El Topo (1970)

Director:
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Writer:
Alejandro Jodorowsky

The movie takes place in two parts. The first half resembles a western; albeit a surreal one. The second is a love story of redemption and rebirth.

The first half, set in an unnamed desert, opens with El Topo (played by Jodorowsky himself) traveling with his naked young son. They find a town whose citizens have been slaughtered and El Topo hunts down and kills the outlaws and their leader, a fat balding Colonel. El Topo abandons his son to the monks of the settlement's mission and rides off with a woman whom the Colonel and his outlaws had kept captive as a slave. The woman, whom El Topo names Mara, convinces him to defeat the four great gun masters to become the greatest gunman in the land. He duels each of them and during each duel, El Topo emerges victorious through trickery or luck.

After the first duel, an unnamed woman with a male voice finds the couple and offers to serve as a guide. Her involvement will prove El Topo's downfall. Ridden with guilt, El Topo destroys his own gun and revisits the places where he killed those masters. The unnamed woman then confronts El Topo and shoots him multiple times in the manner of stigmata. Mara then betrays him and rides off with the woman after shooting El Topo.

The second half of the movie takes place years later, after El Topo is rescued by a band of deformed outcasts. In their underground community he meditates on the "four lessons" and when he awakes, he is 'born again'. He decides to help the outcasts escape their subterranean prison and, together with a dwarf girl who becomes his lover, performs for the depraved cultists of the neighbouring town to raise money to buy dynamite for this cause.

At the same time, a mysterious monk arrives in town and becomes the new priest. It is revealed that the new priest is actually El Topo's own son. He threatens to kill El Topo, but decides to spare El Topo's life until he finishes digging the escape for the underground people. With the help of his girlfriend and son, El Topo digs an exit out of the cave. Just as the exit appears, the underground people flee the mountain and are massacred by the cultists.

El Topo helplessly witnesses his community being murdered by the cultists and is shot himself. He ignores his wounds and massacres the cultists in the town. After all are killed, El Topo takes an oil lamp and immolates himself. El Topo's son and girlfriend survive the massacre and make a grave for his remains, which becomes as much a beehive as the first gun master's grave. His dwarf girlfriend gives birth to their child at the same time as his death, and the son of El Topo, now dressed in his father's garments, the dwarf, and the child ride off on a horse in the same fashion that the Son of El Topo and El Topo had in the beginning of the film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067866/

The Holy Mountain (1973)

AKA La montaña sagrada

Director:
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Writer:
Alejandro Jodorowsky

A man (later identified as a thief) representing The Fool, a tarot card typically depicting a young man stepping off a cliff, lies on the ground with flies covering his face like excrement. He is befriended by a footless, handless dwarf (representing the five of swords: defeat) and goes into a city to make money from tourists. The thief's resemblance to Christ inspires some to use his likeness for the crucifixes that they sell by casting an impression of his face and body. After a dispute with a priest who rejects the thief's likeness of himself, the thief eats off the face of his wax statue and sends it skyward with balloons, symbolically eating the body of Christ and offering "himself" up to heaven. Soon after, he notices a crowd gathered around a large tower, where a large hook with a bag of gold has been sent down in exchange for food. The thief, wishing to find the source of the gold, ascends the tower; finding the alchemist (played by Jodorowsky).

After a confrontation with the alchemist, the thief defecates into a container. The excrement is transformed into gold by the alchemist who proclaims: "You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold." The thief is introduced to seven people who are said to be the most powerful but who, like the thief, are mortal. They are related to the planets in astrological terms and portrayed with broad-brush satire, each personifying the worst aspects of his or her planet's supposed characteristics. The seven consist of: a cosmetics manufacturer, a weapons manufacturer, a millionaire art dealer, a war toy maker, a political financial adviser, a police chief and an architect. They are gathered together by the alchemist who instructs them to burn their money and wax images of themselves.

