I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.-Alexandro Jodorowsky

As the Vietnam War expanded and America's "baby-boom" generation came of age, the underground was superseded by the "counterculture"-a youthful amalgam of radical politics, oriental (or occult) mysticism, "liberated" sexuality, hallucinogenic drugs, communal life-styles, and rock 'n' roll that was sufficiently wide-spread (and even organized) to see itself as a movement. From the onset, the counterculture was a powerful force in the marketplace. Beginning with independent rock documentaries (Don't Look Back, You Are What You Eat, Monterey Pop), post-Blow Up evocations of "swinging" London, and appropriately, as we will see-American International drive-in flicks (The Trip, Wild in the Streets, Psych-Out), youth oriented films flooded the market. Within two years, The Graduate had been followed by I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Three in the Attic, Skidoo, Last Summer, Easy Rider, Chastity, Alice's Restaurant Hail, Hero, and countless others. Mainstream releases (Chappaqua, 2001, Head, Yellow Submarine, Midnight Cowboy, Medium Cool) assimilated the techniques and themes of avant-garde films, while quasi-underground comedies like Brian De Palma's Greetings and Robert Downey's Putney Swope were considerable commercial hits. Among the counterculture intelligentsia, the fragmented pop-political meditations of JeanLuc Godard reached the acme of their prestige. Meanwhile, everinventive Hollywood was experimenting with suburban wife-swapping sitcoms, homosexual comedies of manners, and even an elaborate biopic of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.Perhaps in response to the combination of porn sleeze and counterculture commercialism (not to mention the escalating social chaos of American life), the film avant-garde retreated from the populism of the early and mid-sixties into a rigorous involvement with issues of film form. Between 1966 and 1971, many of the most vital and innovative works of the New American Cinema-such socalled "structural" films as Tony Conrad's The Flicker, Michael Snow's Wavelength, Ken Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, as well as those of younger men like Paul Sharits and Ernie Gehr-were austere explorations of film's specific qualities as a medium, closer to art-world minimalism than underground movies. Warhol aside, there were two other major avant-gardists who were temperamentally suited to address the new hippie subculture. However, Stan Brakhage's intensely subjective, visionary home movies proved too demanding for the youth audience, while Kenneth Anger was unable to finish Lucifer Rising, his occult ode to the Age of Aquarius, when his original footage was stolen in San Francisco by Bobby Beausoleil (a future associate of Charles Manson). The counterculture cash-in peaked in 1970: Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, and Nicholas Roeg's Performance raised the youth film to new heights of artistic pretension: The Strawberry Statement and a halfdozen other visions of campus revolt escaped from Hollywood; Woodstock and Gimme Shelter established the opposite poles of the ecstatic rock documentary; Federico Fellini's Satyricon displaced the counterculture to the pre-Christian era and remade Flaming Creatures in Roman drag; Michael Sarne's Myra Breckinride repackaged "camp" for the American heartland; exploitation films took on the perverse topicality of Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and John Avildsen's Joe; Paul Morrissey's Trash apotheosized the underground comedy. Still, the "Movement" which had first captured national media attention during San Francisco's 1967 "summer of love" was already in retreatãits momentum halted by the bullets of Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent

State in the spring of l970. In its waning days, however, the counterculture was to seize upon an obscurely mystical and grotesquely violent film by a peripatetic forty-one-year-old Latin American avantgardist and, in so doing, invent the ritual of the midnight movie.In December 1970, Jonas Mekas was organizing one of his periodic festivals of avant-garde films at the Elgin, a rundown six hundred seat theater, not unlike the Charles, on Eighth Avenue just north of Greenwich Village. Although the program was laden with major avant-garde figures, the most widely attended screenings were those on the three nights devoted to the films of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The Elgin management took advantage of the hippie crowds to announce an added feature-Alexandro Jodorowsky's El Topo to be shown at midnight because, as the first ad announced, it was "a film too heavy to be shown any other way."El Topo ( The Mole) was a trip, but whose and how "heavy" are open to interpretation. Jodorowsky not only wrote, directed, and scored the film, but appears on screen in virtually every scene as its eponymous hero, a character none too subtly identified with Moses, Buddha, and Jesus Christ. "El Topo is a quest for sainthood," he would later explain. However cosmic the denouement, the film begins as a western. Jodorowsky, bearded and dressed in black leather, comes cantering across the desert on a black horse with a naked child (his actual son, Brontis) clutching on behind him. Striking an appropriate note of macho mysticism, the saturnine rider tells the boy, "Today you are seven years old. Now you are a man. Bury your first toy and your mother's picture." Brontis does so and they gallop off. As the titles come up, a narrative voice-over explains: "The mole is an animal that digs tunnels underground searching for the sun. Sometimes his journey leads him to the surface. When he looks at the sun he is blinded." El Topo and Brontis arrive at a frontier town. Human corpses and butchered animals are strewn everywhere, a river of blood runs through the street, the church is filled with hanging men. An old codger, the sole survivor of the carnage, begs to be put out of his misery. El.Topo hands his revolver to Brontis, who shoots the man dead. Father and son embrace; then, in enormous close-up, El Topo portentously places four rings on the fingers of his right hand.On a hill overlooking the desert, three bandits pass the time by fondling high-heel shoes, eating bananas, and humping the images of naked women they've drawn on the ground. Spotting El Topo and Brontis, the bandits mount their horses and gallop after them. El Topo coolly guns down all three, keeping one alive just long enough to discover that their leader, the Colonel, is responsible for massacring the town. Meanwhile, at a nearby Franciscan mission, the Colonel's men amuse themselves by torturing and sexually humiliatinq the young monks. El Topo arrives and liberates the mission. "Who are you to judge?" the Colonel petulantly demands. "I am . . . God," is the deadpan reply. Abandoning Brontis-"Destroy me. Depend on no one"-El Topo castrates the Colonel, takes his woman, a long-haired hippie in a flowing dress and floppy hat, and rides back into the desert.Thus far, El Topo has been a kind of spaghetti western with crudely Bunuelian overtones. In the second movement, Jodorowsky broadens his range to let fly with a nonstop barrage of Tao, Sufi, Tarot, Nietzschean, Zen Buddhist and biblical references. To compound the esoteric there are also symbols invisible to the audience: "For example," Jodorowsky would reveal, El Topo wears black silk undershorts with two holes: one to expose his balls, and the other, just the tip of the head of his penis. And he wears the black leather pants over them. Oh, and on the shorts there is a green circle around the area of the anus.

