The Great Movies III

The film is also populated, as Jodorowsky's films are, by physically challenged characters; amputees, people with Down syndrome, dwarfs, those whose bodies end at their trunks, men who talk with women's voices, women who talk with men's, a man without legs riding on the shoulders of a man without arms, and one of the most persistent images in the director's work, a symbiosis between a person without arms and another who stands close behind and allows his arms to act as the other's.

Many of these have been exiled to a cave inside a mountain. El Topo, threatened with death, bargains to free them from their cave and digs a tunnel into the mountain. Generations of inbreeding have presumably produced the birth defects on view; no word about how the cave people have been able to eat over the years.

No word, because they are not presented as plausible characters anyway, but as symbols; the mole will dig away from the sun to free them, meaning-what? You tell me. And think again about that naked child in the early scene. Why naked? El Topo has serapes and cloaks aplenty to shield the child from cold or sun. But a man riding with a clothed child would simply represent, well, man and child on horse. If the child is naked, it becomes a Child, a symbol of itself.

Reviews of El Topo tend to be infuriating because their authors, myself included, fail to make coherent sense of the film and are reduced to laundry lists of its ingredients. "These quests," I wrote in my original review, "supply most of the film's generous supply of killings, tortures, disembowelments, hangings, boilings, genocides, and so on." Evocative but scarcely helpful. The film exists as an unforgettable experience, but not as a comprehensible one.

Jodorowsky (born 1929) is a man of many talents, all at the service of his bizarre imagination. At Cannes 1988 he handed me a typewritten autobiography: "Was born in Bolivia, of Russian parents, lived in Chile, worked in Paris, was the partner of Marcel Marceau, founded the `Panic' movement with Fernando Arrabal, directed loo plays in Mexico, drew a comic strip, made El Topo, and now lives in the United States-having not been accepted anywhere, because in Bolivia I was a Russian, in Chile I was a Jew, in Paris I was a Chilean, in Mexico I was French, and now, in America, I am a Mexican."

The 2007 DVD collection of his films (El Topo, Fando y Lis, The Holy Mountain, La Cravate, but not Santa Sangre, which is separately available) brings him back into focus as a great eccentric original.

I talked with Jodorowsky at Cannes in 1988 and 1989. The first year, he said he had to make Santa Sangre, a film about women in a religious cult who cut off their arms to atone for the women he, Jodorowsky, had murdered (not literally; you'll have to look up that interview on my Web site).

The second year, after the Cannes premiere of Santa Sangre, I asked him why El Topo had been out of circulation. He blamed Allen Klein, the man who had put the film in circulation in the first place.

"He's awaiting my death," Jodorowsky said. "He believes he can make more money from the film after I am dead. He says my film is like wine-it grows better with age. He is waiting like a vulture for me to die."

He elaborated: "For fifteen years, I've tried to talk to him by telephone, and he's always busy. He eats the smoking meat. Smoking meat ... you know? From the delicatessen?"

Smoked meat?

"Yes. When I call him by telephone they say to me he's eating the smoking meat. I cannot speak with him because he is eating the smoking meat. He's eating for fifteen years the smoking meat."

I looked out over the Mediterranean and pondered that image. A man who is eating for fifteen years the smoking meat. One more image, or perhaps a symbol, I could not explain.

erner Herzog's films do not depend on "acting" in the conventional sense. He is most content when he finds an actor who embodies the essence of a character, and he studies that essence with a fascinated intensity. Consider the case of Bruno S., a street performer and forklift operator whose last name was long concealed. He is the center of two Herzog films, The Enigma ofKaspar Hauser (1974) and Stroszek (1977). The son of a prostitute, he was locked for twenty-three years in mental institutions, even though Herzog believes he was never insane.

Bruno is, however, very strange, bull-headed, with the simplicity and stubbornness of a child. In Kaspar Hauser, he looks anywhere he wants to, sometimes even craftily sideways at the camera, and then it feels not like he's looking at the audience but through us. He can possibly play no role other than himself, but that is what Herzog needs him for. On the commentary track Herzog says he was vilified in Germany for taking advantage of an unfortunate, but if you study Bruno sympathetically you may see that, by his lights, he is taking advantage of Herzog. On his commentary track, Herzog describes him as "the unknown soldier of the cinema."