Hacker Cinema
El Topo
1970 · Film · 125 min
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
El Topo decides to confront warrior Masters on a trans-formative desert journey he begins with his 6 year old son, who must bury his childhood totems to become a man.
5 positive1 negative3 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
El Topo is my all time favorite movie. Different strokes for different folks.
Would have loved to have seen a Jodorowsky rendition of Dune.
>Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare.
Yeah, it would've been great. El Topo is awesome. Holy Mountain is probably even better.
A part of me did laugh out at the thought of you naively sitting down with a group of friends to watch a Jodorowsky movie. Having watched The Holy Mountain, El Topo and Santa Sangre I could only imagine how awkward this was.
Regarding the creative process of creating Dune, Jodorowsky has this to say in the documentary:
> "if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to... to rape the bride."
Which is a horrifying choice of words considering Jodorwsky "claimed in a 1970 interview to have raped his co-star Mara Lorenzio on camera" [0].
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/director-bragged-on-camera-rape-alejandro-jodorowskys-el-topo/
Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare. The costuming would have been really cool, but the story would have been totally changed to be incoherent, and it would have become an infamous scandal at changing a movie away from the book storyline.
I was so intrigued by this documentary, and how amazing it might be, until I went and actually watched ‘El Topo’. It was probably the worst movie I’ve ever watched… To this day everyone I asked to watch it with me will bring up how bad and weird,incoherent, and gross it was.
I don't believe that anyone who says anything about how X or Y as a Jodorowsky movie would have been $positiveHyperbole has seen anything other than the documentary about the unmade Dune movie.
First, because his most compelling stuff is heavily surrealist and I've found the audience for that is niche and has very little overlap with what modern Sci-Fi/Fantasy fans have in mind. Second, because at this point whatever they have in their minds for what it would have been is likely an impossible standard for any director, much less the one that made El Topo or The Dance of Reality (not a slight, just pointing out this guy makes art pieces - not blockbusters).
"It's one of those films that the entire time you watch it, you just think "How could they make this? Why would they make this? Was the world ever really so different that this seemed OK?"
If you enjoy this sort of thing, I highly recommend Alejandro Jodorowky's The Holy Mountain[1], which is both much weirder and far more profound than The 5,000 Fingers.
If you find yourself liking The Holy Mountain I'd recommend Jodorowsky's other masterpieces: El Topo and Santa Sangre.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmR0vi0ifzE
I have been a cinephile for at least ten years, watching several movies per week. I agree with some of the sentiments expressed here, and I can say I have been in a similar place in my film-watching hobby. It used to feel that "I've seen all the good ones", but no, not really. You certainly go into more obscure teritorry, but reasons for obscurity differ: it can be a bad movie, or it could be produced in Mexico, or it could have been produced sometime in 1934, or only available on torrents in 240p, or all of the above. Another thing that helps is knowing how you watch the movie: you're not watching Tarantino and Tarkovsky the same way. That would explain the disappointment with Lost Highway which has been rather coherent (compared to post Mulholland dr. Lynch). With this attitude, the author is locking himself out of a class of directors that are not catering to you (like Marvel does, lol), but require active participation and adapting from the film watcher. You can not enjoy El Topo or The Mountain by passively consuming.
hey me too, I saw this movie back in the early 90s when I was discovering international films and experimental music. I was a big fan of El Topo too.