A brief idyll-El Topo sitting cross-legged, playing a panpipe while the Colonel's woman, whom he has renamed Mara, frolics about picking leaves and catching birds-is soon ruined by her nagging. "How are we going to live here?" Mara complains. "We'll die of thirst." By way of an answer, El Topo closes his eyes and intones, "As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the Living God." Then he takes out his revolver and plugs a nearby rock. Miraculously, a jet of water streams forth.Mara, however, is only temporarily satisfied and is soon wandering in circles, chanting "Nothing, nothing, nothing." After reciting a wordless prayer, El Topo slaps her face, knocks her down, rips off her clothes, and rapes her. Later, Mara falls before an upright stone. When she taps it, water squirts out and bathes her ecstatic, upturned face. ("This stone is an exact replica of my own phallus," Jodorowsky noted pedantically in the published filmscript. "Thick, not very long, but with a voluminous head. That's how I am. That's how the rock is. That's El Topo's sex.") El Topo declares his love for Mara. To prove himself, she demands that he seek out and kill the four Master Sharpshooters who live in the desert. "The desert is circular," El Topo declares. "To find the four masters, we'll have to travel in a spiral." El Topo and Mara seek out the masters, one by one. The first is a blind, loincloth-clad hippie living in an octagonal tower where in Jodorowsky's most memorable image he is served by a legless man riding on the back of an armless one. The master brags that he offers no resistance to bullets: "I let them pass through the empty places of my flesh." El Topo is frightened but Mara persuades him that he can win through trickery. They dig a hole into which the blind master falls during the ritual shoot-out, giving El Topo a chance to blast him in the head. Mare dispatches the screeching "double man" and they ride off in triumph. A woman in black leather follows, offering to guide them to the next master.The second sharpshooter is vaguely Central Asian. A big man with long, flowing hair, he wears a lamb coat, lives in a gypsy wagon hitched to a lion, and is inordinately fond of his mother. He immediately defeats El Topo but foolishly gives the gunman another chance. El Topo surreptitiously slips broken glass beneath the mother's feet and kills the master when he is distracted by her screams. (Jodorowsky wanted to use "a dramatic bird sound" here. "But I couldn't find what I wanted because bird sounds aren't dramatic. So I used the shriek of a rat . . . and deformed it a little electronically.") Meanwhile-in a scene that could have been lifted from Russ Meyer's desert-motorcycle-sadismo cheapster Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!-Mara and the woman in leather are busy dueling with whips. The latter wins, sealing her triumph by smearing her face with blood and kissing the welts she's raised on Mara's back. Things only get back on track when El Topo discovers a crow feasting on a dead rabbitãa clue to the location of the third master.Number three is a Mexican peon who plays music, reads minds, and lives surrounded by rabbits. ("Dragons were enormous rabbits," Jodorowsky once enthused during an interview. "Fantastic isn't it? Fantastic, fantastic!") The master warns his challenger that he is a perfectionist who need only fire one shot because he always hits his opponent's heart. El Topo, whose negative vibrations have already caused the master's rabbits to die, fools him by covering his heart with a copper plate. After the master wastes his single bullet, El Topo laughingly shoots him, remarking, "Too much perfection is a mistake." Then, depressed but driven, he seeks out the last masterãa fat, toothless derelict who catches El Topo's bullets in a butterfly net and flings them whizzing back. El Topo despairs of ever beating this antagonist, but to demonstrate how little life means to him, the master grabs El Topo's gun

and shoots himself in the gut.With this final "triumph," El Topo goes madãsmashing his revolver, running through the desert, and finally winding up on a bridge suspended over a chasm, crying out that God has forsaken him. The leather lesbian challenges him to a duel and, when he refuses, hres a bullet into each of his hands and feet. Arms extended crucifixion-style, El Topo presents himself to Mara, whoãforced to chooseãshoots him in the side and rides off with her new lover. As he dies, El Topo imagines the two women lasciviously licking each other's tongues. (In the original script, the perfidious duo is promptly killed in an explosion. Jodorowsky omitted this from the film: "Why destroy the two women? I am not a moralist.") Then, a bedraggled band of freakish dwarfs and cripples place El Topo on a stretcher of branches and drag him away. One might assume the movie is over, butãas Jodorowsky would point outã"El Topo is endless."The final third of the film concerns El Topo's penitent reincarnation. In tight close-up, the hero is shown as a frizzy-haired blond, sitting in the lotus position and holding a flower. He has just woken from a twenty-year sleep, during which the dwarfs and cripples have cared for him. After a ceremonial rebirth, El Topo shaves his head and beard and resolves to liberate the freaks by digging a tunnel out from within the mountain where they are evidently imprisoned.At the foot of the mountain is a western town. The place is totally degenerate full of bloody gladiator fights, fat sex-starved harpies, and epicene cowboys. Blacks are sold into slavery, Indians are slaughtered, and executions are treated as theater. The town church service is a communal game of Russian roulette (during which a young child blows out his brains). The universal emblem is an eye within a pyramid, evocative of the symbol found on the back of a dollar bill.* * According to Jodorowsky, "If you look at the symbol on the dollar bill and you're slightly mad, you con see the pyramid becomes weightless. And the top part of it is a flying saucer. The pyramid. A Masonic symbol, right? The top of the pyramid is you. This is the symbol. But I used it in the film as a symbol of guilt: the eye says, 'You are guilty, you are guilty.' Yes. A guilty society. In the film. It was a very nice symbol."Clearly this frontier Sodom is meant to suggest the United States of America. Dressed in a cassock and accompanied by a young dwarf woman, El Topo makes periodic pilgrimages to town, capering in the street for pennies to finance the construction of the tunnel, One time, El Topo and his companion are brought to a subterranean orgy room and forced to make love to the taunts of a drunken audience. Later, El Topo brings the humiliated dwarf to church to marry her. The priest turns out to be Brontis, who recognizes his father and wants to kill him. El Topo persuades Brontis to wait until after they've finished digging the tunnel. Brontis decides to help them, to speed his vengeance. When the tunnel is completed, however, he cannot bring himself to kill his "master."As the dwarf woman lies writhing on the ground, giving birth to El Topo's child, the freaks escape through the tunnel and are gunned down en masse by the townspeople. El Topo arrives, too late, and finds their corpses littering the street. Enraged, he grabs a rifle and, like some implacable force of nature, single-handedly decimates the citizenry. Then he douses himself with kerosene and sets himself ablaze, Buddhist monk-style, on Main Street. Brontis (bearded and dressed in black leather as his father was in the film's opening scene) and the dwarf woman bury El Topo and ride off with his newborn son (?). A final zoom shows the saint's grave covered with bees. "Honey is the divine word," Jodorowsky once explained. "If you're great, El Topo is a great picture; if you're limited, El Topo is

