In one of the first widely read reviews of El Topo, New York Times critic Vincent Canby complained with a mix of disgust and awe that, “Inventorying [the film] is like sorting out the contents of a turkey buzzard's stomach: There is very little that's not there, but nothing much has been digested… The movie has no life of its own. Jodorowsky is not interesting or inventive enough as a filmmaker to restructure reality…He could be the William Randolph Hearst of the movie intellect and El Topo his rather grotesque, ego-salving San Simeon.” Canby went on to relegate much of El Topo’s success to its mere countercultural alterity, hazarding a flimsy comparison to the contemporary popularity of the bourgeois disaster film Airport (1970) and citing its pantheism of symbols as a dubious project of conversion rather than creation. As he observed, “I was about equally torn between my wonder at the uncritical reverence with which the Elgin audience received the film and my impulse to say something loud and rude.” It appeared that the priestly position of the critic had been usurped by the prophetic image of El Topo.

For all of his stodgy lamentations, Canby discerned how important the “event of viewership,” or what might be called an “imagined community” – to borrow Benedict Anderson’s titular concept – was to El Topo’s critical reception. If Jodorowsky’s metaphysical western provided some kind of underground binding for the dispossessed youth and counterculture movements, then its transgression was pronounced through the event of its screening and the art-house became both the scene of conversion and the crime. The images of blood, beheading and transmutation that festooned the film had a significance that was seen to be both timely and timeless – both documentary and Biblical parable. This nexus of ideology and violence, El Topo’s screen of the crime, became increasingly important as the film spread rhizomatically through the ad hoc circuits of midnight festivals during the 70s, absorbing a larger and larger audience though never expanding beyond the event of the screening itself; never admitting advertising infrastructure; never risking any mass awareness or larger public discourse. Because it rarely rose beyond its original midnight time-slot and provided few of the cheap, distracting thrills of the classic Roger Corman-style B movie, it was adjudicated by legitimate critics as an unscrupulous crime of the night to be exiled at all costs. The comparison to the titular character is evident; according to Jodorowsky, the mole spends its life burrowing tunnels upward toward the sun, and when he sees it he is often blinded. In much the same way, El Topo refused to ascend to the surface or suffer the diurnal transparency required for its canonization.

The artist behind this abominable creation, Jodorowky, was a figure of ambiguity in his own right or rite. Chilean by birth and often residing in Mexico, he only began his career in earnest after emigrating to Paris in the 1950s. There and then, he encountered the moribund remnants of the Surrealist movement – including a rather abrupt introduction to Andre Breton. His work in experimental theater, puppetry and pantomime on both continents consumed him for over a decade before he chose to pick up a movie camera. When his first feature-length film Fando y Lis debuted in Acapulco in 1968, a riot ensued. Most Mexican critics found the film to be unintelligible and blasphemous. A dozen years later, the Mexican government refused to sanction El Topo’s release at the Cannes Film Festival because of its perceived anti-Catholic message. Like other cinematic prophets before him – Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov and Pier Paolo Pasolini come to mind – Jodorowsky had a tendency toward “vulgar” messianism that would often subject him to the political disenfranchisement of Homo sacer. El Topo, has, in many ways, become a symbol of his artistic crucifixion.

But this was certainly not a deliberate tactic used by Jodorowsky to ensure his own martyrdom. Much of what kept El Topo from the cinema-going world’s attention stemmed from a badly brokered business deal between the director and American financier and ABKCO founder Allen Klein. According to popular lore, it was during the film’s earliest run at the Elgin Theatre that John Lennon, marveling at what he had just witnessed, enthusiastically recommended it to Klein. Likely sussing a profitable investment from the strong word-of-mouth, Klein purchased the rights to El Topo and bankrolled the follow-up The Holy Mountain (1973), only to withdraw both films when Jodorowsky refused to direct an adaptation of Pauline Reage’s The Story of O. After the falling-out, Klein refused to budge on his executive decision, and a movie that might have bested Easy Rider (1969) and The Wild Bunch (1969) as the definitive statement of post-‘60s brutality became, instead, a historiographic oddity.

But in time this very resistance to the marketing and distribution of film and videotape and its eternal “bootleg-as-other” status became a performative component of the film-as-object. While most other legends of the midnight movie set – Night of the Living Dead (1968), Eraserhead (1977), and Suspiria (1977), to name but a few – would easily transition into mass market exposure through the advent of VHS and the video boom of the '80s, El Topo remained only available in illegal pirated copies and special screen retrospectives. That is, until 2004, when Klein and Jodorowsky settled their differences and began plans to present the first authorized release of El Topo in over thirty-five years. The mole, it seemed, finally treaded upon the earth’s surface.

Fortunately, the DVD has not seemed to diminish the orgiastic desire to experience El Topo in its intended space – the darkened theatre. The film began making its rounds again in the UK last April at the Southbank IFC, and its screening at the SFMOMA only reconfirms that the religiosity of El Topo demands 35MM theatrical presentation.

EL TOPO
Thurs/6, 6:30 p.m.; Sat/8, 3 p.m.; $5 (free for SFMOMA members or with museum admission)
Phyllis Wattis Theater
SFMOMA
151 Third St., SF
(415) 357-4000
www.sfmoma.org