Post by the Scribe on Jul 25, 2020 9:24:49 GMT
El Topo: The weirdest western ever made
By Larushka Ivan-Zadeh
23rd July 2020
El Topo was the original ‘midnight movie’, and inspired the sub-genre of the ‘acid western’, writes Larushka Ivan-Zadeh.
New York, 1971. It’s somewhere around 1am and John Lennon is sitting with Yoko Ono at The Elgin Theatre on Eighth Avenue, about to watch El Topo for the third time. The cinema is packed; lines snake around the block. The original ‘midnight movie’ has been selling out seven days a week for months, thanks to devotees rewatching it an average of 11 times. One girl has seen it 21 times. It’s the trippiest ticket in town.
A thick cloud of marijuana smoke obscures the screen, on which Lennon watches, or rather, experiences, some of the most bizarre images yet committed to celluloid. A horseman in black, a naked little boy clinging to his back, rides across a desert to ritualistically bury a teddy bear. A man with no arms carries a man with no legs towards nirvana. A mystic stands encircled by dead white rabbits. A grizzled cowboy ecstatically sniffs a pink high-heeled shoe.
More like this:
- The most outrageous film ever made?
www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200623-pink-flamingos-the-most-outrageous-film-ever-made
- The classic that’s saved lives
www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200618-the-rocky-horror-picture-show-the-film-thats-saved-lives
- The film that exposed our misogynistic culture
www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200714-how-showgirls-told-the-truth-about-americas-foul-misogyny
“I wanted to do an image that a person will never forget in his life,” El Topo’s director Alejandro Jodorowsky later explained. “To create mental change. To reach a state of enlightenment. This is LSD without LSD.”
Jodorowsky worked as a clown before studying mime in Paris, joining the troupe of Marcel Marceau (Credit: Alamy)
Jodorowsky worked as a clown before studying mime in Paris, joining the troupe of Marcel Marceau (Credit: Alamy)
The movie, to use the parlance of the era, blew John Lennon’s mind, as it would those of other revolutionary visionaries to follow for decades, from Bob Dylan and David Lynch to Erykah Badu, Roger Waters, The Mars Volta, Nicolas Winding Refn and Kanye West (of whom more later). “I was so lucky, because Yoko Ono was a conceptual artist and they were very interested in intellectual and spiritual things,” Jodorowsky recalled, when I interviewed him for the 2007 DVD release of El Topo. “John Lennon told his manager [Allen Klein] to give me $1m to do whatever I would like to create next.” Lennon also persuaded Klein, then head of Apple Records, to buy up the distribution rights to El Topo.
more www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200723-el-topo-the-weirdest-western-ever-made
By Larushka Ivan-Zadeh
23rd July 2020
El Topo was the original ‘midnight movie’, and inspired the sub-genre of the ‘acid western’, writes Larushka Ivan-Zadeh.
New York, 1971. It’s somewhere around 1am and John Lennon is sitting with Yoko Ono at The Elgin Theatre on Eighth Avenue, about to watch El Topo for the third time. The cinema is packed; lines snake around the block. The original ‘midnight movie’ has been selling out seven days a week for months, thanks to devotees rewatching it an average of 11 times. One girl has seen it 21 times. It’s the trippiest ticket in town.
A thick cloud of marijuana smoke obscures the screen, on which Lennon watches, or rather, experiences, some of the most bizarre images yet committed to celluloid. A horseman in black, a naked little boy clinging to his back, rides across a desert to ritualistically bury a teddy bear. A man with no arms carries a man with no legs towards nirvana. A mystic stands encircled by dead white rabbits. A grizzled cowboy ecstatically sniffs a pink high-heeled shoe.
More like this:
- The most outrageous film ever made?
www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200623-pink-flamingos-the-most-outrageous-film-ever-made
- The classic that’s saved lives
www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200618-the-rocky-horror-picture-show-the-film-thats-saved-lives
- The film that exposed our misogynistic culture
www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200714-how-showgirls-told-the-truth-about-americas-foul-misogyny
“I wanted to do an image that a person will never forget in his life,” El Topo’s director Alejandro Jodorowsky later explained. “To create mental change. To reach a state of enlightenment. This is LSD without LSD.”
Jodorowsky worked as a clown before studying mime in Paris, joining the troupe of Marcel Marceau (Credit: Alamy)
Jodorowsky worked as a clown before studying mime in Paris, joining the troupe of Marcel Marceau (Credit: Alamy)
The movie, to use the parlance of the era, blew John Lennon’s mind, as it would those of other revolutionary visionaries to follow for decades, from Bob Dylan and David Lynch to Erykah Badu, Roger Waters, The Mars Volta, Nicolas Winding Refn and Kanye West (of whom more later). “I was so lucky, because Yoko Ono was a conceptual artist and they were very interested in intellectual and spiritual things,” Jodorowsky recalled, when I interviewed him for the 2007 DVD release of El Topo. “John Lennon told his manager [Allen Klein] to give me $1m to do whatever I would like to create next.” Lennon also persuaded Klein, then head of Apple Records, to buy up the distribution rights to El Topo.
more www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200723-el-topo-the-weirdest-western-ever-made