El Topo was screened last week as part of Cinemathèque at the Mercury Cinema. This 1970 Mexican film, directed by the Chilean-French Alejandro Jodorowsky, was described in my brochure as “the ultimate Acid Western, the first midnight movie, a phenomenon of allusion and allegory, and one of the most important films of the Sixties counterculture.” Well. Considering that description, there was more plot, more violence and more torture than I expected, but a full fill of grand Western vistas and heavy symbolism.

Consider the first two scenes. In the first, a gunslinger takes his small son into the desert to bury his toys and declare himself a man. It’s visually striking, reaches for resonance and yet remains slightly absurd. In the second scene, the two ride through the aftermath of a massacre. Women and children lie dead but still bleeding, the men swing from nooses in the town church, and their animals have their guts spilled out. The sun beats down. It’s meant to be savage and it’s meant to motivate the gunslinger to moral action, but the lingering shots felt like torture voyeurism. Even hardened film-goers, such as my companion to the film, a fan of zombie films and Reservoir Dogs, found it hard to stomach. What has been seen cannot be unseen, after all.

The film follows the gunslinger (played by Jodorowsky) through various trials that may or may not lead towards sainthood. He must defeat the men who massacred the townsfolk. He must ride through the desert and face down four other master gunfighters. Then he is metaphorically reborn to help inbred villagers escape their underground prison. He is El Topo, “the mole”.

The landscapes are beautiful. The shot compositions are memorable (for good and ill). The dialogue is mystical and often beside the point. The disfigured and dwarf cast members are more human and less monstrous than the world they want to escape into. There is wanton eating of fruit. But the violence and torture left me thinking that this was a film I was glad to have seen, not a film I was glad to watch.

I was surprised to realise that El Topo is not actually that much of a departure from some other Westerns. The human blight amid starkly gorgeous scenery was not new. This world abandoned by God, without law, where only the gun matters – is this not a staple of the spaghetti western? Think of Tuco and Blondie in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, who abandon each other in the desert, to crawl half-dead across lovingly-shot empty dunes. What hell is this? Push it just a little further and a bit sideways and you might get El Topo.

This is an entertaining production of the old favourite by Agatha Christie. There’s a snowed-in guest house full of eccentrics and an inevitable murder. The first half plays up the comedy, the second half concentrates more on the drama. A few details of the script beggar belief, but otherwise this is a solid version of a minor Christie mystery.

One friend who accompanied me also saw the London production last year: she thought that the Adelaide show was the funnier and more memorable of the two.

Note that this is being performed at the Dunstan Playhouse, one of my favourite Adelaide theatres. You should get a good view from pretty much any seat.

Darryl Pfitzner Milika’s Sky, Land and Beyond: Expanding identity

Milika is an artist and keen amateur astronomer. His photography and mixed media work express a fascination with landscapes uniting land and sky. Some of the photographs are straight-up astronomical photos, while most of the rest depict reflections of sky in water. Milika, who did not grow up with Dreaming stories, is wary of referencing Aboriginal lore directly in his work, but his most striking photograph is of the emu in the Milky Way, a figure of negative spaces within star fields. The mixed media work, of steel animal sculptures marching over painted landscapes, was less immediately interesting, apart from Ants, which brought to mind a union of Mars and Earth via the ant-creatures of Quatermass and the Pit. Until 11 November. Images available at the Tandanya website.

Jimmy Pike’s Desert Psychedelic

Pike brought a fluorescent palette to Western Desert art. This retrospective of the late artist includes screen prints, clothing, and long sheets of fabric hung from the high ceiling of the main gallery. Much of the patterning is familiar if you’ve seen other Western Desert art, but the colours bring to mind the best and worst of the Eighties fluoro fascination. There are also quieter black and white works. Some pieces are presented with descriptions of the stories they depict while others have titles which remain untranslated. A few key works need no translation, such as a sinuous print of desert dunes and vegetation. Until 25 November. Images available at the Tandanya website.

Modern roller derby is a sport that’s part athletics, part violence and part theatre. The all-women teams of Adelaide Roller Derby start each match with a performance to intimidate their enemies and rouse their fans, rising from a grave as the Wild Hearses team, or swimming with sharks as the Salty Dolls. Their costumes draw from a scrapbag of movie and other cultural references, including skeletal face paint, frilled bloomers, fishnets and leopard prints. Skaters have their derby names emblazoned on their backs, often a pun like “Ginger Nut Risk It” or “Sin & Tonic”. Then the match starts, and high-velocity skaters tear around an oval track, taking the hands of team-mates to swing them on faster, and using their hips to smash the opposition from the track. It’s exhilarating to watch.

Australian director Daniel Hayward spent four years and a shoestring budget filming a documentary on roller derby. It’s enthusiastic but uneven. He speaks with the women who restarted the sport in 2001 after a confidence trickster claimed to be setting up a league in Austin. From there it’s spread across the globe. Austinite Barrelhouse Bessie brought it with her when she moved to Adelaide and teams are now spread across Australia. Hayward mixes interviews within a loose thematic structure, but provides a narrative hook by documenting the difficult start of a new team in Ballarat. With no external funding and all the usual problems of volunteer-run organisations, the team struggles first to exist and only second to win matches.

Adelaide derby fans will welcome the extensive interview with Barrelhouse Bessie, the scenes of the Adeladies playing against Victoria in Skate of Origin matches, and interior shots of the Wheatsheaf Hotel. As an introduction to the sport, it’s passable, even though the rules aren’t explained until halfway through the movie. As an introduction to a cultural phenomenon, it glides away from the hard questions, such as the uneasy boundary zone between the fetishisation of the players and its punk attitude to self-expression.