I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.

-Alexandro Jodorowsky
As the Vietnam War expanded and America's "baby-boom" generation came of age, the
underground was superseded by the "counterculture"-a youthful amalgam of radical
politics, oriental (or occult) mysticism, "liberated" sexuality, hallucinogenic drugs,
communal life-styles, and rock 'n' roll that was sufficiently wide-spread (and even
organized) to see itself as a movement. From the onset, the counterculture was a powerful
force in the marketplace. Beginning with independent rock documentaries (Don't Look
Back, You Are What You Eat, Monterey Pop), post-Blow Up evocations of "swinging"
London, and appropriately, as we will see-American International drive-in flicks (The Trip,
Wild in the Streets, Psych-Out), youth oriented films flooded the market. Within two years,
The Graduate had been followed by I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Three in the Attic,
Skidoo, Last Summer, Easy Rider, Chastity, Alice's Restaurant Hail, Hero, and countless
others. Mainstream releases (Chappaqua, 2001, Head, Yellow Submarine, Midnight
Cowboy, Medium Cool) assimilated the techniques and themes of avant-garde films, while
quasi-underground comedies like Brian De Palma's Greetings and Robert Downey's Putney
Swope were considerable commercial hits. Among the counterculture intelligentsia, the
fragmented pop-political meditations of JeanLuc Godard reached the acme of their prestige.
Meanwhile, everinventive Hollywood was experimenting with suburban wife-swapping
sitcoms, homosexual comedies of manners, and even an elaborate biopic of Latin American
revolutionary Che Guevara.
Perhaps in response to the combination of porn sleeze and counterculture commercialism
(not to mention the escalating social chaos of American life), the film avant-garde retreated
from the populism of the early and mid-sixties into a rigorous involvement with issues of
film form. Between 1966 and 1971, many of the most vital and innovative works of the
New American Cinema-such socalled "structural" films as Tony Conrad's The Flicker,
Michael Snow's Wavelength, Ken Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, as well as those of
younger men like Paul Sharits and Ernie Gehr-were austere explorations of film's specific
qualities as a medium, closer to art-world minimalism than underground movies. Warhol
aside, there were two other major avant-gardists who were temperamentally suited to
address the new hippie subculture. However, Stan Brakhage's intensely subjective,
visionary home movies proved too demanding for the youth audience, while Kenneth
Anger was unable to finish Lucifer Rising, his occult ode to the Age of Aquarius, when his
original footage was stolen in San Francisco by Bobby Beausoleil (a future associate of
Charles Manson). The counterculture cash-in peaked in 1970: Michelangelo Antonioni's
Zabriskie Point, Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, and Nicholas Roeg's
Performance raised the youth film to new heights of artistic pretension: The Strawberry
Statement and a halfdozen other visions of campus revolt escaped from Hollywood;
Woodstock and Gimme Shelter established the opposite poles of the ecstatic rock
documentary; Federico Fellini's Satyricon displaced the counterculture to the pre-Christian
era and remade Flaming Creatures in Roman drag; Michael Sarne's Myra Breckinride
repackaged "camp" for the American heartland; exploitation films took on the perverse
topicality of Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and John Avildsen's Joe; Paul
Morrissey's Trash apotheosized the underground comedy. Still, the "Movement" which had
first captured national media attention during San Francisco's 1967 "summer of love" was
already in retreatits momentum halted by the bullets of Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent

State in the spring of l970. In its waning days, however, the counterculture was to seize
upon an obscurely mystical and grotesquely violent film by a peripatetic forty-one-year-old
Latin American avantgardist and, in so doing, invent the ritual of the midnight movie.
In December 1970, Jonas Mekas was organizing one of his periodic festivals of avant-garde
films at the Elgin, a rundown six hundred seat theater, not unlike the Charles, on Eighth
Avenue just north of Greenwich Village. Although the program was laden with major
avant-garde figures, the most widely attended screenings were those on the three nights
devoted to the films of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The Elgin management took advantage
of the hippie crowds to announce an added feature-Alexandro Jodorowsky's El Topo to be
shown at midnight because, as the first ad announced, it was "a film too heavy to be shown
any other way."
El Topo ( The Mole) was a trip, but whose and how "heavy" are open to interpretation.
Jodorowsky not only wrote, directed, and scored the film, but appears on screen in virtually
every scene as its eponymous hero, a character none too subtly identified with Moses,
Buddha, and Jesus Christ. "El Topo is a quest for sainthood," he would later explain.
However cosmic the denouement, the film begins as a western. Jodorowsky, bearded and
dressed in black leather, comes cantering across the desert on a black horse with a naked
child (his actual son, Brontis) clutching on behind him. Striking an appropriate note of
macho mysticism, the saturnine rider tells the boy, "Today you are seven years old. Now
you are a man. Bury your first toy and your mother's picture." Brontis does so and they
gallop off. As the titles come up, a narrative voice-over explains: "The mole 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." El Topo and Brontis arrive at a frontier
town. Human corpses and butchered animals are strewn everywhere, a river of blood runs
through the street, the church is filled with hanging men. An old codger, the sole survivor of
the carnage, begs to be put out of his misery. El.Topo hands his revolver to Brontis, who
shoots the man dead. Father and son embrace; then, in enormous close-up, El Topo
portentously places four rings on the fingers of his right hand.
On a hill overlooking the desert, three bandits pass the time by fondling high-heel shoes,
eating bananas, and humping the images of naked women they've drawn on the ground.
Spotting El Topo and Brontis, the bandits mount their horses and gallop after them. El Topo
coolly guns down all three, keeping one alive just long enough to discover that their leader,
the Colonel, is responsible for massacring the town. Meanwhile, at a nearby Franciscan
mission, the Colonel's men amuse themselves by torturing and sexually humiliatinq the
young monks. El Topo arrives and liberates the mission. "Who are you to judge?" the
Colonel petulantly demands. "I am . . . God," is the deadpan reply. Abandoning
Brontis-"Destroy me. Depend on no one"-El Topo castrates the Colonel, takes his woman, a
long-haired hippie in a flowing dress and floppy hat, and rides back into the desert.
Thus far, El Topo has been a kind of spaghetti western with crudely Bunuelian overtones.
In the second movement, Jodorowsky broadens his range to let fly with a nonstop barrage
of Tao, Sufi, Tarot, Nietzschean, Zen Buddhist and biblical references. To compound the
esoteric there are also symbols invisible to the audience: "For example," Jodorowsky would
reveal,
El Topo wears black silk undershorts with two holes: one to expose his balls, and the other,
just the tip of the head of his penis. And he wears the black leather pants over them. Oh,
and on the shorts there is a green circle around the area of the anus.

