El Topo

Born in 1929 in Chile to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Jodorowsky eventually enrolled at the University of Santiago, where he developed an interest in puppetry and mime. After creating a theater company that employed 60 people, Jodorowsky departed for Paris.Once in Paris he began a lengthy collaboration with Marcel Marceau, collaborating on some of his most famous mimeograms. For the next few years, Jodorowsky would alternate between working in Mexico City and in Paris, developing his interest in the avant-garde and staging the playwrights who would be major influences on his film career, including Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, August Strindberg, and the surrealists. Especially, Theater of Cruelty champion Antonin Artaud and Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal. By the mid-‘60s, the Panic Movement began and theatrical events designed to be shocking; one four-hour ephemera starred a leather-clad Jodorowsky and featured the slaughter of geese, naked women covered in honey, a crucified chicken, the staged murder of a rabbi, a giant vagina, the throwing of live turtles into the audience, and canned apricots. This privileging of the provocative above all other qualities would prove to be a sign of things to come in Jodorowsky’s early film career. For his first project, he chose to adapt the Arrabal play Fando and Lis, about two quarrelling lovers looking for the magical city of Tar. Fando and Lis would go on to be banned in Mexico after starting a riot at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival, an event that forced Jodorowsky to flee an angry mob in a limousine. In December of 1970, Jodorowsky premiered his next film, the self-starring El Topo; the nightmarish allegorical Western El Topo practically announced its debts to Fellini, Luis Bunuel, and Sergio Leone.El Topo became a cult sensation and the first midnight-movie hit. El Topo also attracted the aAlejandro Jodorowskyttention of the critics, who were fiercely divided. Unlike other midnight movies, such as the work of John Waters and George Romero, El Topo’s reputation hasn’t grown over the years, perhaps because it’s a film virtually inseparable from the moment that produced it, a blood-soaked counterculture parable for the post-1968, post-Altamont, post-Manson era.

El Topo was acquired by Allen Klein’s Abkco Films. Abkco also produced the even more extreme follow-up Holy Mountain, which failed to build on the success of its predecessor. In 1975, Jodorowsky, now living in Paris, announced his next project, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune. Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, and Salvador Dali were also on board, but the film never got past the production stage. Almost as intriguing as the cast was the development talent Jodorowsky employed, which included writer Dan O’Bannon and the artists Jean Giraud (aka Moebius), Chris Foss, and H.R. Giger; Pink Floyd and the prog-rock group Magma were also reportedly on board to provide the score. Though, the failed Dune project marked the start of Jodorowsky’s long friendship and collaboration with Moebius, with whom he has worked on a number of comic book projects. His next film project, Tusk, told the story of the bond between an English girl and an Indian elephant. It remains rarely seen and Jodorowsky, citing differences with its producers, has disavowed it. In 1989, he staged a surprising comeback with Santa Sangre, a surrealistic horror film that attracted considerable cult interest. Produced and co-written by Claudio Argento (brother of Dario Argento), it contained many moments of Jodorowsky’s trademark for-its-own-sake bizarreness within a relatively coherent story and the handsomest filmmaking of the director’s career. Despite a cast that included Omar Sharif, Peter O’Toole, and Christopher Lee, its follow-up, The Rainbow Thief, fared far less well. In the late ’90s, he announced plans to film Abelcain, a semi-sequel to El Topo.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:96113~T1)