![]() Known only as ‘El Topo’ (‘the mole’), he is an enigmatic, leather-clad gunslinger who travels the plains with his naked seven-year-old-son (Jodorowsky’s own son, Brontis). Hurt, its director declared: “The next picture I make will be a cowboy picture – then everyone will come and see it.” El Topo was that movie.Ī bloody spaghetti western, heavily infused with Eastern spiritualism, it centres on a hero (played by Jodorowsky himself), who is the western genre’s archetypal ‘man in black’. It incited riots on release in 1968, was banned in Mexico and was shown for just three days in South America. His debut feature, Fando Y Lis (1968), was a post-apocalyptic romance between the mysterious Fando and his paraplegic girlfriend, Lis. Casting Salvador Dalí as a galactic emperor for an eyewatering fee didn’t help – an entire documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), was made about the film that never was.Įl Topo, by comparison, remains Jodorowsky’s most accessible work. Following The Holy Mountain, he was next approached to direct Dune, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel, and managed to spend the entire production budget before the film (which he conceived as at least 14 hours long) even started shooting. Thence onwards Jodorowsky, now a sprightly 91-year-old (he insists he’ll live to see 120), became far more famous for the films of his you couldn’t see. He withdrew all of Jodorowsky’s existing films from release for over three decades – thus, ironically, stoking demand for them as fans enshrined them as cult underground classics. But when Klein demanded that he next adapt The Story Of O, the notorious French BDSM novella, and Jodorowsky refused, reportedly on grounds of ‘sexism’, Klein took revenge. The Chilean auteur used the investment to make The Holy Mountain, his 1973 psychedelic masterpiece that was at one point going to star George Harrison, until – claims Jodorowsky – Harrison balked at a request to bare his anus to the camera whilst frolicking in a fountain with a live hippopotamus. Lennon’s patronage, or rather, Klein’s enforcement of it, was to make and break Jodorowsky’s career. “John Lennon told his manager to give me $1m to do whatever I would like to create next.” Lennon also persuaded Klein, then head of Apple Records, to buy up the distribution rights to El Topo. “I was so lucky, because Yoko Ono was a conceptual artist and they were very interested in intellectual and spiritual things,” Jodorowsky recalled, when I interviewed him for the 2007 DVD release of El Topo. The movie, to use the parlance of the era, blew John Lennon’s mind, as it would those of other revolutionary visionaries to follow for decades, from Bob Dylan and David Lynch to Erykah Badu, Roger Waters, The Mars Volta, Nicolas Winding Refn and Kanye West (of whom more later). ![]() ![]() “I wanted to do an image that a person will never forget in his life,” El Topo’s director Alejandro Jodorowsky later explained. The film that exposed our misogynistic culture ![]() A grizzled cowboy ecstatically sniffs a pink high-heeled shoe. A mystic stands encircled by dead white rabbits. A man with no arms carries a man with no legs towards nirvana. A horseman in black, a naked little boy clinging to his back, rides across a desert to ritualistically bury a teddy bear. It’s the trippiest ticket in town.Ī thick cloud of marijuana smoke obscures the screen, on which Lennon watches, or rather, experiences, some of the most bizarre images yet committed to celluloid. The original ‘midnight movie’ has been selling out seven days a week for months, thanks to devotees rewatching it an average of 11 times. The cinema is packed lines snake around the block. ![]() It’s somewhere around 1am and John Lennon is sitting with Yoko Ono at The Elgin Theatre on Eighth Avenue, about to watch El Topo for the third time. ![]()
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