El Topo Turns 50: Looking Back on Jodorowsky’s Surrealist First Film

The general, mainstream film landscape is a relatively safe place. Even with COVID ravaging theaters, audiences are still being fed sequels, straightforward adaptations, and an ever-growing mountain of superhero movies (themselves being a combination of the two). This draws a parallel to the film world of the 60s. While Italy and Japan were starting their heyday of raucous fun with films like Django and the Zatoichi series, American audiences were trapped in a state of properness with its top grosses taken up by the likes of My Fair Lady, The Bible: In the Beginning, and Cleopatra. Not that these classics are not just that, classics, but these films were released in the era of the civil rights movement. The era of the women’s movement. The era of anti-Vietnam War. This was a time of social upheaval, fighting tooth and nail for human rights, and there weren’t necessarily films to reflect the brutal, violent world that people lived in, let alone films to truly challenge what can even be considered a film. That is, not until 1970 and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s directorial debut, the first midnight movie: El Topo. 

El Topo is a surreal, terribly bloody affair with Jodorowsky’s famous love-it-or-hate-it storytelling. Simultaneously a challenge of the cleanliness of westerns and a startling recreation of the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, El Topo follows a black-clad gunman, portrayed by Jodorowsky himself, on his brutal journey through the desert. Dense with both violence and biblical allegory, the film is just as tough of a watch in 2020 as it was in 1970, and one can see how crowds upon crowds were drawn to the notorious film when it had its New York premiere. 

Picture in your mind’s eye: you are a college-aged student in 1970 and the most challenging thing you’ve seen is 1967’s The Graduate. You hear through the grapevine that this theater in New York is playing this insane movie filled with incredibly violent imagery about a gunman and his child traveling the desert, and it only plays at midnight or 1 a.m. on weekends. This is what garnered the first major film cult following in history and birthed the midnight movie: the exclusivity and the ambiguousness. Were you bold enough to make the perilous trek to find and see El Topo? Were you one of the ones who “got it?” Even celebrities fell in with the cult of El Topo. One of highest note being John Lennon, who after seeing the film told his manager “to give [Jodorowsky] $1,000,000 to do whatever [he] would like to create next.” Jodorowsky would use this money to create his now-legendary, denser, even more surreal The Holy Mountain, which has a massive cult following of its own.

The man to thank for this notoriety is legendary film distributor, Ben Barenholtz. Barenholtz saw an early screening of what audiences began calling the “acid western” at the Museum of Modern Art and was engulfed with a fascination for the film. As soon as he saw it, he asked if he could start screenings at the legendary Elgin Theater in New York (now known as the Joyce Theater), and the cult following exploded. 

“By the end of the first week, we were selling out every seat in the theater, 600 seats, every night and it lasted over a year.” Barenholtz said to The New York Times years after the legendary opening run.

The impact of El Topo on media after it can’t be understated. Creators throughout history, from fellow surrealist filmmakers like David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn to musicians like Frank Ocean and Kanye West, have drawn inspiration from the film. West was so influenced that his “Yeezus” tour was littered with direct references to The Holy Mountain, and he even arranged a meeting between himself and the filmmaker in Cannes France in 2014. 

This isn’t saying the film is necessarily inviting. El Topo will confront most of what you would normally expect from a movie, much less a western. Events happen out of nowhere throughout the film, and long stretches of wordless, confounding storytelling and often-baffling surreal imagery combine to give the viewer quite the opposite of a casual watch, reinforcing the love-it-or-hate-it air that has surrounded the movie for 50 years and will for 50 more. Half a century later, El Topo still guarantees to challenge and inspire artists to create exactly what they want.