A brief idyll-El Topo sitting cross-legged, playing a panpipe while the Colonel's woman,
whom he has renamed Mara, frolics about picking leaves and catching birds-is soon ruined
by her nagging. "How are we going to live here?" Mara complains. "We'll die of thirst." By
way of an answer, El Topo closes his eyes and intones, "As the heart panteth after the water
brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the Living
God." Then he takes out his revolver and plugs a nearby rock. Miraculously, a jet of water
streams forth.
Mara, however, is only temporarily satisfied and is soon wandering in circles, chanting
"Nothing, nothing, nothing." After reciting a wordless prayer, El Topo slaps her face,
knocks her down, rips off her clothes, and rapes her. Later, Mara falls before an upright
stone. When she taps it, water squirts out and bathes her ecstatic, upturned face. ("This
stone is an exact replica of my own phallus," Jodorowsky noted pedantically in the
published filmscript. "Thick, not very long, but with a voluminous head. That's how I am.
That's how the rock is. That's El Topo's sex.") El Topo declares his love for Mara. To prove
himself, she demands that he seek out and kill the four Master Sharpshooters who live in
the desert. "The desert is circular," El Topo declares. "To find the four masters, we'll have to
travel in a spiral." El Topo and Mara seek out the masters, one by one. The first is a blind,
loincloth-clad hippie living in an octagonal tower where in Jodorowsky's most memorable
image he is served by a legless man riding on the back of an armless one. The master brags
that he offers no resistance to bullets: "I let them pass through the empty places of my
flesh." El Topo is frightened but Mara persuades him that he can win through trickery. They
dig a hole into which the blind master falls during the ritual shoot-out, giving El Topo a
chance to blast him in the head. Mare dispatches the screeching "double man" and they ride
off in triumph. A woman in black leather follows, offering to guide them to the next master.
The second sharpshooter is vaguely Central Asian. A big man with long, flowing hair, he
wears a lamb coat, lives in a gypsy wagon hitched to a lion, and is inordinately fond of his
mother. He immediately defeats El Topo but foolishly gives the gunman another chance. El
Topo surreptitiously slips broken glass beneath the mother's feet and kills the master when
he is distracted by her screams. (Jodorowsky wanted to use "a dramatic bird sound" here.
"But I couldn't find what I wanted because bird sounds aren't dramatic. So I used the shriek
of a rat . . . and deformed it a little electronically.") Meanwhile-in a scene that could have
been lifted from Russ Meyer's desert-motorcycle-sadismo cheapster Faster, Pussycat! Kill!
Kill!-Mara and the woman in leather are busy dueling with whips. The latter wins, sealing
her triumph by smearing her face with blood and kissing the welts she's raised on Mara's
back. Things only get back on track when El Topo discovers a crow feasting on a dead
rabbita clue to the location of the third master.
Number three is a Mexican peon who plays music, reads minds, and lives surrounded by
rabbits. ("Dragons were enormous rabbits," Jodorowsky once enthused during an interview.
"Fantastic isn't it? Fantastic, fantastic!") The master warns his challenger that he is a
perfectionist who need only fire one shot because he always hits his opponent's heart. El
Topo, whose negative vibrations have already caused the master's rabbits to die, fools him
by covering his heart with a copper plate. After the master wastes his single bullet, El Topo
laughingly shoots him, remarking, "Too much perfection is a mistake." Then, depressed but
driven, he seeks out the last mastera fat, toothless derelict who catches El Topo's bullets in
a butterfly net and flings them whizzing back. El Topo despairs of ever beating this
antagonist, but to demonstrate how little life means to him, the master grabs El Topo's gun
and shoots himself in the gut.

With this final "triumph," El Topo goes madsmashing his revolver, running through the
desert, and finally winding up on a bridge suspended over a chasm, crying out that God has
forsaken him. The leather lesbian challenges him to a duel and, when he refuses, hres a
bullet into each of his hands and feet. Arms extended crucifixion-style, El Topo presents
himself to Mara, whoforced to chooseshoots him in the side and rides off with her new
lover. As he dies, El Topo imagines the two women lasciviously licking each other's
tongues. (In the original script, the perfidious duo is promptly killed in an explosion.
Jodorowsky omitted this from the film: "Why destroy the two women? I am not a
moralist.") Then, a bedraggled band of freakish dwarfs and cripples place El Topo on a
stretcher of branches and drag him away. One might assume the movie is over, butas
Jodorowsky would point out"El Topo is endless."
The final third of the film concerns El Topo's penitent reincarnation. In tight close-up, the
hero is shown as a frizzy-haired blond, sitting in the lotus position and holding a flower. He
has just woken from a twenty-year sleep, during which the dwarfs and cripples have cared
for him. After a ceremonial rebirth, El Topo shaves his head and beard and resolves to
liberate the freaks by digging a tunnel out from within the mountain where they are
evidently imprisoned.
At the foot of the mountain is a western town. The place is totally degenerate full of bloody
gladiator fights, fat sex-starved harpies, and epicene cowboys. Blacks are sold into slavery,
Indians are slaughtered, and executions are treated as theater. The town church service is a
communal game of Russian roulette (during which a young child blows out his brains). The
universal emblem is an eye within a pyramid, evocative of the symbol found on the back of
a dollar bill.*
* According to Jodorowsky, "If you look at the symbol on the dollar bill and you're slightly
mad, you con see the pyramid becomes weightless. And the top part of it is a flying saucer.
The pyramid. A Masonic symbol, right? The top of the pyramid is you. This is the symbol.
But I used it in the film as a symbol of guilt: the eye says, 'You are guilty, you are guilty.'
Yes. A guilty society. In the film. It was a very nice symbol."
Clearly this frontier Sodom is meant to suggest the United States of America. Dressed in a
cassock and accompanied by a young dwarf woman, El Topo makes periodic pilgrimages to
town, capering in the street for pennies to finance the construction of the tunnel, One time,
El Topo and his companion are brought to a subterranean orgy room and forced to make
love to the taunts of a drunken audience. Later, El Topo brings the humiliated dwarf to
church to marry her. The priest turns out to be Brontis, who recognizes his father and wants
to kill him. El Topo persuades Brontis to wait until after they've finished digging the tunnel.
Brontis decides to help them, to speed his vengeance. When the tunnel is completed,
however, he cannot bring himself to kill his "master."
As the dwarf woman lies writhing on the ground, giving birth to El Topo's child, the freaks
escape through the tunnel and are gunned down en masse by the townspeople. El Topo
arrives, too late, and finds their corpses littering the street. Enraged, he grabs a rifle and,
like some implacable force of nature, single-handedly decimates the citizenry. Then he
douses himself with kerosene and sets himself ablaze, Buddhist monk-style, on Main
Street. Brontis (bearded and dressed in black leather as his father was in the film's opening
scene) and the dwarf woman bury El Topo and ride off with his newborn son (?). A final
zoom shows the saint's grave covered with bees. "Honey is the divine word," Jodorowsky
once explained. "If you're great, El Topo is a great picture; if you're limited, El Topo is
limited," he addedaggressively upholding the counterculture credo that there would be

instant illumination or there would be nothing.

