El Topo is also Jodorowsky’s strange love letter to the Spaghetti Western. There is one scene that is reminiscent of the legendary three-way stand-off at the climax of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — released a few years before, 1966 — where El Topo faces up against three bandits responsible for a dreadful massacre. Like Leone, Jodorowsky uses a collage of increasingly more extreme close-ups of the gunslingers’ faces to ramp up the tension, but unlike Leone, who has Ennio Morricone’s classic score pulsating underneath the action, Jodorowsky utilises the slow, high-pitched squeal of a deflating balloon to echo the unspoken countdown that builds up to the quickdraw. It is a remarkably surreal scene — one that does not match up to Leone’s stylistic craft and innovation — but one that is able to rely on its own dramatic absurdity to succeed.

It is these absurd incongruities that make up most of the film’s kaleidoscopic mosaic of symbols and metaphors. El Topo owes as much to Leone as it does to the great surrealists, Buñuel and Dali. A head picture designed for those film fanatics who were spirituality awoken in the 60s. There is always something unexpected in the surrealist set-pieces, such as each of the duels with the four masters of the universe. Resonant images — such as a symbiosis between a person without arms and another without legs who is strapped behind, acting as the other’s arms — are done with vibrant imagination. In the vision of Jodorowsky, the desert — the archetypal setting of the Western — becomes a dreamscape, more in the manner of Dali’s most famous paintings than the iconic images of John Ford’s American fantasies. Jodorowsky continues the Western tradition of a central conflict between man and nature, both literally and figuratively, and it is this journey of self-discovery that is played out upon the sandswept surrealist stage. At one point, El Topo (or Jodorowsky?) proclaims: “I am God!” Later on, he retracts this statement: “I am not a god. I am a man.” The themes of the Western are presented as an echoic hallucinogenic trip where the boundary between man and nature begin to blur. It becomes unclear where El Topo’s internal struggle begins, and the desert ends.

There are a lot of ideas packed into this offbeat hotchpotch. To divulge the film’s entire meaning is a hopeless and equally thankless task. Perhaps this was Jodorowsky’s intention all along. It plays like a two-hour long collage painting that moves at 24 frames per second. To extract every particle of meaning in a single viewing is near impossible. Like some of those great postmodern collages, it is visually striking, yet often unwieldy in its presentation. Cohesion was clearly never Jodorowsky’s goal, and it is this imperfection that arguably makes it such a fascinating work of art. But the film often falls into the trap of tedious longueurs, and it seems that El Topo has been forced by a higher entity to spiral around the desert revisiting the same encounters again and again. It can at times be wild and thought-provoking, and at others portentous and taciturn, speaking loudly but not saying much.

Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement then is its ability to exist beyond the frames of film. It is a film that reaches back to a collective culture, borrowing elements from all walks of life, but also a film that pushes forward, bringing the entire medium along with it. El Topo not only sits comfortably on a list of essential cult films, but also comfortably in the cinematic canon. Its liberating effect broke down long-standing barriers that stood not only in the realm of art and cinema, but in society. In a film that runs as red as any seminal religious text — we witness castrations, beheadings, lynchings, and massacres — a modern myth is written that hopes to encompass history in its entirety, be that by evoking the stories through which it is told, or the images through which it is presented. Traditional narrative is not so important as visual spectacle. This is cinema in pure, unadulterated form: one of cinema’s greatest genres transposed onto the acid tab of the 1960s counterculture. Jodorowsky reaches out and places it on our tongue.