Midnight Movies Film Series - El Topo
Thursday, August 31, 2006, 07:00 PM

The Department of Speech Communication pleased to present its Fall Film Series every Thursday evening this semester on the theme of Midnight Movies. 

The screenings are free and open to the public. Brief introductions will be offered before each screening. Please join us!

August 31 - El Topo

The voice over from the original trailer: “Be prepared to live the most wonderful experience of your life. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film classic, El Topo. El Topo is not a western. It goes far beyond any western. El Topo is not a religious film. It contains all religions. It is a mystic film. El Topo is bloody. It is tender. El Topo is miraculous. And terrible. It’s funny. It’s violent. El Topo is monstrous. And cruel. El Topo is more than spectacle. It is an experience for all of your life.” Plot description: The gunfighter El Topo (“The Mole”) and his young son ride through a desert to a village, whose inhabitants have been massacred. Bandits are nearby, torturing and killing the survivors. El Topo rescues a woman (Mara), who leads him on a mission to find and defeat the four master gunmen of the desert. Leaving his son with a group of monks, El Topo and Mara complete the mission, accompanied by a mysterious woman in black. The women leave El Topo wounded in the desert, where he is found by a clan of deformed people who take him to the remote cavern where they live. Awakening years later, he goes with a dwarf woman to a nearby town, promising to dig a tunnel through which the cave-dwellers can escape. They find the town run by a vicious sheriff and home to a bizarre religious cult. El Topo's son, now a man, is a monk in the town. The completion of the tunnel leads El Topo, the townspeople, and the cave-dwellers to a bloody and tragic end.

--1970 125 minutes, in color

Praise: “El Topo can lay claim to being the greatest film ever made! Incredible! A visual masterwork! I’m not sure that it is possible in print to do justice to a description of the world of this film.” – Ken Rudolph, Los Angeles Free Press

“El Topo is an extraordinary movie! A phantasmagoric allegory of Western civilization. The film is superior for Jodorowsky’s impulse to satire and surrealism entertains while it slakes the popular thirst for blood.” – Paul D. Zimmerman, Newsweek

“El Topo is simply a monumental work of filmic art. One is astonished each time by patterns and shades of meaning never noticed before. It demands to be seen more than once!” – Peter Schjeldahl, The New York Times

For more information, contact Marc Leverette, Department of Speech Communication, 213C Eddy Building, 970-491-5886, marc.leverette@colostate.edu.