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His is hardly a household name, but the influence of
Alejandro Jodorowsky goes beyond name recognition. His best-known film is El Topo (1970), which
translates to The Mole, a cult classic that created the midnight-movie phenomenon of
the 1970s. He was the world’s premier director of weird cinema before
David Lynch stole his thunder. El Topo — along with two of his other films, Fando and Lis (1968) and The Holy Mountain (1973)
— has finally received a proper DVD release.
Born in Chile, Jodorowsky emigrated to Mexico, where
he shot most of his films. His debut feature, Fando
and Lis, follows a troubled young man and his
paraplegic girlfriend as they search for the fabled city of Tar. The
journey, rather than the destination, is the dominant feature; the pair
encounters an array of demented characters in a search that never seems to
go anywhere. Some of the imagery is mildly disturbing, but it hardly
justifies the riot the film caused at the Acapulco Film Festival. The DVD
includes the documentary The Jodorowsky
Constellation (1994), which manages to
say almost nothing about his films.
El Topo is a mystical
Mexican Western in which the title character (played by Jodorowsky) roams a
landscape of sex and violence. He stumbles upon a massacred village and
becomes an avenging angel. El Topo was apparently too strange for normal distribution
methods, and its alternative midnight showing struck a nerve in the
counterculture. Mainstream audiences would be baffled and infuriated by its
ambiguities, but fans of the weird immediately embraced it as a cult
classic. Jodorowsky attempted to repeat the formula with The Holy Mountain. He struck further
into bizarre terrain, leaving all sense behind. Any meaning is lost in its
overreliance of grotesque images. Barely noticed at the time of its
release, it is now building a cult following because of spillover from El Topo.
Santa Sangre (1989) is
not part of this new set, but it is Jodorowsky’s greatest film. Here
he succeeded in fusing his bizarre extravagances with a coherent narrative.
A young boy is traumatized by a horrible tragedy involving his parents.
Years later he escapes from a mental hospital to aid his armless mother in
a killing spree. Santa Sangre, a modern classic, is actually much stranger than that
brief plotline suggests. Thanks to DVD, Jodorowsky is finally being
rediscovered as he deserves.
New on DVD this Tuesday (June 5): Norbit and The Messengers.
New on DVD this Tuesday (June 5): Norbit and The Messengers.