Stage director, cartoonist, esthetic provocateur, professional avant-gardist, guru, mime, and
"maker of the Topo," Alexandro Jodorowsky constituted something of a counterculture unto
himself. He was born in 1929 or 1930 to Russian-Jewish parents in Iquique, a small copper
and nitrate port on the northern coast of Chile. "All four of my grandparents are Russian.
They took a ship and tried to escape from Russia to the end of the world.... The Cossacks
made me a Chilean." By his own account, Iquique was a tough town, filled with sailors and
whores. "I lived a very sexual childhood," Jodorowsky told Penthouse. "We started to
masturbate ourselves at four or five years. All together." His playmates, who routinely
"violated" cats and drank dogs' milk, rejected him because he was Russian and circumcised:
"My sex had the form of a mushroom."
Jodorowsky's immigrant father owned nothing more spectacular than a dry-goods store,
perhaps precluding his son's easy identification with Iquique's other foreigners-the North
American and British mine owners: "One of the first things I remember is that we could not
walk in certain areas because they were forbidden to Chileans. It was the beautiful side of
the gringo colonies." Still, the boy's life was filled with miracles: "One day we found a
great stone, an enormous stone, floating in the sea.... [Later] I was followed by a bee, a
golden bee. For three years, every day, the golden bee follow me." Once, he claimed, the
other children tied him to a giant kite and lofted him into the sky. "It was terrible. Inside the
clouds I saw a cemetery of airplanes from the 1914 war. And in the airplanes was the corpse
of the aviators. And inside the corpse was white vampires, And when I came in close, the
white vampires began to move.... This was my childhood."
Later, the Jodorowsky family moved to Santiago, where Alexandro attended the university
and became involved with theater. "I am called the new Rimbaud when I am 15. There was
in this circle all queers and women who want young boys. I became interested in puppets
and attach strings to actors and make them into human marionettes." Depending on the
interview, Jodorowsky studied philosophy, psychology, mathematics, physics, or medicine
at the University of Santiago; before dropping out to become a circus clown, act on the
stage, or create his own troupe. "By the time I was 23, I have a company of 50 people."
This precocious success notwithstanding, Jodorowsky left Chile in 1953, never to return. "It
was a paradise, a crazy paradise. Incredible," he nostalgically recalled in 1980. "But I
needed to cut with that...."
Hopping a freighter to Barcelona, he made his way to Paris, where he worked for six years
with Marcel Marceau, directed Maurice Chevalier's music-hall comeback (which coincided
with the star's Hollywood rehabilitation, after he'd been accused of collaborating during
World War II), and filmed a mime version of Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads. On a
world tour with Marceau, Jodorowsky stayed behind in Mexico City and spent the next few
years introducing the locals to European avant-garde theater (Strindberg, Beckett, Ionesco).
With several Mexican writers he founded a "surrealist" review, S.NOB, and went on to
direct several surrealist plays. Then, back in Paris, Jodorowsky teamed up with Spanish
playwright Femando Arrabal and artist Roland Topor to form the Panic Movement (named
for the Greek god Pan). Both Arrabalthe enfant terrible of the so-called Theater of the
Absurd and Jodorowksy consorted with those venerable surrealists who remained in Paris
and were heavils influenced by their notions of theater.
The most important of these were the theories of the French poet/actor/madman/seer
Antonin Artaud, published in a 1938 collection of manifestos, The Theater and Its Double.
Although Artaud was an official surrealist for only three years-quarreling with the

movement's leader, Andre Breton, in 1927he embodied many of surrealism's most radical
impulses. Artaud totally rejected Western theater in favor of something that "must make
itself the equal of life ....Themes will be cosmic, universal, and interpreted according to the
most ancient texts." Artaud's proposed "Theater of Cruelty" was to be a "bloody and
inhuman" spectacle, a kind of ritual cum shock therapy that would enact and exorcize the
spectator's repressed criminal and erotic obsessions. The Theater and Its Double,
Jodorowsky would admit in 1980, "was my bible" (he needn't have added that it would be
the first of many).
Appropriating Artaud's notion of an "alchemical" theater, Jodorowsky proclaimed that "the
goal of theater will be to change men directly." His "Panic" ephemeras (happenings) were
designed to induce a euphoric- and paradigmatically surreal- state in which humor mixed
with terror. The first, and most elaborate of these was the four-hour "Sacramental
Melodrama" staged in May 1965 at the Paris Festival of Free Expression. Against music
provided by a six-peice rock band, a set consisting of a smashed automobile, and the visual
frisson provided by a cast of bare-breasted women (each body painted a different color),
Jodorowsky appeared dressed in motorcyclist leather. He slit the throats of two geese,
smashed plates, had himself stripped and whipped, danced with a honey-covered woman,
and taped two snakes to his chest.
Later, the piece became a travesty of Catholic ritual-beneath a crucified chicken, a
wormlike "pope" served a host of canned apricots. For the final movement, Jodorowsky
performed a solo dance with a cow's head and was baptized in milk by a monstrous rabbi,
whom he eventually attacked and symbolically castrated. After the rabbi was "eviscerated"
by a performer in a bloody butcher's smock, animal entrails pulled from within the holy
man's cloak were nailed to a cross and tossed into the audience. A woman attached to an
enormous plastic vagina appeared on stage and Jodorowsky took refuge inside her "womb,"
pelting the spectators with live turtles.
According to Jodorowsky, "all of the elements employed in the Sacremental Melodrama
were thrown of of the ramp into the audience: costumes, hatchets, containers, animals,
bread, automobile parts, etc. Great squabble among those present who fought like birds of
prey over the division of the spoils. Nothing remained."
After "giving birth" to Jodorowsky, the vagina-woman tied him to a black woman and
covered the couple with syrup. Jodorowsky and his partner tried vainly to coordinate their
sexual movements and, as the curtain descended, collapsed on the floor.
Despite his theoretical debt to Artaud, Jodorowsky's taste for outrage and
scandalcharacteristically pursued in simplistic terms of paraphrasable content and lurid
detail, rather than in those of stylistic or formal expressivenessvirtually reversed Artaud's
radical scenario for reforming the spectator. As an artist, Jodorowsky more closely
resembles Salvador Dali, the most literal-minded, selfparodic, and commercial of the
surrealists: "The only difference between myself and a madman," Dali once explained, "is
that I am not mad." As George Orwell wrote in a 1944 essay, "The two qualities that Dali
unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing ,md cm atrocious egotism." Dali reconciles
these qualities, Orwell argued, by contriving to become as "wicked" as possible. Given the
differences between the climate of the 1930s and that of the 1960s, Orwell's recipe for
Dali's success"If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back"is hardly
irrelevant to Jodorowsky's career:
Always do the thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a
bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectaclesor, at any

rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead
donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original.
And above all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than crime.... You could even top it all up
with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the
fashionable scions of Paris to Abraham's bosom.
By 1967, Jodorowsky was back in Mexico City, where he started a weekly comic strip,
'Fabulas Panicas' for a major newspaper, wrote three books, and established himself as one
of the country's leading stage directors. (He also accumulated what various accounts
describe as the largest comic-book collection in Mexico, or even South America.)
Nevertheless, Jodorowsky was dissatisfied. "The theater in Mexico is definitely dead," he
told an interviewer in 1968. "The only way to revive it would be for theater people to let
themselves be jailed, to provoke scandals as I did six years ago." He inveighed against the
timidity of Spanish literature, called again for a theater that would directly change people's
lives, and dismissed his current productions as hack work. "I have directed many plays
simply for clothing and food, while I am filming a movie in which I am totally involved....
Better to put your efforts into a film, so that if it is censored, it can be stored in cans. It may
sit for 20 years, but one day it is screened."
The film to which he referred was Fando and Lis, an adaptation of an Arrabal play that he
had first directed in Paris. For the movie, Jodorowsky kept only Arrabal's basic situationthe journey of Fando and his paralytic girl friend, Lis, through trash heap and desert to the
unreachable city of Tar-and added his own specifics. Childhood flashbacks were
interspersed with bizarrely sadistic vignettes. At one point a blind old man drew blood from
Lis's arm, poured it into a wine glass, and drank it down. "Everything was real,"
Jodorowsky later asserted. "The physical violence, each drop of blood." (Well, perhaps not
everything-when Lis died at the end of the film, her body was devoured by her moumers.)
The movie, which cost some $300,000, was largely underwritten by the wealthy father of
one of Jodorowsky's students. According to Juan Lopez Moctezuma, another Mexico City
avant-gardist involved in the project (and the future director of such cheap horror films as
Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary and Dr. Tarr's Torture Galcten), Sancho and Lis was "made at a
killing pace,"mainly on weekends.
In Mexico, as elsewhere, 1968 was a year of violent-albeit short-lived-political turmoil.
Police and students clashed all that summer in confrontations that left hundreds dead and
received worldwide media attention, amplified by the near simultaneous Olympic Games in
Mexico City. Fando and Lis premiered at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival shortly after the
Mexican army crushed the student movement with a bloody, unprovoked massacre in
downtown Mexico City. In the tense atmosphere, the film became a cause celebre and even
provoked a riot. ("The army had to intervene to protect us," Montezuma remembered.) The
scandal contributed to the suspension of the festival itself.
Although banned in Mexico, Fando and Lis was cut by thirteen minutes and released in
New York in early 1970 to mainly negative reviews. (More than a few critics compared the
film unfavorably to Fellini's 'Satyricon' which had also recently opened.) Nevertheless,
Fando and Lis proved to be Jodorowsky's entry ticket into the Mexican film industry. The
film's local notoriety enabled him to raise the $400,000 he needed to make a second, even
more provocative, movie. But this time his distribution strategy was different. There was no
immediate attempt to open the film in Mexico. Instead, in the fall of 1970, Jodorowsky
arrived in New York, carrying a print of El Topo under his arm.
Ben Barenholtz, the owner of the Elgin, first saw El Topo at a private screening at the

Museum of Modem Art. "Half the audience walked out, but I was fascinated by it," he
recalls. "I thought it was a film of its time." Barenholtz attempted to purchase the American
rights and, failing that, persuaded El Topo's novice distributor, music producer Alan
Douglas, to begin previewing the film midnights at the Elgin.
As the onetime manager of the Village Theater (a sort of bargain-basement counterculture
Carnegie Hall which later became the Fillmore East), Barenholtz knew his audience. He
figured that the midnight showings during the week-1:00 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdayswould attract hipsters, encourage a sense of "personal discovery," and stimulate word of
mouth. On all three counts, his instincts were sensationally correct. El Topo premiered on
the night of December 18, 1970, and ran continuously, seven nights a week, through the
end of June 1971. There was practically no advertising-not even a poster, aside from an
usher's crudely drawn sign outside the theater-and, for most of the run, no mention of the
film in the daily press. Nevertheless, from January on, the Elgin's phone never stopped
ringing. El Topo was doing turnaway business ($4,000 a week, Variety reported on March
10) and virtually subsidizing the entire theater. "Within two months, the limos lined up
every night," Barenholtz remembers. "It became a must-see item."
The burgeoning cult (which was abetted by the Elgin management's canny refusal to clear
the house after the premidnight show and resigned tolerance of marijuana consumption in
the balcony) finally went public in late March when Glenn O'Brien published an ecstatic
report in the Village Voice. "It's midnight mass at the Elgin," the O'Brien piece began.
Cocteau's Atwood of a Poet has just ended and the Wdit for El Topo is a brief grope for
comfort before sinking back into fantastic stillness. The audience is young. It applauded
Cocteau's sanguine dream as though he were in the theatre, but as credits appear on the
screen, it settles again into rapt attention. They've come to see the lightand the screen
before them is illumined by an abstract landscape of desert and skyand the ritual begins
again.... Jodorowsky is here to confess; the young audience is here for communion.
By this time, El Topo had begun to garner the prestige of such hippie texts as J. R. R.
Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings', Robert Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land', Herman
Hesse's 'Steppenwolf', R. Crumb's "Mr. Natural," and Carlos Castaneda's 'The Teachings of
Don Juan'. More profound than Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Ed Topo
captured the countercultural imagination like no movie since Stanley Kubrick's 2001. The
Los Angeles Free Press called it "the greatest film ever made," Changes found it "a work of
incomprehensible depth." Dennis Hopper was said to be studying El Topo as he edited his
follow-up to Easy Rider, The Last Movie. Indeed, both he and Peter Fonda had offered to
appear in Jodorowsky's next film. By late May, the New York Times dispatched Vincent
Canby to investigate the phenomenon which, ask Canby put it, had more than once emptied
Elaine's (a fashionable literary saloon) "at that point in the evening when the more aged
merry-makers face the alternative of either going home or getting into fights at the bar."
The critic was not impressed. He called Jodorowsky an intellectual William Randolph
Hearst and El Topo his San Simeon. Actually, the "uncritical reverence" of the Elgin
audience seemed to interest Canby more than the film.
I was amazed when, at the end of the screening there was so little audience response. I
would have assumed that a film with this much underground reputation would have
prompted cheers. There was some desultory applause, but most of thepeople around me
seemed to want to be told whether it was good or bad, if not what it really meant. It's
difficult, especially at three o'clock in the morning, to admit that you've been conned.

