MUBI

A stunning entry in the oeuvre of director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and speaking personally; his magnum opus. The film defies classification by conventional standards but may be called a surrealist film.

While I’ll not discuss the plot; The Holy Mountain is a surrealist film exploring, with no conventional storyline, metaphysics with the viewer continously bombarded with esoteric symbolism. Much of the symbolism is drawn from alchemy and it must be stated that while not necessary, to truly appreciate what is being shown, one must have moderate to advanced understanding of the occult.

The only thing I must point out is that the main character does not really represent Jesus as someone said (though there are instances of such and I honestly understand why anyone would draw that connection) but rather the Fool from the Tarot. You’ll notice at the outset of the film the Fool card laying next to the supposed Christ figure.

The film was financed solely by John Lennon after Lennon seen and championed Jodorowsky’s previous film, El Topo. Most Beatles fans will notice the name of Allen Klein (manager replacing Brian Epstein after his death) attached to this film as producer.

For the sake of brevity – Further information may be found elsewhere including some of the below links.

NTSC collection of his first three films

The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

http://www.anchorbayentertainment.com/index.asp?p=MultipackDetail&SKU=DV76002&PriCatID=0&GenreID=0

This set (very much worth the asking MSRP of 49.98) may be found on Amazon for roughly $30 USD and $25 on ebay as new unopened six disc sets. These films are completely restored.

If you want the film by itself:

http://www.anchorbayentertainment.com/index.asp?p=CatalogDetail&SKU=DV76001&PriCatID=4&GenreID=0

Be sure to read the Amazon.com customer reviews

http://www.amazon.com/Holy-Mountain-Alejandro-Jodorowsky/dp/B000NY1E94/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1259099826&sr=8-1

I will say it can be found cheaper on ebay.

A brief synopsis of the film available on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Mountain_(1973_film)

An overview of the director’s career available on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky

okay. I had seen this before a while ago when it was newly restored and apparently that retro-spective opened alot of eyes on what was thought to be nothing more than a trashy-crazy art film: grainy, blurry, dark, indistinct forms etc.
Ironically, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s magnum opus belongs somewhere in the region of satire and comedy, as the film is quite hilarious and gaudy. I may not be the greatest expert on his body of work, but it doesn’t take a genius to notice that not much of the film is meant to be taken seriously.
The first thing one might notice besides the bawdy humor, is the crisp, technicolor-vibrant widescreen compositions. It’s quite striking and almost every sequence is a tour-de-force of editing, sound, music and visual composition. THat’s not including the magnificient art-direction which, while seemingly 70’s inspired in the most surrealist fashion that even out-classes Fellini himself, has aged remarkably well and only adds to the ever-rising weirdness.

I suppose it’s no mistake that the plot is almost marginal. It goes something like this. Jesus is found in the middle of the desert, his pants wet from piss, flies and ants crawling on his face, tarot cards scattered everywhere. it’s at that point that a group of tormetning naked kids and a short armless, legless kind-hearted man befriends Jesus. If you can see where this is heading, then you get a gold star. If not, then you probably don’t anticipate seeing the streets of Mexico City strewn with the bodies of innocents and flayed dogs paraded in front of flagellating Catholic worshippers, and nazi-soldiers dancing with Bandits in the courtyard to leisurely sounding mariachi bands, while the pope dressed in what appears to be S&M leather suit fetish-wear with a model of Jesus. He speaks in tongues and urges the real Jesus to leave the church, angrily hissing all the while. I forgot to mention the band of prostitues, dressed in blatantly goofy costumes suggesting school-girls (actually, one of them is a school girl. She is worshipped in front of an idol of Jesus by an old latino man with a glass eye, who thus, pops it out and hands it to the girl, Lavishly kissing her hand as if she were the virigin mary herself) as well as the randomly appearing roman/cross-dressing peddlers who decide to make a mold of jesus because he’s….jesus, and they sell his likeness for money, though this makes Jesus mad and he decides to eat his face….I mean, his face on the mold…of his…face…

the rest of the film goes on like this, where picaresque characters and colorful personages parade through the frame, and the director himself makes an appearance as a mystical Alchemist who for the latter half of the movie spouts cryptic phrases about turning shit into gold and does kung-fu with Jesus who has dagger in a rainbow tunnel that’s bigger than a ballroom. (?)

