The Holy Mountain (1973)
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Written by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas Zamira Salinas
November 27th, 1973
Published May 15th, 2023
Is Holy Mountain a movie or an experience? Perhaps it is both. I'm not sure exactly what it is but it had a major effect on me. Written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the movie is a wildly political, deeply esoteric and visually daring film of extraordinary ambition. Watching Holy Mountain is what I imagine it must be like to be drunk. I've never had a drop of alcohol but observing drunken behavior, I am reminded of how I felt watching Holy Mountain. The film left me dizzy, delirious, occasionally giddy and left me needing a nap.
Every frame of Holy Mountain could be a painting. Jodorowsky's taken for composition is extraordinary. The opening moments of the film both set the tone for the rest of the movie and do nothing to establish a recognizable story. Two nude women kneel next to a black clad person wearing a large black hat. The background is a psychedelic black and white. The person in the black hat proceeds to brutally and painfully sheer the hair from the women's heads. Why? I don't know but it is damn sure a striking series of visuals.
Our protagonist in Holy Mountain is a man who vaguely visually associates with Jesus just before he was nailed to the cross. He has long brown hair, a beard, and a lanky, emaciated frame. Our Jesus stand-in is introduced lying in his own filth. Covered in flies, urine flowing around him, and a general air of gross, the man is awakened when a bunch of naked children start throwing rocks at him. He flees. Eventually, our Jesus meets a tiny man with no legs or hands and the two become fast friends.
They travel to town where they witness a series of indescribable events that include a recreation of the fall of the Mayan people with the Mayans represented by Lizards and the invading Spanish portrayed by a plague level of frogs. The frogs destroy and consume the lizards as Jesus and his friend dance about. Meanwhile, soldiers arrive to break up the scene and one of the tourists breaks off to have sex with the soldier while her husband watches and calls on Jesus to capture the event on camera.
Eventually, our Jesus stand in realizes that his resemblance to Jesus could be a way to make some money. He begins accepting money to carry a giant cross while tourists snap photos of him. However, when he falls asleep, he's kidnapped by the same people who gave him the cross to carry. They proceed to make a plaster cast of him as Jesus on the cross and when our Jesus awakens, he finds a room full of plaster versions of himself as Jesus and suffers intense despair before destroying all but one of these plaster Jesus's.
I have left out so many things. You have no idea. And what I have described thus far is maybe 20 minutes into the movie, at most. Holy Mountain only gets wilder from here with sequences that it would take pages to try and summarize and then assess the meaning. Let's just say that what is still to come in Holy Mountain amounts to a series of artist allegories regarding corporate greed, violence, sexism, religious corruption, the death of the ego and the overall idea of what it means to transcend in the Emerson/Thoreau sense.
It's a lot and I am not sure I understood a lot of it or what I was meant to understand. Jodorowsky appears to want the viewer to take something away from Holy Mountain that is just for them. At the same time, he's not without a very personal, political perspective. Much of that boils down to greed is bad, corruption is bad, and everyone is susceptible to these societal ills. We can try to assign more depth to Jodorowsky but the basic message is a leftist perspective that is deeply opposed to the corrupting influence of capitalism and generally suspicious of anything that represents a capitalistic status quo.
Find my full length review of The Holy Mountain at Geeks.Media.