O'Brien was so taken with his perception of the El Topo screenings as a surrogate mass that
he assumed Jodorowsky was himself a Catholic: "As a good Catholic, as only a fallen-away
Catholic can be, Jodorowsky makes his ritual perform the universe."
"It would be a terrible mistake," Canby concluded, "to show the movie at an earlier hour."
Canby's piece provoked a host of angry letters to the Times (one reader saw the film as a
protest against the war in Vietnam, another wrote to say that he had attended the film eight
times and each viewing was more powerful than the last, a third compared Jodorowsky to
Shakespeare and Picasso). The newspaper felt compelled to print a lengthy defense of El
Topo by art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who called it "a monumental work of filmic art."
Among the Elgin regulars that spring was John Lennon, whom Barenholtz recalls seeing at
three or four screenings. Lennon had just returned from the Cannes Film Festival, where he
and Yoko Ono had exhibited their films and been knocked out by Arrabal's first feature,
Viva la Muerte. The ex-Beatle wanted his manager, Allen Klein, to purchase the rights to
Arrabal's film but, after he saw El Topo, Lennon changed his mind. In June, Klein's Abkco
Films bought El Topo and immediately withdrew the film from the Elgin, where it was still
selling out seven nights a week. Klein had big plans for Jodorowsky: "My whole idea was
to build him up as an international director." At the same time that he acquired El Topo,
Klein signed Jodorowsky to an exclusive contract.
"We must forget the idea of making it with Broadway cinemas," Jodorowsky had declaimed
a few months earlier. "In five years, those theaters will be used exclusively for showing
erotic film pamphlets to propagandize war." Nevertheless, in November 1971, while
Jodorowsky was working on the script of The Holy Mountain, Klein rented a block-long
billboard off Times Square at $60,000 a month, plastered it with Jodorowsky's name, leased
a Broadway theater, and gave El Topo its belated, official New York premiere.
By then, five Manhattan movie houses had instituted regular midnight screenings. The
Elgin, which had experimented with a number of different midnight attractions after El
Topo was unceremoniously yanked, was showing Peter Bogdanovich's Targets: the St.
Marks was halfway through a ten-week run of Viva La Muerte, the Waverly (where George
Romero's Night of the L.ving Dead had just concluded a twenty five-week midnight
stand) was premiering another horror film, Equinox; and the midtown Bijou-a theater
specializing in Japanese movies-had added Night of the Living Dead to their midnight
standby, Freaks, while uptown at the Olympia, the Brazilian black comedy, Macunaime,
was approaching the end of its nine-week engagement.
The film received mixed notices from New York's mainstream reviewers (one of whom
noted a number of "kids in capes and wide-brimmed hats, the 'El Topo freaks,'" at the
Broadway premiere). A few critics were disturbed by the idea that some of El Topo's gaudy
carnage and display of physical deformity was meant to be taken humorously. This mixture
of horror and comedy was part of Jodorowsky's surrealism-derived Panic esthetic, but it
had its equivalent elsewhere in the counterculture. By titling her New Yorker review "El
Topo-Head Comics," Pauline Kael linked El Topo to both drug consumption and the "head"
or "underground" comics of R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and others. Rock aside, these
comics were the purest (and most scurrilous) expression of the counterculture: availing
themselves of the freedom their medium allowed, as well as the ready connection between
"doodling" and unconscious desire, underground cartoonists routinely trafficked in
grotesque violence, baroque sexual transgression, and freakish deformity (albeit with less
metaphysical pretension than Jodorowsky). Head comics existed to violate all American
taboos; as Leslie Fiedler later observed, they "made everything the 1950s found monstrous

the norm." hive years a professional cartoonist, Jodorowsky was neither unaware nor
unappreciative of their existence: indeed, he told one interviewer that he would like to
collaborate with Crumb. Kael's impression of El Topo's acolytes was somewhat more
sinister than Canby's had been: "The mostly young audience sat there quietly-occasionally
laughing at a particularly garish murder or mutilation-while the few older people staggered
out in disgust." Here, the generational battle lines were clearly drawn. O'Brien, for
example, had rhapsodized over El Topo's violence as though it had been performed by the
Living Theater, if not the Rolling Stones:
Blood spurts and gushes, it is smeared over faces, it rouges lips and paints the scenery. The
audience has never seen so much blood, even in streets filled with danger and death, and so
it is intoxicated, shocked and thrilled. El Topo is a killer, yet he is a holy man. Like
Zarathustra, he wants to overcome all men. He is a seeker who seeks to overcome his
masters. And blood is the sacramental by which El Topo soars/falls towards enlightenment.
But for Keel, who, four years earlier, had made her national reputation in her first New
Yorker piece by defending Arthur Penn's Bonnie end Clyde against the charge of excessive
violence, Jodorowsky was simply pandering to his youthful audience, a view that many of
the director's numerous pronouncements do nothing to assuage. (Asked if he would want
spectators to be high while watching the film, Jodorowsky-who had more than once made
his disdain for marijuana known-replied, "Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'd demand them to be.") Kael
felt that Jodorowsky's "fundamental amorality" wasn't even an "honest amorality."
He's an exploitation filmmaker, but he glazes everything with a useful piety. It's the
violence plus the unctuous prophetic tone that makes El Topo a heavy trip .... Jodorowsky
has come up with something new: exploitation filmmaking joined to sentimentalitythe
sentimentality of the counter-culture.
(In this, Jodorowsky's major precursor-if not his role model-was Dr. Timothy Leary, who
had attached a similar piety to the use of LSD. The original view of acid pioneers like Ken
Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had been that the hallucinogen was a new kind of crazy
fun; it was Leary, their East Coast counterpart, who turned the drug into a sacrament and
invested its ingestion with the trappings of a religion. Of course, rock music, too, was
widely held to be a proselytizing force that would serve to "turn on" the world to
counterculture values.)
Still, whatever else it was, El Topo was in no way as stupid or cynical as most of the
Hollywood movies which, with varying degrees of success, attempted to address the youth
market. Jodorowsky's connection with his audience was far more a matter of shared
interests than speculative demographics. In The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore
Roszak cites the syllabus of a particular course offered by the London "Antiuniversity" in
1968 as the quintessential embodiment of the hippie world view. Under the rubric "From
Comic Books to the Dance of Shiva: Spiritual Amnesia and the Physiology of
Estrangement," the course proposed itself as "a free-wheeling succession of open-ended
situations" including "Exploration of Inner Space, de-conditioning of the human robot,
significance of psycho-chemicals, and the transformation of Western European Man." "Ongoing vibrations" were "highly relevant," and the reading list comprised Marx; Artaud;
Gurdjieff; Reich; the indologist Heinrich Zimmer; Gnostic, Sufi, and Tantric texts;
"autobiographical accounts of madness and ecstatic states of consciousness"; and Pop Art.
("Orse notes the bizarre but cunning association of the comic strip and high religion,"
Roszak observes, presaging Kael's critique of Jodorowsky.) In the context of this fanatically
eclectic prospectus, El Topo which its maker called "a library of all the books I love"-

carried the cultural clout of T. S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland'.