Like I said, it’s hard to take it seriously at all, but it turns out that this is strangely the point, and the sooner you realize that, the more enjoyable the rest of the film becomes. Comparisons with Fellini are inevitable, as Fellini in his later years grew tired of narrative and character exposition in general, favoring artifice and lack-of-context situations. The same could be applied to The Holy Mountain, where everything is in a familiar context(in this case, religious iconography) but the meanings are deliberately jumbled and, in perhaps a most brilliant move, skewers the genre of avant-garde film in general. I suppose an even BETTER analogy is it’s like Monty Python, but on acid. or more acid, if you like.
The soundtrack is pretty awesome too. You got some classic psychadelic style sitars and mantras coming at you on both sides of the speakers. Make sure you watch this on a big screen with a good sound system, it can reach levels of epic. there’s also some general atonal-wall-of-sound moments that are cool and some genre benders that range from jazz, blues, disco, mariachi, and even baroque.
The performances are pretty great also (I mean, anyone who is willing to run around in the fields, naked, acting like zebras and animals is pretty brave, but can that top a crazed religious dictator, decked out in leather tights, with a wild mohawk, who initiates his followers by castrating them, until he reaches the 1,000th testicle? I’m not making that up.)
The Jesus guy is interesting, even if he says absolutely nothing, besides a few grunts and screams. He’s a more aggresive guy this time around, clearly pissed off at how people treat him but he turns out to be a pretty cool guy in the end, marrying the prostitute and adopting a monkey as a son. The prostitue is gorgeous throughout and stares longingly at the audience for stretches of time. It never gets old. But the real cake goes to the group of the ’world’s most powerful individuals’, meglamaniacal and possibly insane people who’s lines of business range of lurid satire to ridiculous slapstick psycho-humor that even the Marx Brothers would commend. One of these people is a government official working for some bat-shit insane dictator. Said official likes his job, despite the fact that he lives in relative squalor with an immensely horrid wife, who enjoys dishing out ‘punishment’ (!) and pees on a several foot high toilet bowel, complaining about how she doesn’t like windows. Also, their son is a snake. And the policies he comes up for the dictator are written in basically five minutes. This is also where some of the best bits of hilarious quotes come from but at the moment I cannot paraphrase.
All the people, based around the planets, are pretty fascinating in their own right, and these sequences are arguably the best parts of the movie. the weakest is the final moments, where even Jodorowsky acknowledges that he probably got caught up in the production and thus the film in these moments occasionally gets mired in Jodorowsky’s own spirituality (he’s quite the eclectic guy, combining all forms religion, symbols and whatnot to give life personal meaning. He’s actually quite laid-back in real life as well, judging from the interviews, enjoying pleasures like any other person.) but these are excusable, as I had said before, the film is visually and filmically stunning, and really showcases Jodorowsky’s artistic instincts and roots as a performer and mime (!)
That being said, I’m surprised this film wasn’t picked up by the Criterion Collection, but seeing as how this film languished on a crappy VHS and DVD version, (the aforementioned grainy version) it’s no wonder it took it this long to finally be lusciously restored. For so long, Jodorowsky was praised for his film El Topo (even that was being seen incorrectly. It’s restored glory is also quite stunning. The desert has never seemed more colorful.) but it’s clear that this is apparently his masterwork (some say Santa Sangre is, but i have not seen it yet as of now).
THe production of this film is both clear and mired in aprocryphal tales, most by Jodorowsky. A strange one accounts of how in order to get everyone more comfortable with the film, he urged all the actors to come live with him at a retreat, and they did. He then proceeded to sleep with all the girls. “ALL of them,” he says with a grin. I suppose that would be good time for us to grin as well, and grin we shall, just like he does at the end of the film, finally smashing any remanant of pretention the film may have carried.