Holy Mountain, The

A black-clad gunslinger's journey toward enlightenment involves killing four holy masters and liberating a subterranean community of freaks. Alejandro Jodorowsky's mystical western transformed him into a countercultural icon and kick-started the 'midnight movie' boom
"The mole (el topo) is an animal that digs tunnels underground, searching for the sun. Sometimes his journey leads him to the surface. When he looks at the sun, he is blinded." Preachy, pretentious and baffling - El Topo is one of cinema's most radical and single-minded visions. Jodorowsky takes the western and injects it with references to Nietzsche's 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' and his own spiritual meanderings into the 'Bhagavad Gita', Sufi teachings, the Bible and Buddhism. The result is a lyrical tour de force. When El Topo premiered at one o'clock in the morning on 18 December 1970 in New York's shabby downtown theatre The Elgin, it spawned an obsessive fanbase of stoners, artists and hipsters and the 'midnight movie' was born; a cinema phenomenon that made cult hits of Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead and The Harder They Come. Jodorowsky's underground smash also garnered celebrity devotees: Hollywood bad boys Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson got high to it; and John Lennon persuaded his manager Allen Klein to buy the rights and even bankroll its psychedelic follow-up, The Holy Mountain (1973). The unknown Chilean-born director's chic credentials were cemented. The film is split into two parts. The first sees El Topo (a bearded Jodorowsky dressed in black) appear out of the Mexican desert on horseback with his naked son (Jodorowsky's seven-year-old boy Brontis). On encountering a decimated village littered with corpses, El Topo vows to avenge the bloodthirsty slaughter. The guilty despot (Silva) and his bandit gang dispatched, El Topo abandons his son for a young woman called Mara (Lorenzio) and embarks on a selfish mission to obtain sacred enlightenment. In order to achieve his lofty aim, El Topo must first defeat four masters of the desert (by any means necessary) and absorb their holy knowledge. He succeeds but is betrayed by Mara and her mysterious female lover. The two women riddle El Topo with bullets and leave him for dead. A crowd of cripples, dwarfs and deformed children appears and drags his lifeless body away. The second section opens on El Topo (now with a peroxide afro) reborn as a saintly figure inside a mountain cavern. He awakes (spiritually and physically) to find himself worshipped by a mass of sick and deformed inbreds who have been banished from the local settlement. He has his head shaved and proclaims himself nothing more than a simple man. El Topo promises to help them escape from their prison-like existence and ventures down to the nearby town. There he finds a racist, money-obsessed society enslaved by their Russian roulette-based faith. El Topo performs clown routines in exchange for money to finance digging a hole out of the mountain for the undesirables. A dwarf woman (Luis) accompanies El Topo on these trips and the two start to fall in love. On discovering that she is pregnant, El Topo takes his lover to the church to marry her. Inside, the priest reveals himself to be El Topo's grown-up son. The trio join forces and the mountain dwellers are soon released. But as the freed freaks crawl into town, El Topo sees his dream turn into a violent nightmare. Jodorowsky covers the fascist town in banners decorated with a pyramid-and-eye symbol; the same motif found on the US dollar. El Topo's anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist message is not a subtle one. The tirade against institutional religion is equally blatant, with the townspeople jostling to try their luck at the end of the priest's loaded pistol. They might seem slightly antiquated slurs now but Jodorowsky bangs his message home hard and still gives today's viewer food for thought. Likewise, the film's liberal use of abstruse dialogue, esoteric symbolism and new age psychobabble marks it out as a product of its hippie time. But Jodorowsky's relentless conviction, both in front of and behind the camera, imbues these elements with an undeniable resonance. With its sexually charged content and frequent bursts of bloody carnage, El Topo was always going to be a challenging film. But Jodorowsky positively fanned the flames of scandal by claiming that, because he demanded authenticity at all times while shooting the film, he beat and raped his female co-star for real during a scene where El Topo sexually assaults Mara. Not that controversy was anything new for the director: his scandalous 1968 debut Fando And Lis was denounced as "corrosive and corrupting" by the Mexican government. It caused a riot at its Acapulco premiere, and the subsequent death threats forced Jodorowsky into exile. At the time of its original release, El Topo vehemently divided critics. While some leapt to praise Jodorowsky's maverick vision, others went on the attack, charging the director with doing nothing more than giving exploitation an arty sheen. The truth is most likely somewhere in between. For his part, Jodorowsky had the perfect response: "If you're great, El Topo is a great picture; if you're limited, El Topo is limited."
Verdict El Topo remains a poignant, visceral and occasionally baffling film. It stands as a gloriously strange remnant from a long since passed era and a landmark work in subversive cinema.