limited," he addedãaggressively upholding the counterculture credo that there would be instant illumination or there would be nothing.Stage director, cartoonist, esthetic provocateur, professional avant-gardist, guru, mime, and "maker of the Topo," Alexandro Jodorowsky constituted something of a counterculture unto himself. He was born in 1929 or 1930 to Russian-Jewish parents in Iquique, a small copper and nitrate port on the northern coast of Chile. "All four of my grandparents are Russian. They took a ship and tried to escape from Russia to the end of the world.... The Cossacks made me a Chilean." By his own account, Iquique was a tough town, filled with sailors and whores. "I lived a very sexual childhood," Jodorowsky told Penthouse. "We started to masturbate ourselves at four or five years. All together." His playmates, who routinely "violated" cats and drank dogs' milk, rejected him because he was Russian and circumcised: "My sex had the form of a mushroom."Jodorowsky's immigrant father owned nothing more spectacular than a dry-goods store, perhaps precluding his son's easy identification with Iquique's other foreigners-the North American and British mine owners: "One of the first things I remember is that we could not walk in certain areas because they were forbidden to Chileans. It was the beautiful side of the gringo colonies." Still, the boy's life was filled with miracles: "One day we found a great stone, an enormous stone, floating in the sea.... [Later] I was followed by a bee, a golden bee. For three years, every day, the golden bee follow me." Once, he claimed, the other children tied him to a giant kite and lofted him into the sky. "It was terrible. Inside the clouds I saw a cemetery of airplanes from the 1914 war. And in the airplanes was the corpse of the aviators. And inside the corpse was white vampires, And when I came in close, the white vampires began to move.... This was my childhood."Later, the Jodorowsky family moved to Santiago, where Alexandro attended the university and became involved with theater. "I am called the new Rimbaud when I am 15. There was in this circle all queers and women who want young boys. I became interested in puppets and attach strings to actors and make them into human marionettes." Depending on the interview, Jodorowsky studied philosophy, psychology, mathematics, physics, or medicine at the University of Santiago; before dropping out to become a circus clown, act on the stage, or create his own troupe. "By the time I was 23, I have a company of 50 people." This precocious success notwithstanding, Jodorowsky left Chile in 1953, never to return. "It was a paradise, a crazy paradise. Incredible," he nostalgically recalled in 1980. "But I needed to cut with that...."Hopping a freighter to Barcelona, he made his way to Paris, where he worked for six years with Marcel Marceau, directed Maurice Chevalier's music-hall comeback (which coincided with the star's Hollywood rehabilitation, after he'd been accused of collaborating during World War II), and filmed a mime version of Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads. On a world tour with Marceau, Jodorowsky stayed behind in Mexico City and spent the next few years introducing the locals to European avant-garde theater (Strindberg, Beckett, Ionesco). With several Mexican writers he founded a "surrealist" review, S.NOB, and went on to direct several surrealist plays. Then, back in Paris, Jodorowsky teamed up with Spanish playwright Femando Arrabal and artist Roland Topor to form the Panic Movement (named for the Greek god Pan). Both Arrabalãthe enfant terrible of the so-called Theater of the Absurdã and Jodorowksy consorted with those venerable surrealists who remained in Paris and were heavils influenced by their notions of theater.The most important of these were the theories of the French poet/actor/madman/seer Antonin Artaud, published in a 1938 collection of manifestos, The Theater and Its Double.

Although Artaud was an official surrealist for only three years-quarreling with the movement's leader, Andre Breton, in 1927ãhe embodied many of surrealism's most radical impulses. Artaud totally rejected Western theater in favor of something that "must make itself the equal of life ....Themes will be cosmic, universal, and interpreted according to the most ancient texts." Artaud's proposed "Theater of Cruelty" was to be a "bloody and inhuman" spectacle, a kind of ritual cum shock therapy that would enact and exorcize the spectator's repressed criminal and erotic obsessions. The Theater and Its Double, Jodorowsky would admit in 1980, "was my bible" (he needn't have added that it would be the first of many).Appropriating Artaud's notion of an "alchemical" theater, Jodorowsky proclaimed that "the goal of theater will be to change men directly." His "Panic" ephemeras (happenings) were designed to induce a euphoric- and paradigmatically surreal- state in which humor mixed with terror. The first, and most elaborate of these was the four-hour "Sacramental Melodrama" staged in May 1965 at the Paris Festival of Free Expression. Against music provided by a six-peice rock band, a set consisting of a smashed automobile, and the visual frisson provided by a cast of bare-breasted women (each body painted a different color), Jodorowsky appeared dressed in motorcyclist leather. He slit the throats of two geese, smashed plates, had himself stripped and whipped, danced with a honey-covered woman, and taped two snakes to his chest.Later, the piece became a travesty of Catholic ritual-beneath a crucified chicken, a wormlike "pope" served a host of canned apricots. For the final movement, Jodorowsky performed a solo dance with a cow's head and was baptized in milk by a monstrous rabbi, whom he eventually attacked and symbolically castrated. After the rabbi was "eviscerated" by a performer in a bloody butcher's smock, animal entrails pulled from within the holy man's cloak were nailed to a cross and tossed into the audience. A woman attached to an enormous plastic vagina appeared on stage and Jodorowsky took refuge inside her "womb," pelting the spectators with live turtles. According to Jodorowsky, "all of the elements employed in the Sacremental Melodrama were thrown of of the ramp into the audience: costumes, hatchets, containers, animals, bread, automobile parts, etc. Great squabble among those present who fought like birds of prey over the division of the spoils. Nothing remained."After "giving birth" to Jodorowsky, the vagina-woman tied him to a black woman and covered the couple with syrup. Jodorowsky and his partner tried vainly to coordinate their sexual movements and, as the curtain descended, collapsed on the floor.Despite his theoretical debt to Artaud, Jodorowsky's taste for outrage and scandalãcharacteristically pursued in simplistic terms of paraphrasable content and lurid detail, rather than in those of stylistic or formal expressivenessãvirtually reversed Artaud's radical scenario for reforming the spectator. As an artist, Jodorowsky more closely resembles Salvador Dali, the most literal-minded, selfparodic, and commercial of the surrealists: "The only difference between myself and a madman," Dali once explained, "is that I am not mad." As George Orwell wrote in a 1944 essay, "The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing ,md cm atrocious egotism." Dali reconciles these qualities, Orwell argued, by contriving to become as "wicked" as possible. Given the differences between the climate of the 1930s and that of the 1960s, Orwell's recipe for Dali's successã"If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back"ãis hardly irrelevant to Jodorowsky's career:

