Monday, June 29, 2009

The Mole Who Discovered The Sun

El Topo(1970)
Directed By Alejandro Jodorowsky


"You must bury a picture of your mother and your favorite toy, before you can become a man...", says Alejandro Jodorowsky to a naked infant as he rides through the desert in all black with an umbrella.
El Topo(The Mole), is a story about one long gunslingers quest to become the greatest of all killers, along the way he encounters and duels several "masters", until he reaches the final stage, where the most enlightened of all masters, kills himself.
Distraught the lone gunmen, goes underground where he meets a group of kindly deformed people who have never been to the surface...
The best way to explain the rest may be to mention another scene in a Jodorowsky film, "The Holy Mountain".
In this scene the thief gives food to a group of starving children, at which the alchemist scoffs and asks if he wants to see what would happen if he tried to feed them all, and the alchemist makes dozens of loaves of bread appear.
The children began fighting over the food, snarling at each other, etc.
The Alchemist tells the thief, "all the food in the world is useless if they are not ready to share".
If you haven't seen the movie yet, ignore that, but if you have think about the mole going into the light prematurely and blinding itself at the beginning (and others ancient stories of Caves and temporary blindness like Plato's'?), about what the gunmen is attempting to do for the people underground, and why it goes wrong?

Anyway it's food for thought.
Don't take anything about this film literally.
Surreal, allegorical, violent, and sensory pounding, take on the Spaghetti Western and Samurai tale, set in the Mexican desert.

Wasn't available in the states for years until very recently, if you get the chance, see it.

No comments: