Legendary avant-garde-filmmaker-turned cartooner Alexandro Jodorowsy is profiled in the NY Sun as new prints of EL TOPO highlight the NY Film Festival:
Visiting this fall for the New York Film Festival’s revival screenings of the films, Mr. Jodorowsky was nonetheless an iconoclast, if a good deal stealthier in his soft-spoken expression. The three decades that have passed since his mystic gonzo epics became countercultural touchstones have made the filmmaker a legend, even as the movies seemed to vanish â traded by collectors as poorly dubbed bootleg videos, washy and incomplete. Legal issues between Mr. Jodorowsky and his former producer, the late Allen Klein, cast the films into limbo for all those years, but were resolved in 2004.Thus, a remastered, highdefinition video version of “El Topo” opens today at the IFC Center. Incorporating influences from tarot to the Bible to surrealism into a stupefying Western, Mr. Jodorowsky cast himself as the leather-clad gunman, El Topo (“the mole”), who ambles through a desert strewn with mystical symbols on an unnamed quest, leaving carnage and destruction in his wake.
Since his film heyday, Jodorowsky has collaborated with such folks as MOEBIUS on THE INCAL. The US arm of Humanoids released several of his books during their brief affair with DC Comics — the fact that it’s unlikely these GNs will be reprinted anywhere any time soon ensures that every time we make a book purge here at SBM, they stay on the shelf.