Always do the thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectaclesãor, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And above all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than crime.... You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable scions of Paris to Abraham's bosom.By 1967, Jodorowsky was back in Mexico City, where he started a weekly comic strip, 'Fabulas Panicas' for a major newspaper, wrote three books, and established himself as one of the country's leading stage directors. (He also accumulated what various accounts describe as the largest comic-book collection in Mexico, or even South America.) Nevertheless, Jodorowsky was dissatisfied. "The theater in Mexico is definitely dead," he told an interviewer in 1968. "The only way to revive it would be for theater people to let themselves be jailed, to provoke scandals as I did six years ago." He inveighed against the timidity of Spanish literature, called again for a theater that would directly change people's lives, and dismissed his current productions as hack work. "I have directed many plays simply for clothing and food, while I am filming a movie in which I am totally involved.... Better to put your efforts into a film, so that if it is censored, it can be stored in cans. It may sit for 20 years, but one day it is screened."The film to which he referred was Fando and Lis, an adaptation of an Arrabal play that he had first directed in Paris. For the movie, Jodorowsky kept only Arrabal's basic situation-the journey of Fando and his paralytic girl friend, Lis, through trash heap and desert to the unreachable city of Tar-and added his own specifics. Childhood flashbacks were interspersed with bizarrely sadistic vignettes. At one point a blind old man drew blood from Lis's arm, poured it into a wine glass, and drank it down. "Everything was real," Jodorowsky later asserted. "The physical violence, each drop of blood." (Well, perhaps not everything-when Lis died at the end of the film, her body was devoured by her moumers.) The movie, which cost some $300,000, was largely underwritten by the wealthy father of one of Jodorowsky's students. According to Juan Lopez Moctezuma, another Mexico City avant-gardist involved in the project (and the future director of such cheap horror films as Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary and Dr. Tarr's Torture Galcten), Sancho and Lis was "made at a killing pace,"mainly on weekends.In Mexico, as elsewhere, 1968 was a year of violent-albeit short-lived-political turmoil. Police and students clashed all that summer in confrontations that left hundreds dead and received worldwide media attention, amplified by the near simultaneous Olympic Games in Mexico City. Fando and Lis premiered at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival shortly after the Mexican army crushed the student movement with a bloody, unprovoked massacre in downtown Mexico City. In the tense atmosphere, the film became a cause celebre and even provoked a riot. ("The army had to intervene to protect us," Montezuma remembered.) The scandal contributed to the suspension of the festival itself.Although banned in Mexico, Fando and Lis was cut by thirteen minutes and released in New York in early 1970 to mainly negative reviews. (More than a few critics compared the film unfavorably to Fellini's 'Satyricon' which had also recently opened.) Nevertheless, Fando and Lis proved to be Jodorowsky's entry ticket into the Mexican film industry. The film's local notoriety enabled him to raise the $400,000 he needed to make a second, even more provocative, movie. But this time his distribution strategy was different. There was no immediate attempt to open the film in Mexico. Instead, in the fall of 1970, Jodorowsky

arrived in New York, carrying a print of El Topo under his arm.Ben Barenholtz, the owner of the Elgin, first saw El Topo at a private screening at the Museum of Modem Art. "Half the audience walked out, but I was fascinated by it," he recalls. "I thought it was a film of its time." Barenholtz attempted to purchase the American rights and, failing that, persuaded El Topo's novice distributor, music producer Alan Douglas, to begin previewing the film midnights at the Elgin.As the onetime manager of the Village Theater (a sort of bargain-basement counterculture Carnegie Hall which later became the Fillmore East), Barenholtz knew his audience. He figured that the midnight showings during the week-1:00 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays-would attract hipsters, encourage a sense of "personal discovery," and stimulate word of mouth. On all three counts, his instincts were sensationally correct. El Topo premiered on the night of December 18, 1970, and ran continuously, seven nights a week, through the end of June 1971. There was practically no advertising-not even a poster, aside from an usher's crudely drawn sign outside the theater-and, for most of the run, no mention of the film in the daily press. Nevertheless, from January on, the Elgin's phone never stopped ringing. El Topo was doing turnaway business ($4,000 a week, Variety reported on March 10) and virtually subsidizing the entire theater. "Within two months, the limos lined up every night," Barenholtz remembers. "It became a must-see item."The burgeoning cult (which was abetted by the Elgin management's canny refusal to clear the house after the premidnight show and resigned tolerance of marijuana consumption in the balcony) finally went public in late March when Glenn O'Brien published an ecstatic report in the Village Voice. "It's midnight mass at the Elgin," the O'Brien piece began. Cocteau's Atwood of a Poet has just ended and the Wdit for El Topo is a brief grope for comfort before sinking back into fantastic stillness. The audience is young. It applauded Cocteau's sanguine dream as though he were in the theatre, but as credits appear on the screen, it settles again into rapt attention. They've come to see the lightãand the screen before them is illumined by an abstract landscape of desert and skyãand the ritual begins again.... Jodorowsky is here to confess; the young audience is here for communion.By this time, El Topo had begun to garner the prestige of such hippie texts as J. R. R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings', Robert Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land', Herman Hesse's 'Steppenwolf', R. Crumb's "Mr. Natural," and Carlos Castaneda's 'The Teachings of Don Juan'. More profound than Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Ed Topo captured the countercultural imagination like no movie since Stanley Kubrick's 2001. The Los Angeles Free Press called it "the greatest film ever made," Changes found it "a work of incomprehensible depth." Dennis Hopper was said to be studying El Topo as he edited his follow-up to Easy Rider, The Last Movie. Indeed, both he and Peter Fonda had offered to appear in Jodorowsky's next film. By late May, the New York Times dispatched Vincent Canby to investigate the phenomenon which, ask Canby put it, had more than once emptied Elaine's (a fashionable literary saloon) "at that point in the evening when the more aged merry-makers face the alternative of either going home or getting into fights at the bar." The critic was not impressed. He called Jodorowsky an intellectual William Randolph Hearst and El Topo his San Simeon. Actually, the "uncritical reverence" of the Elgin audience seemed to interest Canby more than the film. I was amazed when, at the end of the screening there was so little audience response. I would have assumed that a film with this much underground reputation would have prompted cheers. There was some desultory applause, but most of thepeople around me

