El Topo (Thu., Aug. 11, 8 p.m., free, the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.) An inexplicable amalgam of Buñuel, Herzog and Leone, Alejandro Jodorowsky's midnight movie par excellence is an endlessly ponderable, ultimately impenetrable glyph whose violent mysticism strikes at the gut and the soul. Jodorowsky plays the title character, a rogue gunfighter with delusions of deity who sets out to vanquish the four "masters of the gun," only to find that completed quest replaced with a new one: digging a tunnel to connect a group of Indian cave-dwellers with a cult-ruled frontier town.

Jodorowsky's bold, alogical symbolism confounds rational interpretation, at least for the handful who've seen the film in an unaltered state. Although scattered phrases hint at the substantial influence of Eastern mysticism, as does El Topo's shaven-headed appearance in the final segment, when he resembles a Buddhist bonze — Jodorowsky himself calls the character "a bandit who realized his violence and became a saint" — the movie's synthetic religion doesn't really jell. But incompleteness may be the point, an urging to further spiritual quests. Thanks to rights issues, El Topo remains virtually impossible to see in the U.S. (although a decent DVD, the source for the screening, is available from Italy), which makes this Andrew's Video Vault screening a rare opportunity indeed, not to mention good preparation for Jodorowsky's long-in-the-works-sequel, Abelcain. Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, a spiritual odyssey of a more conventional sort, fills out the double bill.

Directors in Focus: Sam Peckinpah (Fri., Aug. 12 - Sun., Aug. 14, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Sam Peckinpah is so closely associated with cinematic violence that his biography might have been written in stage blood. Say Peckinpah's name, and images come immediately to mind: men being blown backwards in slow motion, their chests exploding, then slumping quickly, finally in the dirt. In 1969's The Wild Bunch and many of the films that followed, Peckinpah slowed death down so we could look it in the face. The results were transfixing, horrifying and often beautiful.

It's the latter quality that makes Peckinpah both troublesome and fascinating. Peckinpah believed that he had to awaken his audience's blood lust in order to expose it — as he described The Wild Bunch (Sat., 7 p.m.), to "get people involved in it so they are starting to go in the Hollywood-television-predictable-reaction syndrome, and then twist it so it's not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut." The trouble was, and is, that audiences couldn't always be trusted to make the leap. Peckinpah's expressionistic violence may have grown out of the televised carnage of the Vietnam war, but today, it's the stuff of a thousand orgiastic gunfights which expire without a hint of moral ambiguity.

More than violence, ambivalence is the key to Peckinpah's oeuvre. His movies are full of polar opposites who discover in confrontation that they are mirror images instead. In 1973's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sun., 7 p.m.), Garrett (James Coburn) and Billy (Kris Kristofferson) are less lawman and fugitive than two halves of the same psyche; in the credit sequence, Garrett is gunned down in revenge for Billy's death, but Peckinpah intercuts footage to make it seem as if Billy has risen from the grave to avenge himself. In Cross of Iron (Sat., 9:30 p.m.), Coburn's decorated German corporal is paired with Maximillian Schell's cowardly Captain Stransky, while Major Dundee (Fri., 7 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.) doubles Charlton Heston's Ahab-like Yankee commander with a host of alter egos, among them Richard Harris' down-but-not-out Southern captain and Michael Pate's bloodthirsty Indian chief. (Regrettably, Peckinpah's most boldly surreal treatment of the theme, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, is not in the series, but MGM's recent DVD will ease the pain.)

A lifelong maverick, not to mention a temperamental alcoholic and, late in life, drug addict, Peckinpah had perpetual trouble with the studios (in the 1992 documentary Man of Iron, longtime associate Katherine Haber speculates that Peckinpah may have been an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, which would explain both his self-medication and his attraction to the theme of split personality), but each of the five films in International House's series is being screened in a restored cut, including the new restoration of Dundee, whose added 13 minutes elevate the movie from ambitious failure to mutilated sub-masterpiece. (All prints are 35 mm except Cross of Iron, shown as a double feature with The Wild Bunch.)

Apart from The Wild Bunch, even Peckinpah's greatest films are riddled with flaws, due as much to his battles with himself as with the studios. Raised in Fresno, Calif., Peckinpah wrestled with the myth of the West and more generally with the romantic but restrictive codes of masculinity. The territorial misogyny of Straw Dogs (Sun., 7 p.m.) is impossible to ignore, but it's one of Peckinpah's most powerful movies as well as his most distasteful. The fact that Susan George, the wife of impotent college professor Dustin Hoffman, accedes to rape by her brutish ex-boyfriend — and worse, at some point, clearly opts to enjoy it — plays into the most nauseating view of male-female relations: that all men are savages, and all women want to be savaged. But it's also clear that, in Peckinpah's mind, her actions are meant to be empowering, a way of seizing some small measure of control over her situation — a sentiment recapitulated more successfully in Alfredo Garcia, when Isela Vega takes her gun-toting rapist by the hand in order to save fiance Warren Oates' life. In both movies, the masculine rage that erupts after the rape is shown to be a lethally corrosive force. Women can survive violence, but men are always consumed by it, as Peckinpah was consumed by his own self-destructive urges.

Peckinpah made movies in which violence plays only a minor role, although, as he complained, "no one goes to see them." But the series hints at Peckinpah's softer side, often expressed as tenderness between men (Peckinpah veteran L.Q. Jones called The Wild Bunch "a little bit gay"). By going beyond the canonical Bunch and Dogs, the series expands the view of Peckinpah as an inspired madman obsessed with serial carnage and bloody revenge. (Dundee's widescreen vistas explicitly, if oddly, evoke David Lean.) Of particular note is the Dundee-Bunch-Dogs continuum, an increasingly frantic cycle that reflects Peckinpah's growing digust with his native land, and especially the Nixon administration. The story of a simple rescue operation that becomes a self-destructive crusade, Dundee's revival is particularly well-timed: Its spooky resonances underline the similarities between the Vietnam quagmire and the muddy swamp of Iraq.