The Jodorowsky Collection

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Film Description

A collection of three films from visionary director Alejandro Jodorowsky, the man who said that he 'asks of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs'. In El Topo (1970), gunfighter El Topo ('The Mole') and his young son ride through a desert to a village, whose inhabitants have been massacred. Bandits are nearby, torturing and killing the survivors. El Topo rescues a woman, who leads him on a mission to find and defeat the four master gunmen of the desert. "See the naked young Franciscans whipped with cactus. See the bandit leader disembowelled. See the priest ride into the sunset with a midget and her newborn baby. What it all means isn't exactly clear, but you won't forget it."

The Holy Mountain (1973) is Jodorowsky's surreal, hallucinatory, mystical movie in which a Christ-like figure wanders through bizarre, grotesque scenarios filled with religious and sacrilegious imageryand, while in Fando & Lis (1968), Fando and his partially paralyzed lover Lis search for the mythical city of Tar. Based on Jodorowsky's memories of a play by surrealist Fernando Arrabal.

Film Information

DVD Extras

6 discs; La Constellation Jodorowsky - 90 minute documentary by Louis Mouchet; El Topo & The Holy Mountain Soundtrack CDs.

Technical Details

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5 Stills

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Review by Mark Goodall on 16th April 2007

I ask of film what hippies ask of drugs" the visionary film director Alejandro Jodorowsky once remarked, and his first three features are certainly the nearest thing to a trip the cinema has ever produced. Jodorowsky's exotic biography (born in Chile of Russian and Argentinean parents, he has worked in Mexico, France and America) and egotistical persona make him the ultimate auteur.
His first feature, Fando and Lis (1968), adapted from an absurdist play by Fernando Arrabal, expresses Jodorowsky's central motif: the spiritual quest of innocents in a sadistic universe. The journey of the lovers is told in a sequence of vivid episodes that are often cruel and grotesque but also at times tender. Abrupt edits and beautiful monochrome surrealism render it a quintessential sixties art film.
El Topo (1971) is Jodorowsky's most famous work, inspiring John Lennon to fund the director through Apple Corps. Here a leather-clad outlaw (Jodorowsky himself) embarks on a labyrinthine Zen-like trek, gradually shedding his 'culture' for a state of minimalist purity. El Topo is a Jungian spaghetti western, shot in the surrealist paradise of Mexico on the abandoned sets of American westerns by Sam Peckinpah's Wild Bunch crew. The poetic, trance-like qualities of the images, enhanced when stoned (something which Jodorowsky approved of), made it the first 'midnight movie'.
In Holy Mountain (1973), with its perverted quest by a Christ-like figure, Jodorowsky's obsessions with the symbolism of Zen, Taoism, Sufism, Catholicism, Tarot and the occult, and the writings of Nietzsche and Borges all come to a head with the art of Dalí, Breugel and Bosch. Mangled visions of violent counter-cultural activity fuse with op art, pop art and excessive Fellini-esque tableaux in a kaleidoscope of alcehmical happenings.
Jodorowsky's surreal cinematic universe is unique – few films can boast a gory battle between rival armies of toads; the films’ music, sometimes composed by the director, is also astonishing, combining sultry jazz, quiet folk, psychedelic rock and Latin pipes with abstract electronic treatments. The anarchic spirit of Pan, typified by these works, remains – despite time and weak imitations – undimmed.

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Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Surrealism on Film

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