"El Topo" - Mitternachtsfilme um halb 10

The new film series "Midnight movies at half past nine" is showing five films until August that became cult in the midnight screenings of the 70s. It starts with a movie that is fascinating and disturbing in many ways:

EL TOPO

MEX 1970. D: Alejandro Jodorowsky. D: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Robert John, Mara Lorenzio. 125 min. SpanOmdtU. FSK: 18

EL TOPO - a mixture of adventure and new age, horror and western, surreal, ultra-brutal, spiritual and full of allegorical elements, hit the zeitgeist and became a cult in the post-hippie scene. The director plays the "mole" ( = el topo) himself. He wanders through the desert with his son. When he comes across the bloody scene of a massacre, he decides to take revenge for the senseless killing and gets into a fight with bandits. After settling accounts with the henchmen, he castrates the mastermind. El Topo takes his slave Mara with him on his journey. He shows her how to survive in the wilderness using biblical examples. But Mara demands that the bounty hunter compete with the four masters of the desert...
An Italian western that becomes a philosophical-surreal-esoteric-psychedelic trip: "Like no other film before or since, EL TOPO presented itself to the counterculture as a spiritual initiation rite (if not a kind of Dionysian bloodbath): It appealed to their predilection for all things mysterious and found images for their collective paranoia." (J. Hoberman/J. Rosenbaum: Midnight Cinema. Cult films of the 60s and 70s)

Introduction: Harald Mühlbeyer

Info on the series: https://cinema-quadrat.de/filmreihen-mitternachtskino-um-halb-10/