seemed to want to be told whether it was good or bad, if not what it really meant. It's difficult, especially at three o'clock in the morning, to admit that you've been conned.O'Brien was so taken with his perception of the El Topo screenings as a surrogate mass that he assumed Jodorowsky was himself a Catholic: "As a good Catholic, as only a fallen-away Catholic can be, Jodorowsky makes his ritual perform the universe.""It would be a terrible mistake," Canby concluded, "to show the movie at an earlier hour." Canby's piece provoked a host of angry letters to the Times (one reader saw the film as a protest against the war in Vietnam, another wrote to say that he had attended the film eight times and each viewing was more powerful than the last, a third compared Jodorowsky to Shakespeare and Picasso). The newspaper felt compelled to print a lengthy defense of El Topo by art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who called it "a monumental work of filmic art." Among the Elgin regulars that spring was John Lennon, whom Barenholtz recalls seeing at three or four screenings. Lennon had just returned from the Cannes Film Festival, where he and Yoko Ono had exhibited their films and been knocked out by Arrabal's first feature, Viva la Muerte. The ex-Beatle wanted his manager, Allen Klein, to purchase the rights to Arrabal's film but, after he saw El Topo, Lennon changed his mind. In June, Klein's Abkco Films bought El Topo and immediately withdrew the film from the Elgin, where it was still selling out seven nights a week. Klein had big plans for Jodorowsky: "My whole idea was to build him up as an international director." At the same time that he acquired El Topo, Klein signed Jodorowsky to an exclusive contract."We must forget the idea of making it with Broadway cinemas," Jodorowsky had declaimed a few months earlier. "In five years, those theaters will be used exclusively for showing erotic film pamphlets to propagandize war." Nevertheless, in November 1971, while Jodorowsky was working on the script of The Holy Mountain, Klein rented a block-long billboard off Times Square at $60,000 a month, plastered it with Jodorowsky's name, leased a Broadway theater, and gave El Topo its belated, official New York premiere.By then, five Manhattan movie houses had instituted regular midnight screenings. The Elgin, which had experimented with a number of different midnight attractions after El Topo was unceremoniously yanked, was showing Peter Bogdanovich's Targets: the St. Marks was halfway through a ten-week run of Viva La Muerte, the Waverly (where George Romero's Night of the L.ûving Dead had just concluded a twenty five-week midnight stand) was premiering another horror film, Equinox; and the midtown Bijou-a theater specializing in Japanese movies-had added Night of the Living Dead to their midnight standby, Freaks, while uptown at the Olympia, the Brazilian black comedy, Macunaime, was approaching the end of its nine-week engagement.The film received mixed notices from New York's mainstream reviewers (one of whom noted a number of "kids in capes and wide-brimmed hats, the 'El Topo freaks,'" at the Broadway premiere). A few critics were disturbed by the idea that some of El Topo's gaudy carnage and display of physical deformity was meant to be taken humorously. This mixture of horror and comedy was part of Jodorowsky's surrealism-derived Panic esthetic, but it had its equivalent elsewhere in the counterculture. By titling her New Yorker review "El Topo-Head Comics," Pauline Kael linked El Topo to both drug consumption and the "head" or "underground" comics of R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and others. Rock aside, these comics were the purest (and most scurrilous) expression of the counterculture: availing themselves of the freedom their medium allowed, as well as the ready connection between "doodling" and unconscious desire, underground cartoonists routinely trafficked in grotesque violence, baroque sexual transgression, and freakish deformity (albeit with less

metaphysical pretension than Jodorowsky). Head comics existed to violate all American taboos; as Leslie Fiedler later observed, they "made everything the 1950s found monstrous the norm." hive years a professional cartoonist, Jodorowsky was neither unaware nor unappreciative of their existence: indeed, he told one interviewer that he would like to collaborate with Crumb. Kael's impression of El Topo's acolytes was somewhat more sinister than Canby's had been: "The mostly young audience sat there quietly-occasionally laughing at a particularly garish murder or mutilation-while the few older people staggered out in disgust." Here, the generational battle lines were clearly drawn. O'Brien, for example, had rhapsodized over El Topo's violence as though it had been performed by the Living Theater, if not the Rolling Stones: Blood spurts and gushes, it is smeared over faces, it rouges lips and paints the scenery. The audience has never seen so much blood, even in streets filled with danger and death, and so it is intoxicated, shocked and thrilled. El Topo is a killer, yet he is a holy man. Like Zarathustra, he wants to overcome all men. He is a seeker who seeks to overcome his masters. And blood is the sacramental by which El Topo soars/falls towards enlightenment.But for Keel, who, four years earlier, had made her national reputation in her first New Yorker piece by defending Arthur Penn's Bonnie end Clyde against the charge of excessive violence, Jodorowsky was simply pandering to his youthful audience, a view that many of the director's numerous pronouncements do nothing to assuage. (Asked if he would want spectators to be high while watching the film, Jodorowsky-who had more than once made his disdain for marijuana known-replied, "Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'd demand them to be.") Kael felt that Jodorowsky's "fundamental amorality" wasn't even an "honest amorality." He's an exploitation filmmaker, but he glazes everything with a useful piety. It's the violence plus the unctuous prophetic tone that makes El Topo a heavy trip .... Jodorowsky has come up with something new: exploitation filmmaking joined to sentimentalityãthe sentimentality of the counter-culture.(In this, Jodorowsky's major precursor-if not his role model-was Dr. Timothy Leary, who had attached a similar piety to the use of LSD. The original view of acid pioneers like Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had been that the hallucinogen was a new kind of crazy fun; it was Leary, their East Coast counterpart, who turned the drug into a sacrament and invested its ingestion with the trappings of a religion. Of course, rock music, too, was widely held to be a proselytizing force that would serve to "turn on" the world to counterculture values.)Still, whatever else it was, El Topo was in no way as stupid or cynical as most of the Hollywood movies which, with varying degrees of success, attempted to address the youth market. Jodorowsky's connection with his audience was far more a matter of shared interests than speculative demographics. In The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak cites the syllabus of a particular course offered by the London "Antiuniversity" in 1968 as the quintessential embodiment of the hippie world view. Under the rubric "From Comic Books to the Dance of Shiva: Spiritual Amnesia and the Physiology of Estrangement," the course proposed itself as "a free-wheeling succession of open-ended situations" including "Exploration of Inner Space, de-conditioning of the human robot, significance of psycho-chemicals, and the transformation of Western European Man." "On-going vibrations" were "highly relevant," and the reading list comprised Marx; Artaud; Gurdjieff; Reich; the indologist Heinrich Zimmer; Gnostic, Sufi, and Tantric texts; "autobiographical accounts of madness and ecstatic states of consciousness"; and Pop Art. ("Orse notes the bizarre but cunning association of the comic strip and high religion,"

