El Topo [The Mole] (1970)

(archive.org streaming, December 2019) As far as I can gather, El Topo is about Alexander Jodorowsky and friends wandering around the set of a Western doing wacky things and spouting pseudo-religious meanderings just for the fun of it. That’s being unfair, of course—Jodorowsky is an artist’s artist, and he’s doing whatever he wants according to his own logic. But I guarantee that El Topo is a lot more fun to watch if you’re imagining a bunch of people just making stuff up on the go. The production values are poor (the audio is very deliberately overdubbed, the cuts don’t match and I suspect that the video quality is poor, although the version I watched was too low-resolution to tell reliably) but the images are sometimes very strong—the film has a knack for finding and showing spectacular locations even though the sketches at those locations don’t make a lot of sense. There’s a strong dream logic running through El Topo that will either drive Cartesian viewers crazy, bored or forced to abandon any attempt to make strict sense out of it. It messes around with symbolism, delirium western movie iconography and ironic humour—the result is best described, as per Wikipedia, as an “acid western art film” for both meanings of acid, corrosive and hallucinatory. I can’t say that I enjoyed the entire film, but there were a few times where some scenes were either provocative, hilarious or just plain weird and that’s not a bad kind of experience. Even though my attention wandered a lot during the second half of the film, I may even re-watch it (in much better resolution) at some point in the future.