The Movie: El Topo (1970)
What Is It?: The
very first midnight movie is a surreal cowboy movie about a soulless gun
slinger who evolves into a holy man played by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Everything that would distinguish midnight movies, and many cult movies to
follow, is present in El Topo—the
violence, the sex, the bizarre imagery, the dreamlike pace, the mannered
acting, and the shattering of genre. Although El Topo has all of the trappings of the classic western, it’s more
of an avant garde film with a surplus of Buddhist and Sufi symbolism. El Topo is also tremendously
pretentious, but charmingly so, and the fact that it started perhaps the most
important cinematic movement of the 1970s helps it to transcend those
pretensions.
Why Today?: It’s
8/4. 8 + 4 = 12, as in 12:00
midnight. Pretty clever rationale, eh?
