Challenging your expectations and your boundaries can be a good thing. I will never regret taking the time to try and experience something I am not familiar with. I would rather know I took the time with a piece of art that I ended up not understanding or liking rather than the possibility that there are works out that would set my brain and my spirit on fire and I just chose not to bother with them.
So I do not regret experiencing El Topo. I just am not sure of what I just watched and how I will truly feel about it later.
Film #21 El Topo (1971)
Never has trailer explained exactly how I feel and don't feel at the same time.
As I feel that this post is going to be way different than the other 20 I have completed before, I am going to change the format up a little bit.
Here is the wikipedia page about the film. Here is Roger Ebert's review when then film was released on DVD in 2007. I would suggest reading his review, he captures the essence better than I feel that I am about to.
The film feels like it is broken into three distinct segments. The first is of El Topo (the writer and director himself), while taking his naked son out to the dessert to have him bury a picture of his mother and a toy 'so as he is now a man.' Afterwards, they encounter a town that has been absolutely slaughtered. Every man, woman, and child has been killed horribly. He finds out that the Colonel and his men are responsible. El Topo finds the Colonel and confronts him and humiliates him in front of his men (he cuts his dick off) and the Colonel kills himself. A woman who was forced to serve the Colonel wants to run away with El Topo, but his child gets in the way of them. So he leaves the child with some friars.
Second, the woman and El Topo wander the desert where she tells him there are four gun masters that he must find and kill if he is to be considered the greatest. He finds them, each representing a different philosophy or religion. He defeats them with luck or trickery. Along the way another woman joins El Topo and the original woman. She is dressed in black similar to him and starts tempting the other woman away from him. After completing his task, he has doubts and feels abandoned by God. The black clad woman makes the other woman make a choice and hands her a gun. She shoots El Topo and they leave him to die. A group of physically deformed people find him and take him away.
Thirdly, El Topo awakes from what is a years long meditation in a cave under a mountain and the same deformed people believe he is their savoir. After a drug fueled 'rebirth' he believes he can get out of the cave (the only opening is high up and as the people are deformed or mentally handicapped, they are not able to make it) and dig a tunnel freeing them so they can get down to the nearby town and get help and live a normal life. El Topo gets out of the cave with a small woman who helps him busk in town for coins in which they can use to buy equipment and dynamite to speed up the tunneling process. The town, as they find out, has sick delights (branding people like cattle, having men with barb wire wrapped boxing gloves slugging it out in the street) and she worries that maybe her people won't be welcomed in the town when they are freed. A friar comes to town and is disgusted by the religion the people follow and tries to put a stop to it. El Topo ends up crossing paths with this friar, and he realizes it was his son that he had abandoned. The friar recognizes him too and vows to kill him. The small woman tells his son that he is now doing good things and about the tunnel. The friar agrees to let him live until the tunnel is finished. Soon, they are working together to finish it faster and when they breach the inner chamber, his son realizes he can't kill his father. At the same time, the people in the cave rush to the town for help and they are met with gunfire. Destroyed, El Topo picks up a gun again and wipes out the town and then sets himself on fire. The son, dressed like his father was at the start of the film, the small woman (oh she was pregnant with El Topo's child and had just given birth) and her baby, leave town.
It is clear that this film is full of imagery, ideas, and statements from beginning to end, I just can't tell you what many of them were and what they meant. That doesn't mean that I am not aware that El Topo is trying to say something, its just that maybe I wasn't understanding its language or...
...I just have a difficult time getting into more of the independent artistic cinema.
This isn't the first film to challenge me to watch it as a work of art and let it be more of a emotional experience as to opposed to an intellectual one. Even stating that this is not an intellectual experience is not correct either. There was a lot of thought that went into this film. I just hit a point while watching where my brain stopped trying to asks questions as to what everything stands for and I just let go and let it crash over me. That sounds like a transcendent experience, right? If you consider drowning to be transcendent, then sure.
There are many, many, more qualified people that can speak to what they believe this film is than myself but I will try my best to explain why films like this tend to hit me flat and hopefully I don't come across as some kind of neanderthal bitching about why everyone thinks fire is so ahead of its time.
When anyone makes something that is deeply personal to them, its never going to be 100 percent clear what their intent was, unless you ask them directly, and even then you may never know. I am perfectly okay with that and understand that my experience will not be yours and vice versa. I feel like poetry, physical art (in this case, I mean paintings but I understand that art is more than something you hang on your wall) and music can get away with people expecting it to be more up to interpretation. I feel like films have a red line where interpretation can only go so far and reasonably expect the viewer to go with them till the end. I don't think El Topo gives a single shit about whether it loses people along the way, and while I can respect that artistically, I can not find enjoyment in that.
Generally when I write these posts, I keep the score from the film running until I am finished as it helps keeps me in the mood of the film. I broke away from that because I had to find the right way into thinking about my reaction to this film. The only way I can put it in perspective is from the same way I approach Radiohead. I am currently listening to a mix of Amnesiac, Kid A, and Ok Computer. Each one of these albums I didn't like the first time I heard them, but I would revisit them a few months later and something about them just clicked and I love them.
Another way for me to approach it to is think about one of my favorite Picasso paintings, Guernica.
Some people might be off put by the abstract imagery and the chaos it is presenting. For me, once I learned the origin of the piece, it all snapped into view. How do you make a single image that tries to encapsulate all the feelings and desperation that would come from such a devastating event? Picasso decided to go for something surreal and it resonates with me. Someone else might be too off put by the style to let it speak to them. I can't fault them for that. I hope people won't fault me too much for not really digging El Topo.
Here is a scene that I can present that I think speaks to the hypocritic power of faith that I think the film is trying to point out. The church leader is saying that God will protect them if they have faith and then hands out a revolver with a single bullet in it. A person will need to put it to their head and pull the trigger to see if they have faith.
It's a miracle until it isn't and tempting fate is not the same thing as having faith. So there are things I can say I liked and feel that I understand about the film.
I feel like this is a film I should give another chance after having time to let it gestate but for now it was not a revelatory first watch. I welcome the dialogue about how I didn't allow myself the right perspective or if there is other information I need to consider in order to appreciate what is being said.
I will never regret the journey. I would appreciate it if someone can help me read the map along the way though.
Western Checklist (this time it is not a checklist but a series of questions):
- Why did the child at the beginning have to be naked? I am sure it was a statement about innocence but he was naked for a long time.
- Why did the one bandit have an assortment of women's footwear? Why did the other one make a naked lady drawing out of beans and then try to sex it?
- Was the deflating balloon to signal a gunfight a joke about how arbitrary those moments can be in other westerns?
- Were any fake animal carcasses created for this film? I don't think so. It feels like every gutted horse, skinned goat/sheep, and rabbit set on fire were real.
- Was there a particular reason why men's and women's voices were gender switched at times?
- How did you convince the actors to be near a real lion that was just chained up a few feet away?
Not a question, but here's a piece of the score that went along with El Topo. It isn't bad.
Rating:
I am not going to give this film a rating. This is not because I didn't particularly enjoy the film but because I think films like El Topo defy rating. This is an experience, for good and for ill, and your mileage is going vary greatly on how much you enjoy pure surreal imagery.
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