Roszak observes, presaging Kael's critique of Jodorowsky.) In the context of this fanatically eclectic prospectus, El Topo which its maker called "a library of all the books I love"-carried the cultural clout of T. S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland'.By 1971, the counterculture had lost the euphoria of the late sixties and was beginning to experience a dissolution into the sullen privatism of the 197O's. In this light, the messianic revenge fantasy that El Topo offered was a complex one-directed against both an evil social order and a faltering spiritual authority.Rather remarkably, none of El Topo's American exegetes seem to have made the connection between the film's title and Karl Marx's celebrated image of the revolution as a "red mole." Even more surprisingly, no one appears to have linked the figure of El Topo to that of his contemporary near-look-alike, Charles Manson. Manson's 1970 arrest for the previous summer's Tate-La Bianca murders presented the counterculture with a thorny ideological problem. Not everyone in the Movement was as eager to embrace Manson as were the ultraleft Weathermen who declared 1970 "The Year of the Fork," in reference to the kitchen implement that the killers of Leo La Bianca plunged into his stomach. As David Felton and David Dalton observed in a lengthy piece on the Manson "family," first published in Rolling Stone in June 1970: The underground press in general has assumed kind of a paranoid-schizo attitude toward Manson, undoubtedly hypersensitive to the relentless gloating of the cops who, after a five year search, finally found a longhaired devil you could love to hate.... The question that seemed to split underground editorial minds more than any other was simply: Is Manson a hippie or isn't he?El Topo was conceived and scripted before the world had ever heard of Manson, but the film appeared less than six months after the specter of his LSD commune run amok began to haunt the counterculture. Thus, Jodorowsky's movie served to comfort its original audience by investing hippie violence with a religious aura.If the film's devotees identified with the "holy killer' in the first and second sections of the movie, by the third he presented himself as their savior-the champion, quite literally, of the freaks. Freaks, after all, had enjoyed universal currency as a self-descriptive countercullurdl lerln since at leusl 1967. ("That's what we call ourselves," says one of the first longhairs interviewed in the counterculture's Triumph of the Will, the three-hour Woodstock.)Significantly the second film to enjoy a lengthy midnight run in New York-starting barely a month after El Topo established itself at the Elgin- was itself Tod Browning's 1932 Freaks, a movie in which the denizens of a circus sideshow revenge themselves on the normals who hurt and exploit them.On the countercultural use of the term fry, Leslie Fiedler has observed that the expression "betrays an undercurrent of self-hatred, nature enough in a group of rebels drawn from the least violent, most educated, most self-deprecating segment of our society, the suburban bourgeoisie."What other way to take El Topo's penultimate massacre-in which the innocent freaks are destroyed by degenerate frontier capitalists-than as an apocalyptic vision of the end of the counterculture? And despite the fact that he wore black silk undershorts with holes for his testicles and a green circle stitched around his anus "to make sure" he "wouldn't act lice John Wayne," Jodorowsky played El Topo as perhaps the most potent counterculture hero to ever appear on screen. Actually-although he seldom spoke of it (or, to be fair, was never asked about it) Jodorowsky had been around for the violent end of the Mexican student movement at

Tlateloco (the Plaza of the Three Cultures) in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, when soldiers, acting on a prearranged signal from government operatives, fired round after round into a peaceful (if unauthorized) student rally, killing scores of men, women, and children. Although the memory of this Mexican mega-Kent State had little currency in the United States, it is interesting that years after El Topo appeared here, a rumor spread that Jodorowsky's first film had been a documentary of this massacre. Dispelling the story in a 1980 interview, Jodorowsky explained that while he never made such a film, "the reality is that I was there."My wife was playing in a theatre in the some place where they killed the students at that time. Then, I went about half an hour later to find my wife and I started to feel the ambiance. All the people in the taxi were scared....there was a big silence and the dogs were barking. It was one of the weird psychologicai experiences I've had. Death was in the air. It's true. It's like with animals. When a large quantity of human beings are killed, all the town is scared and they don't know why.Recognizing El Topo's "commercialized surrealism," Keel observed that "the avant-garde devices that once fascinated a small bohemian group because they seemed a direct pipeline to the occult and 'the marvelous' now reach the mass bohemianism of youth." Actually, the counterculture was in many respects popularized, updated, mass-produced surrealism. Where the surrealists had prized dreams, trance states and automatic writing as paths to the unconscious, the counterculture substituted psychedelic drugs and various modes of meditation. Indeed, surrealists like Rene Daumal, a poet who left the movement to experiment with hashish, study Gurdjieff, and learn Sanskrit (and whose novel Mount Analogue wass an obvious model for Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain), or even Artaud, who became immersed in Tarot, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and peyote, were virtual proto-hippies. The more politically, aesthetically, and pharmaceutically radical elements of the counterculture shared the surrealists' belief that the transcendence of ego functions, the blurring of binary oppositesãdream/daily life, work/leisure, social/ politicalãand the valorization of taboo practices could combine to change reality itself.If rock had superseded movies as the privileged form of popular art, the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison bore more than a passing resemblance to the poetry of such teenaged proto-surrealists as Arthur Rimbaud and Lautreamont. (The first album released by the Jefferson Airplane was titled Surrealistic Pillow, while the cover art of innumerable rock records were blatant pastiches of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte.) Both the counterculture and the surrealists repudiated Western rationality, exalting Asia and the cult of the self-destructive adolescent. Their two great values were Love and Revolution, what Susan Sontag called "the politics of joy." The call of the first surrealist manifesto to "open the prisons, disband the army" could just as well have been issued by the counterculture. On the other hand, such counterculture media manipulations as the 1967 attempt to exorcise and levitate the Pentagon and the showering of the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills, would surely have met with the surrealists' approval.But Kael was not totally amiss in suggesting that Jodorowsky's was a reactionary surrealism. Unlike Luis Bunuel, whose surrealist techniques cracked open conventional pieties, Jodorowsky uses those techniques to support a sanctimonious view: Man-God tempted by evil, power-hungry woman abandons righteous ways and then, with the love of a good woman, becomes spiritual man, only to learn that the world is not ready for his spirituality.

