsky’s world is full of predatory packs of people that mass around exceptional individuals, wanting a piece of them – literally in Lis’ case – demanding miracles, expecting to be fulfilled or enlightened. Animal noises – or the sound of clicking scissors in the coffin scene – heighten the sense of menace. Idolisation doesn’t go without aggression and the parody of the Catholic ritual is not vacuous provocation but the revelation of its disturbing nature: what the host truly is about is nothing less than the cannibalistic consumption of the saint/saviour/master’s body to partake of its god-like quality. But while the character of Lis already announces Jodorowsky’s later preoccupations with the messianic individual in El Topo and The Holy Mountain, here the threatening gangs want less a guru than a sexual toy, an object they can play with, possess and destroy.

As in El Topo and Santa Sangre Freudian neuroses are played out in grandiloquent, baroque excess. In the desolate mountains Fando is force-fed by his dying mother, a formidable figure who is more drag queen diva than homely matriarch. Elsewhere he is assaulted by lewd, toothless old hags, one of which crushes peaches in her hands when he refuses her sexual advances. Terrorized by mother-like figures, Fando takes it out on the helpless Lis. As passive as a doll she gets dragged this way and that way, positioned and played with according to his whims. In a scene that echoes the violence to which she is subjected a man cuts an obscene hole into a doll before placing a snake inside. Misogynistic, Jodorowsky? Most definitely, at least here: in Fando Y Lis women are either castrating old witches or whimpering, impotent victims. But what makes it bearable is that Fando himself is a rather pathetic example of the male species. Traumatized by an overbearing mother, humiliated by the cocktail ladies, femininized by the drag queens, he is screwed-up, confused, insecure and as whiny and needy as Lis is.

Fando and Lis are a deviant, perverted version of the classic lovers. They can’t live without each other, so much so that Fando ends up handcuffing Lis and chaining her to the cart. They love each other until death parts them, that is… well, you’ll have to see what happens – needless to say it’s brutal and ferocious. ‘And when I wanted to separate myself from her I realised we formed one body with two heads’, reads the title of part 4. In Fando Y Lis love is a monstrous two-headed creature, a grotesque body formed by two needy, incomplete people, incapable of living apart but resenting the confines of this unnatural togetherness and wanting to strike out at their conjoined twin. In later Jodorowsky films the freakish nature of people’s dependency on each other will become literal: in Santa Sangre a son unites his body to that of his armless mother to become a glamorous mime artist while in El Topo a legless man on the back of an armless man makes one fully functioning sidekick.

Ultimately it is its Dionysiac quality that makes Fando Y Lis such a compelling experience: the sensory assault of the film, the savage violence it depicts, the sardonic bursts of hilarity are all an unleashing of primal instincts, a celebration of destructive excess, a cathartic release of explosive energy. Ignore all descriptions of Jodorowsky’s work as psychedelic ‘head trip’. There is no druggy vagueness here but a crap-cutting, exhilarating viciousness that makes the film timeless. Jodorowsky has been unfavourably compared to Luis Buí±uel and yet (oh sacrilege!) the latter’s much admired half-polite satires of the bourgeoisie are nowhere near as vital or violently surreal as Jodorowsky’s imaginings. And it is probably because of his supreme disrespect for any kind of facile world view – any political, religious or plain sentimental simplification of the world – that Jodorowsky has been made to linger in the cult ghetto while less radical artists were given full honours. Forty years later Fando Y Lis remains a triumph of lacerating audacity, a hysterical tale of fucked-up revolt that still pulses with dark life now. Conjuring dangerously potent visions, Jodorowsky throws you head first into the bottomless pit of grotesque pain that is life and makes you laugh all the way like a hyena. Enjoy.

Virginie Sélavy