El Topo

Alejandro Jodorowsky - 1970
This, in mayn ways, looks a lot like a lot of films of its time, especially the American cinema, in Peckinpah ('The Wild Bunch' especially), and also in Leone and so on. This is the pretty flat canvas, zooming, or in this case perhaps more tracking, in and out with a wide angle lens. There are also, for all the pretty relaxed framings and sometimes not entirely smooth cameras, a penchant for central framing, very geometrical. Visually, we also have a lot of strong colours against the long horizontals, montomy of the sand.
Action here though is in what is being filmed. With pretty much a narrative, just surreal encounters reached. There is heavy use of symbolism, fetishism, often strong, comic book, quite deliberately unreal colours and images used. Sometimes people just start doing the darndest things. This is, in one sense, a little tiresome; rather like stripping Bunuel of what is actually Bunuel. But to be fair here there is a clear political accent, an attack, or rather a mockery of ways of life, practicies of racism and so on. This is counterculture. If rather too abstract to be really strong on this, well, it at least tries, rather more than can be said for some of what it has influenced.
Basically a melting plot of a kind of Christianity infued with Buddhist and Hindu leanings, this is really of its time; and not necessarilly too much the worse for that.