With THC in your brain and feeding your myriads of cannabinoid receptors, even Son of the Mask is viewed as a masterpiece. I have a copy of El Topo so I guess I am entitled to my opinion that it is a perfect example of pretentiousness erected (sic) as an art form. Thanks precisely to promotion by the likes of a very disoriented John Lennon during the peak phase of his Yokomania when even her least belch was perceived by the to-be-ex Beatle as an art performance, El Topo became artificially inflated to the status of masterpiece of symbolism cinema.
In his commentaries to El Topo on the DVD, Jodorowsky argues (in his own words) that cinema can basically do and be everything that other arts, and literature and particular, do and are. Thus, if you want to write an allegory on the successive stages through which an individual will go during one's life, you can basically do it using basically the same intellectual process. Only the technical differences between the various art forms will show as specific to these art forms in the respective final works (or products).
This is obviously a simplistic approach to art and to me, is responsible for El Topo being unbearably painful to watch for a sober brain. The allegories simply do not work, and even using the director's comments to attempt at making some sense of what one sees, it does not work. Not at all. As a result of his theory of the equivalence of art forms, what you see (cinema being THE visual art per excellence) is extremely artificial, looks very amateurish, whereas in the written form, as in a poem of an essay, it would make perfect sense because obviously, the brain can best depict the abstract.
Had the imagery been properly treated with much better ideas and techniques - as available in 1970, of course, which is not a problem at all per se (man, even Bunuel made surrealism work even at an early stage of cinema history!) - instead of this dreadful succession of nauseating images, poorly designed scenes and most terrible actors (here, the term is in fact inappropriate most of the time)- El Topo might have worked and been both a substantial film and a film of substance. Jodorowsky aimed much, much too big considering the limited technical platform and resources he had to his disposal and, perhaps, his actual capabilities. Listening to him endlessly digressing about how an erudite he is in the DVD commentaries reminds one of the saying that culture is like strawberry jam: the least you have, the most you spread it on your toast... :-)
One can think big and that's perfectly fine with me if the basic idea is interesting and promising and if you are a genius. But promises not held are worth, you know ... well, what I now think of this movie. And blaming everybody else for not understanding how clever you are while ignoring the blatant fact that there is virtually nothing by which to get intellectually stimulated in the first place from what you actually see: this is so infantile!
One of the worst I have seen in my life, and I'm 57 ... of course, the cinematography is sometimes nice, and that's why I gave it one point over what total disasters get. But all the credit for the imaginative imagery gets destroyed by how punishingly, how unimaginably boring El Topo is. Really, really boring, which is something legitimate to say after all, because cinema should not be an accessory to learning (for instance, having Prof Jodorowsky explaining oriental symbolism in the extra comments -not part of the film, remember- while you are watching an extremely arcane screenplay unravel before your weary, nearly deadshut eyes. A film should be self-sufficient, and El Topo is like a prop (and a poor one at that, most of the time) for teaching and learning philosophy.
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