Zero G (1-2pm Mondays on RRR) is Melbourne's premiere pop culture, science fiction, TV, film and everything show. Rob Jan did the following reviews as part of his wrap-up of this year's MIFF. The restored El Topo has its premiere Australian screening tonight at the Forum. Some tickets are still available from the MIFF box office or online here.

-EL TOPO-

(MEXICO)

El Topo ("The Mole") was director Alejandro Jodorowsky's third film.

The infamous Mexican allergorically surreal Eastern/Western is presented at the festival in a very fine new restoration (a bit of a shock for those used to seeing it in its customary raddled grindhouse/cult prints!) along with its natural companion piece, The Holy Mountain.

This comprehensively startling but compelling film begins, not unlike the Lone Wolf And Cub Samurai series, with the black clad, flute playing gunslinger El Topo (played by the director himself) riding across the wastelands in company with a taciturn child companion. After a blood drenched encounter with drunkenly bestial bandits El Topo replaces the boy with a seductively manipulative woman who urges him to become the greatest shootist in the world by seeking out and defeating four master gunfighters.

As with the wuxia martial arts films that this story frequently references the quest for the masters proves dangerous, difficult, baffling and wonderous.

The gunslinger's odyssey to achieve enlightment and mastery is populated with exotic encounters and inventive, symbolically charged imagery. Deflating balloons signal the start of duels, capering outlaws with shoe fetishes rape feminised sand paintings and carve bananas with sabres, civilised townsfolk prove more depraved and debauched than the wasteland bandits, herds of rabbits mysteriously die at El Topo's feet, incestuously deformed trogalytes living in oil drums tunnel to escape their underground prison, and live bullets are caught and deflected by butterfly nets.

This visual melange is supported by Jodorowskys and Nacho Méndezs evocative music which, by turns soothing or jarring, echoes across the many desert based sequences and permeates the locations, which frequently read more like artistic installations than sets grounded in any kind of mundane reality. In fact, there is a timeless anachronistic feel to the desert that makes you question whether this is nominally a period Western or indeed set in some kind of post-apocalyptic Stephen King future.

El Topo is rendered even stranger by its renowned mid-film gear change, one of several enigmatic transformations that can be interpreted as Buddhist inspired reincarnations of the title character.

Just imagine what might have been if Jodorowsky had pulled off his mid-70s adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, with its intended cast of Salvidor Dali as the Emperor, Mick Jagger playing Feyd Rautha and Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen? As it is the Acid Western tradition at least got another outing in Jim Jarmusch's more recent film, Dead Man, which, for all its many remarkable charms, by comparison to El Topo is cast into monochrome shade.

A bizarre chimera even by Zero-G's notoriously unhinged standards El Topo is a cult classic given gloriously grotesque new life by its own recent transfiguring restoration.

Director/Screenwriter Alejandro Jodorowsky 1971/125mins

Sessions
Fri, 03rd of August, 11:15 PM
Forum

-THE HOLY MOUNTAIN-

MEXICO

If you thought Alejandro Jodorowsky's third film, El Topo, was weird...well, no caca Sherlock! Wait until you get a load of this....

His next surreally allegorical outing, 1973's The Holy Mountain, scales even more whackily experimental heights. Like El Topo, The Holy Mountain has also been recently, lovingly restored, all the better to trip out on the eye bulging psychedelic imagery!

Again, as with El Topo, the nominal protagonist is on a messianic quest to achieve enlightment. Even more ironically symbolic in this case since the central thief character bears a strong and exploitable resemblance to the traditional representation of Jesus Christ.

Horácio Salinas plays the hapless thief, leaving Jodorowsky himself the catalytic role of a tower dwelling alchemist who charges him to accompany seven influential but materialistic powerbrokers to Lotus Island where they will achieve eternal life once they have climbed the eponymous Holy Mountain.

Initially the dialogue is thin on the ground but soon ramps up to cheerfully inexplicable levels where a line like "hypersexed brown native vampires" can pass without comment or indeed comprehension.

Politics, art, sexuality, and filmmaking, amongst many other subjects, all cop a satirical hiding in this extraordinary film which relies heavily upon fantasy imagery drawn from tarot cards, astrology and religion.

Just listing a few of the oddball ideas gives you an idea of the unique scope of Jorodowsky's fevered imagination.

Two women are ‘cleansed' of clothing, make-up, jewellery, false nails, and hair by a black robed priest who himself has ebony varnished fingernails. A screaming man lies covered in tarantulas...no big acting stretch there! The Invasion of Mexico is renacted by lizards dressed in Mezoamerican costumes battling frogs wearing Conquistador armour and missionary robes. (I have my doubts about this sequence, it sure looks like the poor frogs are really being blown up by explosives?) A mulitple amputee writes cryptic messages in the dirt with a severed animal leg. Parading prostitutes turn out to be just as holy as priests. Roman soldiers cast the thief in plaster and create a line of life-sized crucifiction merchandise. Art factory paint coated nude backsides stamp out images on a production line while live body painted nudes are built into installations so they can be fondled by gallery patrons. Gas masked soldiers attend dances and machine guns and hand grenades are painted in rainbow colours. Spartan like warriors pursue a cunning plan to emasculate 1000 heroes to create a shrine of 1000 testicles....and nevermind what they did with the other 1000!

Eviscerated victims spill chicken guts....and I mean they literally pull chickens from their wounds' while Liederhosen wearing Teutonics trip on drugs and strongmen are able to turn intangible and teleport through entire mountains.

Distantly reminiscent of Fellini's Satyricon, and to some extent Roma, The Holy Mountain also boasts the most startling Orgasmatron machine since the erotic cult film Barbarella, in the form of a Giant mechanical vagina that's manipulated like a theramin.... well, if a theramin was played by a giant dildo!

Is it any surprise, really, in the wake of the cult success of El Topo, that The Holy Mountain's producer Allen Klein also managed The Beatles and that those fans of all things psychedelic, John Lennon and Yoko Ono helped fund the movie?

Landmark or landfill experimental film? The Holy Mountain remains an obvious precursor to movies like Eraserhead, The Cremaster Cycle, and The Qatsi Trilogy.

Climb it at your own peril. (You know you want to!)

Director/Screenwriter Alejandro Jodorowsky 1973/114mins

Sessions
Fri, 10th of August, 11:00 PM
RMIT Capitol