By Erik Morse
After its belated 2007 release in a highly anticipated DVD box set, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 midnight masterpiece El Topo – which translates to “The Mole” – will revisit the big screen on March 6 and 8 as a part of SFMOMA’s “Non-Western Westerns” film series.
El Topo has been touted as nothing less than the Philosopher’s Stone of film by certain cineastes, as well as by ars gratia artis anarchists and alchemy students. Much of El Topo‘s religious potency has been connected to the shared, orphic experience found in cheap art-houses and midnight festivals, where the elicit jouissance of its viewing came as a secret cinematic samizdat. Upon the film’s New York debut at Ben Barenholtz’s Elgin Theatre, its philosophical and cultural prescience – between the subterranean art of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol and the apocalyptic violence of Altamont and the Manson murders – secured it a place within the cleaving of two seminal but divergent decades. Although Jodorowsky seemed more entwined with the elder studies of Antonin Artaud and spectral mysticism, his work spoke to the ever-expanding archive of bestiality and immolation that was part of a new postmodern and post-war language.