By 1971, the counterculture had lost the euphoria of the late sixties and was beginning to
experience a dissolution into the sullen privatism of the 197O's. In this light, the messianic
revenge fantasy that El Topo offered was a complex one-directed against both an evil social
order and a faltering spiritual authority.
Rather remarkably, none of El Topo's American exegetes seem to have made the connection
between the film's title and Karl Marx's celebrated image of the revolution as a "red mole."
Even more surprisingly, no one appears to have linked the figure of El Topo to that of his
contemporary near-look-alike, Charles Manson. Manson's 1970 arrest for the previous
summer's Tate-La Bianca murders presented the counterculture with a thorny ideological
problem. Not everyone in the Movement was as eager to embrace Manson as were the
ultraleft Weathermen who declared 1970 "The Year of the Fork," in reference to the kitchen
implement that the killers of Leo La Bianca plunged into his stomach. As David Felton and
David Dalton observed in a lengthy piece on the Manson "family," first published in
Rolling Stone in June 1970:
The underground press in general has assumed kind of a paranoid-schizo attitude toward
Manson, undoubtedly hypersensitive to the relentless gloating of the cops who, after a five
year search, finally found a longhaired devil you could love to hate.... The question that
seemed to split underground editorial minds more than any other was simply: Is Manson a
hippie or isn't he?
El Topo was conceived and scripted before the world had ever heard of Manson, but the
film appeared less than six months after the specter of his LSD commune run amok began
to haunt the counterculture. Thus, Jodorowsky's movie served to comfort its original
audience by investing hippie violence with a religious aura.
If the film's devotees identified with the "holy killer' in the first and second sections of the
movie, by the third he presented himself as their savior-the champion, quite literally, of the
freaks. Freaks, after all, had enjoyed universal currency as a self-descriptive countercullurdl
lerln since at leusl 1967. ("That's what we call ourselves," says one of the first longhairs
interviewed in the counterculture's Triumph of the Will, the three-hour Woodstock.)
Significantly the second film to enjoy a lengthy midnight run in New York-starting barely a
month after El Topo established itself at the Elgin- was itself Tod Browning's 1932 Freaks,
a movie in which the denizens of a circus sideshow revenge themselves on the normals who
hurt and exploit them.
On the countercultural use of the term fry, Leslie Fiedler has observed that the expression
"betrays an undercurrent of self-hatred, nature enough in a group of rebels drawn from the
least violent, most educated, most self-deprecating segment of our society, the suburban
bourgeoisie."
What other way to take El Topo's penultimate massacre-in which the innocent freaks are
destroyed by degenerate frontier capitalists-than as an apocalyptic vision of the end of the
counterculture? And despite the fact that he wore black silk undershorts with holes for his
testicles and a green circle stitched around his anus "to make sure" he "wouldn't act lice
John Wayne," Jodorowsky played El Topo as perhaps the most potent counterculture hero
to ever appear on screen.
Actually-although he seldom spoke of it (or, to be fair, was never asked about it)
Jodorowsky had been around for the violent end of the Mexican student movement at
Tlateloco (the Plaza of the Three Cultures) in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, when
soldiers, acting on a prearranged signal from government operatives, fired round after

round into a peaceful (if unauthorized) student rally, killing scores of men, women, and
children. Although the memory of this Mexican mega-Kent State had little currency in the
United States, it is interesting that years after El Topo appeared here, a rumor spread that
Jodorowsky's first film had been a documentary of this massacre. Dispelling the story in a
1980 interview, Jodorowsky explained that while he never made such a film, "the reality is
that I was there."
My wife was playing in a theatre in the some place where they killed the students at that
time. Then, I went about half an hour later to find my wife and I started to feel the
ambiance. All the people in the taxi were scared....there was a big silence and the dogs were
barking. It was one of the weird psychologicai experiences I've had. Death was in the air.
It's true. It's like with animals. When a large quantity of human beings are killed, all the
town is scared and they don't know why.
Recognizing El Topo's "commercialized surrealism," Keel observed that "the avant-garde
devices that once fascinated a small bohemian group because they seemed a direct pipeline
to the occult and 'the marvelous' now reach the mass bohemianism of youth." Actually, the
counterculture was in many respects popularized, updated, mass-produced surrealism.
Where the surrealists had prized dreams, trance states and automatic writing as paths to the
unconscious, the counterculture substituted psychedelic drugs and various modes of
meditation. Indeed, surrealists like Rene Daumal, a poet who left the movement to
experiment with hashish, study Gurdjieff, and learn Sanskrit (and whose novel Mount
Analogue wass an obvious model for Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain), or even Artaud,
who became immersed in Tarot, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and peyote, were virtual protohippies. The more politically, aesthetically, and pharmaceutically radical elements of the
counterculture shared the surrealists' belief that the transcendence of ego functions, the
blurring of binary oppositesdream/daily life, work/leisure, social/ politicaland the
valorization of taboo practices could combine to change reality itself.
If rock had superseded movies as the privileged form of popular art, the lyrics of Bob
Dylan and Jim Morrison bore more than a passing resemblance to the poetry of such
teenaged proto-surrealists as Arthur Rimbaud and Lautreamont. (The first album released
by the Jefferson Airplane was titled Surrealistic Pillow, while the cover art of innumerable
rock records were blatant pastiches of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte.) Both the
counterculture and the surrealists repudiated Western rationality, exalting Asia and the cult
of the self-destructive adolescent. Their two great values were Love and Revolution, what
Susan Sontag called "the politics of joy." The call of the first surrealist manifesto to "open
the prisons, disband the army" could just as well have been issued by the counterculture.
On the other hand, such counterculture media manipulations as the 1967 attempt to exorcise
and levitate the Pentagon and the showering of the New York Stock Exchange with dollar
bills, would surely have met with the surrealists' approval.
But Kael was not totally amiss in suggesting that Jodorowsky's was a reactionary
surrealism. Unlike Luis Bunuel,
whose surrealist techniques cracked open conventional pieties, Jodorowsky uses those
techniques to support a sanctimonious view: Man-God tempted by evil, power-hungry
woman abandons righteous ways and then, with the love of a good woman, becomes
spiritual man, only to learn that the world is not ready for his spirituality.
(Breton, after all, had remarked that "all that is atrocious, nauseating, fetid, vulgar, is
summed up in one word, God.") However, at the same time that Jodorowsky exploited the
surrealist vocabulary developed by Artaud, Bunuel, Dali, Magritte, and others, he remained

