MYOFNF #10: El Topo (dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

This film isn't so much a part of the world cinema canon of greatness, but it is one of the very first "cult" movies, and it's in Spanish, and it's crazy as hell, so I thougt I'd check it out. I'm glad I did. It's the story of a wandering gunslinger in a mystical Old West whose search for meaning leads him to gunfights with shamen and cohabitation with underground mutants.The phrase "they don't make up like they used to" seems intensely appropriate. Every frame pulses with the revolutionary thrust of the late-sixties counterculture. The only person making movies this defiantly abstract is David Lynch, but El Topo has a nakedly earnest philosophical agenda that Lynch, with his willful obscurism, would never display. I don't think anyone could make a film like El Topo today without being mocked into oblivion. Writer-director-star Alejandro Jodorowsky takes notions of spiritual corruption and rebirth, social injustice and redemption, far too seriously for the current climate of ironic detachtment and gentle ennui. Movies nowadays start from the premise that grand cosmic enlightenment is beyond our understanding, and all an artist can do is record the sad foibles of us terminally blinkered humaniods. The only exception that comes to mind is Darron Aronosfsky, whose Jadorowsky-reminiscent 2006 film The Fountain was, in fact, mocked into oblivion. I haven't seen that one yet, or Jadorowsky's follow up to El Topo, The Holy Mountain, but the startingly visual power, potent allegory and, most of all, the sheer uninhibited audacity of the thing has made me eager to check them out. There's something exhilerating about watching a director open his heart and let out a primal scream of existential yearning, with no regard at all for the snickering of the hipsters at the cool kids table.