(Breton, after all, had remarked that "all that is atrocious, nauseating, fetid, vulgar, is summed up in one word, God.") However, at the same time that Jodorowsky exploited the surrealist vocabulary developed by Artaud, Bunuel, Dali, Magritte, and others, he remained true in his fashion to the movement's essence. For, unlike other artistic schools, surrealism was not meant to be painted or written so much as lived."When I direct a film," Jodorowsky insisted, "everybody, myself include, falls into such trances that there is dead silence, because our lives are at stake." In El Topo, "there was no difference between filming and reality. It was a very religious trip." The film contained "no techniques," Jodorowsky maintained. There were "no dissolves, no effects, nothing. I filmed things as they were." Jodorowsky claimed that when the script (one is tempted to say, the ritual, which began with the burial of Brontis's teddybear and the slaughter of six burros in the opening scene, and ended with the burning of a human skeleton covered with beefsteak) called for El Topo to rape Mara, he dismissed the entire crew except for the cameraman and actually raped her. In short, the film El Topo, like the performance Sacramental Melodrama, was merely the end product of a specific spiritual adventure in the life of Alexandro Jodorowsky. The whole film was shot in consecutive order: "I film it like the Odyssey, like the conquest of Alexander the Great. I started out and kept going."The success of El Topo did nothing to diminish Jodorowsky's ego. "I want to be the Cecil B. De Mille of the Underground," he told the Los Angeles Free Press. "This I really want. I like Cecil B. De Mille. Fantastic!" Elsewhere, he confided that he expected to become enlightened while making The Holy Mountain for producer Allen Klein, adding, "Maybe I am a prophet. I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies." Before beginning The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky and his wife, Valerie, went a week without sleep under the direction of a Japanese Zen master. Then they took the Arica training developed by Oscar Ichazo. The son of a Bolivian general, Ichazo was no less eclectic than Jodorowskyãhis system was an amalgam of Zen, Sufi, and yoga exercises with a theoretical overlay derived from alchemy, the Kabala, the I Ching, the teachings of Gurdjieff, and other esoteric doctrines. Ichazo was a year younger than Jodorowsky and their careers had some interesting parallels. At the same time that Jodorowsky was filming El Topo, Ichazo established his first institute in Arica, Chile, 150 miles up the coast from Jodorowsky's birthplace. Shortly after El Topo made Jodorowsky a counterculture superstar, Ichazo moved his Arica Institute to New York, where he attracted numerous acolytes among the hipper show-biz intelligentsia. The main actors for The Holy Mountain (among whom Jodorowsky had hoped to include John Lennon) were required to take three months of Arica training, after which they spent a month living communally in Jodorowsky's home. Only then, in the spring of 1972, was the film ready to start shooting.Budgeted at $750,000, The Holy Mountain was filmed entirely in Mexico. As with El Topo, the scenes were shot in consecutive order. Jodorowsky, his hair dyed platinum blond and bound back in a long braid, starred as well as directed. The cast and crew seemed inspired by a mystical sense of purpose. "You know, I think this is the most important thing going on in the world today," one bearded production assistant told the Rolling Stone reporter who visited the set. "At least, it's the most far out." Ichazo frequently dropped in on the shooting and two Arica group leaders were assigned to the project, standing by to provide any necessary "Mongolian massages" with a wooden spoon. Later, Jodorowsky soured on Arica. "You want me to tell you about Oscar?" he asked a Vilhge Voice journalist after The Holy Mountain's lone Los Angeles showing, "I will tell you." He comes

to me in Mexico. "We will make a great movie together," says Oscar. He will train me, he will train my actors. You want to know of what his training consists? Oscar's idea of training is two days in a motel room with me taking L.S.D. I want you to know I don't need Oscar to take L.S.D. in a motel room, I do that plenty enough on my own....Oscar Is the continuation of Gurdjieff, but so what? What is the problem with these damn gurus is they want to be immortal, to have the life of God. I am an anarchist mystic. Good for Buddha to be Buddha, not for me.Desipte Jodorowsky's inability to get everything he wanted (including a real corpse to hack apart during the opening credits), the first hour of The Holy Mountain is arguably the best moviemaking of his career. Thereafter-despite the canny recycling of his elaborate studio set-the film becomes increasingly schematic and dull.The Holy Mountain opens with a Christlike thief crucified in the desert. A crowd of naked children pelt him with stones but the Thief climbs down from his cross and frightens them off. Then he shares a joint with an armless dwarf and leaves for Mexico City. A vast marketplace is crowded with scores of flayed, crucified lambs.(During the interview, the journalist reported, a bearded young man spotted Jodorowsky and threw himself at the filmmaker's feet, pleading for the privilege of serving him. "It is fate," Jodorowsky remarked, shaking his head. "Write me a letter," he told his prostrate admirer, and beat a hasty retreat.)Troops of soldiers are executing people in the streetãtheir blood flows blue and, in some cases, birds fly out of their wounds. An American tourist is filming everything with a super-eight camera and doesn't even stop when one of the soldiers backs his wife up against the wall and rapes her. Abruptly, the plaza is taken over by the "Great Toad and Chameleon Circus," whose colors are red, white, and blue. In the film's most spectacular set piece (and an homage to Antonin Artaud, who proposed a theater piece on the same theme), the conquest of Mexico is enacted by lizards dressed as monks and conquistadors, crawling around models of the Aztec pyramids, like an Escher army on display. Blood covers everything, a plague of frogs is unleashed, and ultimately, the set is blown up. In a series of short cartoonlike vignettes (with no dialogue except for an occasional stylized "quack"), the Thief is imprisoned in a hall of mirrors with hundreds of plaster Christs; soldiers in gas masks and men dressed as nuns parade through the street; and a group of whores pose in front of a cathedral. An old man shuffles by, pulls out his eyeball, and tenderly hands it to a little girl. The whores mock the Thief, except for one-leading a chimpanzee, who bathes his feet.Obscurely searching, the Thief ascends through a drainpipe into a vast white interior. He approaches Jodorowsky, who is dressed in white and wearing a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat. Rising from a throne that is flanked by two rams (and a black woman whose naked body is inscribed with Hebrew letters), Jodorowsky knocks the Thief to the ground, cuts his neck, and pulls out a chicken. "Do you want gold?" he asks in heavily accented English. After the Thief has taken a bath with a hippopotamus, Jodorowsky places one of his visitor's turds in a bell jar, puts on phylacteries and a prayer shawl, and transforms the feces to gold. Jodorowsky explains to the Thief that the giant Tarot cards on the floor of his palace represent the "most powerful people on the planet." The film goes on to offer short background sketches on each. One is a cosmetics manufacturer, another a munitions queen, the rest include a wealthy art dealer, a financial wizard, the chief of police, and an architect. Each is associated with a different planet in the solar system. Jodorowsky plans to lead the six "powerful people," the black woman (who represents Earth), and the Thief to the