true in his fashion to the movement's essence. For, unlike other artistic schools, surrealism
was not meant to be painted or written so much as lived.
"When I direct a film," Jodorowsky insisted, "everybody, myself include, falls into such
trances that there is dead silence, because our lives are at stake." In El Topo, "there was no
difference between filming and reality. It was a very religious trip." The film contained "no
techniques," Jodorowsky maintained. There were "no dissolves, no effects, nothing. I
filmed things as they were." Jodorowsky claimed that when the script (one is tempted to
say, the ritual, which began with the burial of Brontis's teddybear and the slaughter of six
burros in the opening scene, and ended with the burning of a human skeleton covered with
beefsteak) called for El Topo to rape Mara, he dismissed the entire crew except for the
cameraman and actually raped her. In short, the film El Topo, like the performance
Sacramental Melodrama, was merely the end product of a specific spiritual adventure in the
life of Alexandro Jodorowsky. The whole film was shot in consecutive order: "I film it like
the Odyssey, like the conquest of Alexander the Great. I started out and kept going."
The success of El Topo did nothing to diminish Jodorowsky's ego. "I want to be the Cecil
B. De Mille of the Underground," he told the Los Angeles Free Press. "This I really want. I
like Cecil B. De Mille. Fantastic!" Elsewhere, he confided that he expected to become
enlightened while making The Holy Mountain for producer Allen Klein, adding, "Maybe I
am a prophet. I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha, and
Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies."
Before beginning The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky and his wife, Valerie, went a week
without sleep under the direction of a Japanese Zen master. Then they took the Arica
training developed by Oscar Ichazo. The son of a Bolivian general, Ichazo was no less
eclectic than Jodorowskyhis system was an amalgam of Zen, Sufi, and yoga exercises with
a theoretical overlay derived from alchemy, the Kabala, the I Ching, the teachings of
Gurdjieff, and other esoteric doctrines. Ichazo was a year younger than Jodorowsky and
their careers had some interesting parallels. At the same time that Jodorowsky was filming
El Topo, Ichazo established his first institute in Arica, Chile, 150 miles up the coast from
Jodorowsky's birthplace. Shortly after El Topo made Jodorowsky a counterculture
superstar, Ichazo moved his Arica Institute to New York, where he attracted numerous
acolytes among the hipper show-biz intelligentsia. The main actors for The Holy Mountain
(among whom Jodorowsky had hoped to include John Lennon) were required to take three
months of Arica training, after which they spent a month living communally in
Jodorowsky's home. Only then, in the spring of 1972, was the film ready to start shooting.
Budgeted at $750,000, The Holy Mountain was filmed entirely in Mexico. As with El Topo,
the scenes were shot in consecutive order. Jodorowsky, his hair dyed platinum blond and
bound back in a long braid, starred as well as directed. The cast and crew seemed inspired
by a mystical sense of purpose. "You know, I think this is the most important thing going on
in the world today," one bearded production assistant told the Rolling Stone reporter who
visited the set. "At least, it's the most far out." Ichazo frequently dropped in on the shooting
and two Arica group leaders were assigned to the project, standing by to provide any
necessary "Mongolian massages" with a wooden spoon. Later, Jodorowsky soured on
Arica. "You want me to tell you about Oscar?" he asked a Vilhge Voice journalist after The
Holy Mountain's lone Los Angeles showing, "I will tell you." He comes to me in Mexico.
"We will make a great movie together," says Oscar. He will train me, he will train my
actors. You want to know of what his training consists? Oscar's idea of training is two days
in a motel room with me taking L.S.D. I want you to know I don't need Oscar to take

L.S.D. in a motel room, I do that plenty enough on my own....Oscar Is the continuation of

Gurdjieff, but so what? What is the problem with these damn gurus is they want to be
immortal, to have the life of God. I am an anarchist mystic. Good for Buddha to be Buddha,
not for me.
Desipte Jodorowsky's inability to get everything he wanted (including a real corpse to hack
apart during the opening credits), the first hour of The Holy Mountain is arguably the best
moviemaking of his career. Thereafter-despite the canny recycling of his elaborate studio
set-the film becomes increasingly schematic and dull.
The Holy Mountain opens with a Christlike thief crucified in the desert. A crowd of naked
children pelt him with stones but the Thief climbs down from his cross and frightens them
off. Then he shares a joint with an armless dwarf and leaves for Mexico City. A vast
marketplace is crowded with scores of flayed, crucified lambs.
(During the interview, the journalist reported, a bearded young man spotted Jodorowsky
and threw himself at the filmmaker's feet, pleading for the privilege of serving him. "It is
fate," Jodorowsky remarked, shaking his head. "Write me a letter," he told his prostrate
admirer, and beat a hasty retreat.)
Troops of soldiers are executing people in the streettheir blood flows blue and, in some
cases, birds fly out of their wounds. An American tourist is filming everything with a supereight camera and doesn't even stop when one of the soldiers backs his wife up against the
wall and rapes her. Abruptly, the plaza is taken over by the "Great Toad and Chameleon
Circus," whose colors are red, white, and blue. In the film's most spectacular set piece (and
an homage to Antonin Artaud, who proposed a theater piece on the same theme), the
conquest of Mexico is enacted by lizards dressed as monks and conquistadors, crawling
around models of the Aztec pyramids, like an Escher army on display. Blood covers
everything, a plague of frogs is unleashed, and ultimately, the set is blown up. In a series of
short cartoonlike vignettes (with no dialogue except for an occasional stylized "quack"), the
Thief is imprisoned in a hall of mirrors with hundreds of plaster Christs; soldiers in gas
masks and men dressed as nuns parade through the street; and a group of whores pose in
front of a cathedral. An old man shuffles by, pulls out his eyeball, and tenderly hands it to a
little girl. The whores mock the Thief, except for one-leading a chimpanzee, who bathes his
feet.
Obscurely searching, the Thief ascends through a drainpipe into a vast white interior. He
approaches Jodorowsky, who is dressed in white and wearing a high-crowned, widebrimmed hat. Rising from a throne that is flanked by two rams (and a black woman whose
naked body is inscribed with Hebrew letters), Jodorowsky knocks the Thief to the ground,
cuts his neck, and pulls out a chicken. "Do you want gold?" he asks in heavily accented
English. After the Thief has taken a bath with a hippopotamus, Jodorowsky places one of
his visitor's turds in a bell jar, puts on phylacteries and a prayer shawl, and transforms the
feces to gold. Jodorowsky explains to the Thief that the giant Tarot cards on the floor of his
palace represent the "most powerful people on the planet." The film goes on to offer short
background sketches on each. One is a cosmetics manufacturer, another a munitions queen,
the rest include a wealthy art dealer, a financial wizard, the chief of police, and an architect.
Each is associated with a different planet in the solar system. Jodorowsky plans to lead the
six "powerful people," the black woman (who represents Earth), and the Thief to the
summit of the Holy Mountain, where nine "Immortals" are said to make their home. To
purify themselves, the group burns all of their money: After several more rituals among
some Indian ruins and a scene in which Jodorowsky performs Christ's miracles of the

loaves, the group gets on a boat for Lotus Island.

