Cinema Klandestino Presents El Topo
-
Fri 4 July 2008 // 20:00
(Fri 4th / 8pm / £5/4)
(Alejandro Jodorowsky / 1971 / Mexico / 125 mins / Cert 18)
Off the back of the last sell-out event, Cinema Klandestino returns with another 35mm banger. To celebrate the re-release of Jodorovsky's 1970 cult classic El Topo we are having a party from 7pm - dress code is psychedelic Western and the film screening at 9pm.
El Topo is the landmark cult film that began the whole 'midnight movie' phenomenon in 70s New York. A quasi-Western head trip which transformed the way risk-taking audiences watched edgy underground films and how the industry learned to market them. New York cinema owner Ben Barenholtz first came across El Topo at the Museum of Modern Art. He booked the film to play seven nights a week at midnight in his run-down Elgin Cinema on 8th Avenue because, as the single ad he took out in The Voice put it, it was "too heavy to be shown any other way". El Topo regularly sold out every night for months, with many fans returning on a weekly basis.
The movie takes place in two parts. The first half is set in an unnamed spaghetti Western desert. El Topo tells his son that he is now seven years old, and must bury his first toy and a picture of his mother in the sand. The movie starts as El Topo plays his flute. The second half of the movie takes place years later, after El Topo is rescued by a band of deformed outcasts, saving him from death. The outcasts take El Topo to their underground community, where he, comatose, meditates on the four lessons for many years. When he awakes, he is 'born again,' decides to help the outcasts and together with a dwarven girl who looked after him while he was comatose, goes on a quest to free them from their subterranean prison ...
(Alejandro Jodorowsky / 1971 / Mexico / 125 mins / Cert 18)
Off the back of the last sell-out event, Cinema Klandestino returns with another 35mm banger. To celebrate the re-release of Jodorovsky's 1970 cult classic El Topo we are having a party from 7pm - dress code is psychedelic Western and the film screening at 9pm.
El Topo is the landmark cult film that began the whole 'midnight movie' phenomenon in 70s New York. A quasi-Western head trip which transformed the way risk-taking audiences watched edgy underground films and how the industry learned to market them. New York cinema owner Ben Barenholtz first came across El Topo at the Museum of Modern Art. He booked the film to play seven nights a week at midnight in his run-down Elgin Cinema on 8th Avenue because, as the single ad he took out in The Voice put it, it was "too heavy to be shown any other way". El Topo regularly sold out every night for months, with many fans returning on a weekly basis.
The movie takes place in two parts. The first half is set in an unnamed spaghetti Western desert. El Topo tells his son that he is now seven years old, and must bury his first toy and a picture of his mother in the sand. The movie starts as El Topo plays his flute. The second half of the movie takes place years later, after El Topo is rescued by a band of deformed outcasts, saving him from death. The outcasts take El Topo to their underground community, where he, comatose, meditates on the four lessons for many years. When he awakes, he is 'born again,' decides to help the outcasts and together with a dwarven girl who looked after him while he was comatose, goes on a quest to free them from their subterranean prison ...