The Dance of Reality

Endless Poetry portrays Alejandro Jodorowsky’s young adulthood, set in the 1940’s and 1950’s, in the electric capital city of Santiago. There, he decides to become a poet and is introduced, by destiny, into the foremost bohemian and artistic circle of the time. He meets Enrique Lihn, Stella Díaz Varín, Nicanor Parra and many other young, promising and unknown artists who would later become titans of Latin America’s literature.

On their journey across the desert of a symbolic western landscape, the gunman El Topo and his son face a band of fetishists led by a lecherous coronel who keeps a Franciscan congregation terrorized. After killing them, El Topo leaves his son with the monks and goes off in search of the four gun masters—who a woman he loves has convinced him to kill—and is rescued from death by a group of dwarfs and disabled outcasts whom he tries to free.

A young man is confined to a mental hospital. Through a flashback we see that he was traumatized as a child. When he and his family were circus performers, he saw his father cut off the arms of his mother, a religious fanatic and leader of the heretical church of Santa Sangre ("Holy Blood"). Back into the present, he escapes and joins his mother. Against his will, he "becomes her arms" and the two undertake a grisly campaign of murder and revenge.