Alejandro Jodorowsky, the “psychomagical realist” Chilean director and father of the midnight movie, will be the subject of our mini-retrospective.
From “The Psychomagical Realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky” by Eric Bensen in The New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2014:
Written, directed, scored by and starring Jodorowsky, “El Topo” was an ultraviolent Western with a potent mix of Eastern spirituality and European art house surrealism. For six months, beginning on Dec. 18, 1970, it played once a day at the Elgin Cinema in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, at midnight (1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday) — selling out virtually all its screenings and attracting a heady crowd of hippie-intellectual royalty. Dennis Hopper saw “El Topo,” loved it and recruited Jodorowsky to recut his next film. John Lennon saw it, returned several times and persuaded his manager, Allen Klein, to buy the distribution rights. Reviewers squabbled. The New York Times’s chief film critic, Vincent Canby, dismissed “El Topo” as a garish con, calling it a “rather grotesque, ego-salving San Simeon.” Another Times critic, Peter Schjeldahl, celebrated the film as “a vastly complex, genuinely profound comic allegory — a sort of bloody Latin American ‘Peer Gynt.’ ” Ken Rudolph from The Los Angeles Free Press was more to the point, calling “El Topo” “the greatest film ever made.” Jodorowsky had his own take: “If you are great, ‘El Topo’ is a great picture. If you are limited, ‘El Topo’ is limited”…
In the decades after the fabled run of “El Topo,” for which Jodorowsky was christened the “father of the midnight movie,” he faded in and out of the American cultural consciousness … But now Jodorowsky the filmmaker is legitimately back. “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” a documentary by the American director Frank Pavich about Jodorowsky’s two-year quest to adapt the Frank Herbert science-fiction novel, and “The Dance of Reality,” a trippy but big-hearted reimagining of the young Alejandro’s unhappy childhood in a Chilean town, will each make its stateside debut this spring.
April 24, 9:35 p.m., Bijou
April 26, 9:30 p.m., Bijou
Opens April 25 at Bijou Art Cinemas