The Holy Mountain

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
Writer & Director ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky
1973, Mexico
Stars ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas, Zamira Saunders

A kaleidoscope of symbolism, symmetry, creativity, misogyny, intentional and unintentional humour, dodgy dubbing and random animals. Jodorowsky gets by on intermediate narrative but a wealth of social and spiritual commentary and prescience: rituals, algorithms, false idols, counterculture outrage, consumerism, selling wars to children via games, etc., and – which got the second biggest laugh from the full audience – religiously themed firearms (the biggest laugh was “My chauffeur is not good at sex”). Meanwhile the soundtrack veers between spiritual chants, jazz, throat singing, to glam and electro. So singular is Jodorowsky’s stream-of-consciousness vision and cut-up carnivalesque narrative that it is impossible to predict what is coming next.

 

 

Jodorowsy fled Mexico during filming because of government threats due to his portrayal of soldiers massacring civilians; John Lennon partly financed it. Gregory J. Smalley writes, 

“The Holy Mountain is meant as a Symbolist work, not as unconscious nonsense; but the end user, unable to decipher the film, experiences it as Surrealism.”  

 Certainly, there’s the overall sense that the true meaning of it all is all in Jodorowsy’s head, and we’re just along for the ride. With the story relegated to intermittently decipherable allegory, the audience is left hooked by the brilliance, bemusement and excess of the film-making.  
   
‘The Holy Mountain’ is all at once and in part stunning, baffling, inconsistent, erratic, dazzling, psychedelic, oblique, deeply felt and always beguiling. The quest is an illusion and the point. Film-making as a religious revelation and indulgence, art as the way to immortality, art for art’s sake.