There, they are greeted by a simpering man in lederhosen who takes them to a twist party at
the Pantheon Bar. Ignoring a hippie in a stars-and-stripes hat and an LSD gobbling devout
who tells them that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a "trip," the group sets off across a
mountainous waste. By this time they have completely shaved their heads and dressed up in
identical turquoise sweatshirts. As they scramble up the summit, the whore with the
chimpanzee reappears and joins them. The ascent is enlivened with various visionsa pack
of savage dogs, a rainstorm of money, a mass of tarantulas crawling over a naked body, a
hag with a bloody sword, a hermaphrodite sage with snarling leopard heads for breasts. One
seeker has to cut off his frostbitten finger, another's crotch begins oozing blood.
At the summit of the mountain, the group sees nine cowled figures sitting around a stone to.
"You don't need a master now, goodbye," Jodorowsky tells his followers. He instructs the
Thief to behead him but somehow a lamb gets sacrificed instead. Then Jodorowsky blesses
the union of the Thief and the Whore (and, presumably, the chimp), sending them back to
his palace. The remaining followers approach the stone table to find that the Immortals are
only dummies. Taking their chairs, they sit around the table laughing. "If we have not
attained immortality, we have attained reality," Jodorowsky tells them. "This is maya."
Toppling the table, he instructs the camera to zoom back. As it does, it reveals lights,
microphones, and technicians, a gesture which in the hundred-year context of artistic
modernism, can best be seen as hackneyed but felt.
The Holy Mountain was finished in the nick of time for the 1973 Cannes Film Festival,
where it was eagerly anticipated but, for the most part, coolly received. Marco Ferreri's La
Grande Bouffe, a grotesque comedy in which a segment of the bourgeoisie literally eats
itself to death, was the festival's succes de scandale, and Klein picked up its American
rights. Meanwhile, Jodorowsky trimmed twenty minutes from The Holy Mountain
(eliminating as much dialogue as he could) and both films were scheduled to open in New
York that fall. Klein was uncertain about The Holy Mountain's prospects, but he had great
hopes for La Grande Bouffe. Burned by its subsequent failure and determined, he says, to
"protect" Jodorowsky from the critics, Klein restricted The Holy Mountain's New York run
to Friday and Saturday midnights at the Waverly Theater. (Elsewhere, the film was released
as a double bill with El Topo. In a few key markets, notably Los Angeles, it was not
released at all.) But, despite Klein's disappointment, The Holy Mountain cannot be
considered a failure, at least as a midnight movie. After premiering at the Waverly on
November 29, 1973, it played the theater continuously for the next sixteen months, through
the first week of April 1975. In a sense, the final scene of The Holy Mountain, which
evidently disconcerted many of Jodorowsky's followers with its mixture of "Mr. Natural"
and Marcel Duchamp, proved prophetic of his subsequent career. However unwillingly, the
director did pass from cinema back into life.
Asi Hablaba Zaratustra, an adaptation of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, which
Jodorowsky staged in Mexico City immediately before he began work on El Topo, ends
with a similar exhortation to. his audience: "You have seen and you have heard. Now is the
moment to act. Zarathustra has ended. Now you begin."
After finishing The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky had hoped to make Mr. Blood and Miss
Bones, a "pirate film" for children. But Klein was not interested in bankrolling a PG rated
film and instead proposed that Jodorowsky adapt Pauline Reage's notorious paean to female
masochism, The Story of O. The project (which Kenneth Anger had unsuccessfully hoped
to realize in Paris a decade and a half before) was ultimately rejected by Jodorowsky

becauseaccording to Kleinthe director felt it was too commercial.

Subsequently (after the Panic Movement was "officially" disbanded), Jodorowsky became
involved in an ambitious attempt to film Frank Herbert's science-fiction cult novel, Dune. A
French American co-production, Dune was to star Jodorowsky's son, Brontis, with featured
performances by Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, and Gloria Swanson. By late 1976, more
than a year after Dune had been announced, the film's American backers pulled out, despite
having already sunk a reported $2 million into production costs. Ultimately, the entire
project had to be scrapped and the rights were purchased by Dino Di Laurentis. Never at a
loss, Jodorowsky remained in Paris, working on a novel, providing scripts for the sciencefiction cartoonist Moebius, and telling one interviewer, "Now I am into aroma therapy with
a doctor who heals illnesses using essential oils of odorant plants."
Jodorowsky did complete one other film during the 1970s, a French production, Tusk,
described in a Variety item as "a G-rated epic about the entwined fate of an English girl and
a rogue elephant born in India on the same day." Shot completely in the south Indian state
of Karnataka at a cost of $5 million, the movie featured 110 pachyderms. India reminded
Jodorowsky of Mexico: "Almost the same climate, almost the same food.... I ate only
elephant food for four months." Tusk was scheduled to open in the United States during the
summer of 1980. It never has. Variety reviewed it that year at Filmex, the Los Angeles film
festival, as "a two-ton turkey . . . grandiose, pretentiously simple, tonally inconsistent"and
warned that "turgid b.o. looms." Allen Klein, who had no more than a friendly interest in
the film, considers it "unreleasable." As of this writing, Jodorowsky's American reputation
has evaporated along with the counterculture that nourished it. Even El Topo has lapsed
into obscurity, in part because of Klein's stipulation that the film be booked with The Holy
Mountain. According to Jodorowsky's first American prophet, Ben Barenholtz, El Topo
"was strictly a product of the '60s. It wouldn't make a dime today." But Klein is not so sure.
More than eleven years after El Topo first emptied Elaine's, he is still toying with the idea
of rereleasing it in a dubbed English version: "I might go back to the Waverly yet," he
muses, raising the spectre of midnight nostalgia. If Jodorowsky was dismayed by his failure
to repeat El Topo's American success, he wasn't letting on. "Listen . . . I am not a normal
filmmaker," he told poet Uri Hertz the day after Tusk's Filmex screening. "What I am doing
is making my masterwork, which is my soul." And anyway, "we are occidental. We don't
experience the elephant. We experience the Cadillac."