After several scenes wherein the characters are led by the alchemist through several death/rebirth rituals, they all journey to Lotus Island to gain the secret of immortality from nine immortal masters who live on a holy mountain. Once on Lotus Island they are sidetracked by the "Pantheon Bar", a cemetery party where people have abandoned their quest for the holy mountain and instead engage in drugs, poetry or acts of physical prowess. Leaving the bar behind, they ascend the mountain and each have personal symbolic visions representing each characters worst fears and obsessions. Near the top, the thief is sent back to his "people" along with a young prostitute and an ape who has followed him to the mountain. The rest confront the cloaked immortals who are shown to be only faceless dummies. The alchemist then reveals the film apparatus just outside the frame (cameras, microphone, lights and crew) and says "Zoom back camera!" Instructing everyone, including the audience for the film, to leave the holy mountain. "Real life awaits us," he says, and the movie ends.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071615/

Fando y Lis (1967)

Directed by
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Writing credits
Fernando Arrabal (play)
Alejandro Jodorowsky

The film follows Fando (Sergio Klainer) and his paraplegic girlfriend Lis (Diana Mariscal) through a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of the mythical city of Tar, where legend has it all wishes come true. The film is divided into four acts:

Act I

This first part begins with a flashback of young Fando hanging around with his father. The father says that when he dies, his skin would make a beautiful drum, and that, if ever Fando should ever feel lonely, he should go to the wonderful city of Tar. Fando and Lis begin their journey in a destroyed city (Fando drives Lis in a small wooden cart, which also carries Fando's drum and Lis' phonograph), where they meet a group of aristocrats having a ball in the midst of the destruction. Fando is lured away by a group of seductresses into a junkyard, where he is blinded and made to chase after them. In the end he is tricked into kissing a man and paid for amusing them. Meanwhile, Lis is surrounded by the arisocrats and a flashback occurs, where we see young Lis being lured backstage by a puppeteer (played by Jodorowsky) and being harassed by the artists yonder. Fando throws the money away and goes back to get Lis and leave the city. They hang around in a cemetery: Lis sings "I shall die, and no-one shall remember me..." and Fando reassures her that he will remember her and will visit her grave bringing a flower and a dog. A musical sequence follows, "Qué bonito es un entierro" (how beautiful is a funeral), during which the couple play dead and cavort around the cemetery.

Act II

Fando and Lis pull into what appears to be a dead end until they are guided out by the Pope, who also signals the road to Tar. He also advises them against the coming of the night, which is signaled by the beating of drums, "for those who are asleep become awake". Shortly afterwards the couple come across a marsh in which the bodies of men and women lie asleep. As they approach, they wake up and bathe in mud. Fando leaves Lis behind, planting her in the muddy swamp, much to her chagrin, but changes his mind and rescues her shortly after. Not long afterwards, however, he becomes tired of Lis and mistreats her, dragging her across the desert and abandoning her at the bottom of a spiraling canyon. Fando runs away and upon reaching a mountain top witnesses a card game between three old ladies, playing for the right to suck fruit pulp off a young man's mouth. Fando runs away from the scene and into an ambush composed of desert women armed with bowling balls and a scantily clad woman with a whip. The group chases Fando and sends him tumbling down a hill and right next to the grave of his father, who proceeds to come back to life and send his son into the tomb. Fando eventually goes back to Lis and the two leave. He promises never to hurt her again.

Act III

A sequence of scantily-clothed Fando and Lis follows, painting each others' names in black in a room and proceeding to throw buckets of paint at the walls and at each other. Back in the desert, the couple come across an array of different characters: a man and his blind son begging for blood (which they extract from Lis but the father drinks and leaves nothing for his son), a party of transvestites (who cross-dress Fando and Lis) and an apparition of Fando's mother (who is then shown in a flashback along young Fando, in which we see her death and how she taunted Fando's father - her servants are the young women from Act II), now begging to be killed. Fando subsequently strangles her with her own hair and walks her to her grave.

Act IV

Yet again, Fando becomes tired of Lis, and tearing her clothes apart, chains her up to the cart and hides nearby. He leaves her to the mercy of three men (the clowns from the circus flashback of Lis' childhood)) who slowly approach the scene. Fando reappears and encourages the men to look at her and feel her and kiss her. They do so, but shyly walk away after Fando proudly claims she is his girlfriend. The couple drifts some more but constantly reaches the same barren spot between the mountains. Lis points it out and a frustrated Fando charges against the hills, but to no avail. He then proceeds to handcuff Lis and torture her once more. In retaliation, she throws Fando's treasured drum away, breaking it. An enraged Fando beats Lis up, killing her. Lis is taken away by a mob, who puts her in a coffin and cannibalize parts of her skin. Fando interrupts the ceremony to retrieve Lis' body and eventually bury her. In the film's last scene, Fando visits Lis' grave as promised with a flower and a dog. Calling her name, he lies down by the grave and is covered by crawling ivy. Then, we see a naked Lis rising from the grave, spotting an also naked Fando, and the couple running off into the woods. But we cut back to Fando, lying by Lis' grave, calling her name in dreams, wrapped in ivy.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061643/