summit of the Holy Mountain, where nine "Immortals" are said to make their home. To purify themselves, the group burns all of their money: After several more rituals among some Indian ruins and a scene in which Jodorowsky performs Christ's miracles of the loaves, the group gets on a boat for Lotus Island.There, they are greeted by a simpering man in lederhosen who takes them to a twist party at the Pantheon Bar. Ignoring a hippie in a stars-and-stripes hat and an LSD gobbling devout who tells them that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a "trip," the group sets off across a mountainous waste. By this time they have completely shaved their heads and dressed up in identical turquoise sweatshirts. As they scramble up the summit, the whore with the chimpanzee reappears and joins them. The ascent is enlivened with various visionsãa pack of savage dogs, a rainstorm of money, a mass of tarantulas crawling over a naked body, a hag with a bloody sword, a hermaphrodite sage with snarling leopard heads for breasts. One seeker has to cut off his frostbitten finger, another's crotch begins oozing blood.At the summit of the mountain, the group sees nine cowled figures sitting around a stone to. "You don't need a master now, goodbye," Jodorowsky tells his followers. He instructs the Thief to behead him but somehow a lamb gets sacrificed instead. Then Jodorowsky blesses the union of the Thief and the Whore (and, presumably, the chimp), sending them back to his palace. The remaining followers approach the stone table to find that the Immortals are only dummies. Taking their chairs, they sit around the table laughing. "If we have not attained immortality, we have attained reality," Jodorowsky tells them. "This is maya." Toppling the table, he instructs the camera to zoom back. As it does, it reveals lights, microphones, and technicians, a gesture which in the hundred-year context of artistic modernism, can best be seen as hackneyed but felt.The Holy Mountain was finished in the nick of time for the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, where it was eagerly anticipated but, for the most part, coolly received. Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe, a grotesque comedy in which a segment of the bourgeoisie literally eats itself to death, was the festival's succes de scandale, and Klein picked up its American rights. Meanwhile, Jodorowsky trimmed twenty minutes from The Holy Mountain (eliminating as much dialogue as he could) and both films were scheduled to open in New York that fall. Klein was uncertain about The Holy Mountain's prospects, but he had great hopes for La Grande Bouffe. Burned by its subsequent failure and determined, he says, to "protect" Jodorowsky from the critics, Klein restricted The Holy Mountain's New York run to Friday and Saturday midnights at the Waverly Theater. (Elsewhere, the film was released as a double bill with El Topo. In a few key markets, notably Los Angeles, it was not released at all.) But, despite Klein's disappointment, The Holy Mountain cannot be considered a failure, at least as a midnight movie. After premiering at the Waverly on November 29, 1973, it played the theater continuously for the next sixteen months, through the first week of April 1975. In a sense, the final scene of The Holy Mountain, which evidently disconcerted many of Jodorowsky's followers with its mixture of "Mr. Natural" and Marcel Duchamp, proved prophetic of his subsequent career. However unwillingly, the director did pass from cinema back into life. Asi Hablaba Zaratustra, an adaptation of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, which Jodorowsky staged in Mexico City immediately before he began work on El Topo, ends with a similar exhortation to. his audience: "You have seen and you have heard. Now is the moment to act. Zarathustra has ended. Now you begin."After finishing The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky had hoped to make Mr. Blood and Miss Bones, a "pirate film" for children. But Klein was not interested in bankrolling a PG rated

film and instead proposed that Jodorowsky adapt Pauline Reage's notorious paean to female masochism, The Story of O. The project (which Kenneth Anger had unsuccessfully hoped to realize in Paris a decade and a half before) was ultimately rejected by Jodorowsky becauseãaccording to Kleinãthe director felt it was too commercial.Subsequently (after the Panic Movement was "officially" disbanded), Jodorowsky became involved in an ambitious attempt to film Frank Herbert's science-fiction cult novel, Dune. A French American co-production, Dune was to star Jodorowsky's son, Brontis, with featured performances by Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, and Gloria Swanson. By late 1976, more than a year after Dune had been announced, the film's American backers pulled out, despite having already sunk a reported $2 million into production costs. Ultimately, the entire project had to be scrapped and the rights were purchased by Dino Di Laurentis. Never at a loss, Jodorowsky remained in Paris, working on a novel, providing scripts for the science-fiction cartoonist Moebius, and telling one interviewer, "Now I am into aroma therapy with a doctor who heals illnesses using essential oils of odorant plants."Jodorowsky did complete one other film during the 1970s, a French production, Tusk, described in a Variety item as "a G-rated epic about the entwined fate of an English girl and a rogue elephant born in India on the same day." Shot completely in the south Indian state of Karnataka at a cost of $5 million, the movie featured 110 pachyderms. India reminded Jodorowsky of Mexico: "Almost the same climate, almost the same food.... I ate only elephant food for four months." Tusk was scheduled to open in the United States during the summer of 1980. It never has. Variety reviewed it that year at Filmex, the Los Angeles film festival, as "a two-ton turkey . . . grandiose, pretentiously simple, tonally inconsistent"ãand warned that "turgid b.o. looms." Allen Klein, who had no more than a friendly interest in the film, considers it "unreleasable." As of this writing, Jodorowsky's American reputation has evaporated along with the counterculture that nourished it. Even El Topo has lapsed into obscurity, in part because of Klein's stipulation that the film be booked with The Holy Mountain. According to Jodorowsky's first American prophet, Ben Barenholtz, El Topo "was strictly a product of the '60s. It wouldn't make a dime today." But Klein is not so sure. More than eleven years after El Topo first emptied Elaine's, he is still toying with the idea of rereleasing it in a dubbed English version: "I might go back to the Waverly yet," he muses, raising the spectre of midnight nostalgia. If Jodorowsky was dismayed by his failure to repeat El Topo's American success, he wasn't letting on. "Listen . . . I am not a normal filmmaker," he told poet Uri Hertz the day after Tusk's Filmex screening. "What I am doing is making my masterwork, which is my soul." And anyway, "we are occidental. We don't experience the elephant. We experience the Cadillac."