The Holy Mountain (Dir Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1h 55m, 1973)

The year is 1971, and John Lennon is sitting in the Elgin cinema in New York, watching a film.

It is a bizarre, beautiful mix of Peckinparish violence, mysticism, surrealism, and magic.

The film is El Topo.

The director is a man called Alejandro Jodorowsky

Lennon goes to his manager, Allen Klein and together with Yoko Ono, convinces him to not only buy the rights for El Topo, but to give this Jodorowsky one million dollars to make his next film.

That film is La montaña sagrada

That film is The Holy Mountain

There are few figures in modern cinema like Alejandro Jodorowsky, a director who entwines his work in front of and behind the camera with his devotion to mysticism, from his painstaking reconstruction of the Marseilles Tarot in the late 80s to mid 90s, to his treaties upon psychomagic, to his vivid, surrealism-laced comic books. His films, from his first effort, Fando y Lis (1968), a film so controversial it caused a riot and was eventually banned, to El Topo, a psychedelic western that practically invented the midnight movie, to the violent and psychosexual Santa Sangra, to his later autobiographical films, are rife with surreal imagery, stunningly strange characters, and an impressively ambitious scale, all of which is beholden to Jodorowsky's passion and devotion to the Tarot, to various brands of magic, and above all, to the cinema.

But none of Jodorowsky's works come close, in either their cinematic, surrealistic, or quasi-magical sense, to The Holy Mountain, a film that essentially takes "the journey of the fool", a concept from the tarot linked to personal growth, and depicts it over two hours of celluoid, in a film that takes in everything from the corruption of religion by money to the hollowness of false mysticism, to the alchemical and the magical, as Jodorowsky's Alchemist leads the Fool (here a thief, played by Horacio Salinas), and a group of disparate, formerly powerful individuals towards immortality, undergoing many surreal, and transformative moments on their travel towards the titular mountain.

These travellers, each representing a planet, and its negative elements, range from a sadistic police chief in charge of a practically cult-like force of castrated men to a scheming weapons maker, already arming up the "youth generation" with psychedelic shotguns, mystical weapons and hand-grenade necklaces, to an architect building coffin-like domiciles to cut down on unneeded sanitation and services, and this is as much their journey away from the materialistic to the spiritual and the enlightened that the film depicts, leading to the final ascent of the holy mountain, a final trial for the travellers, and one of cinema's greatest, if strangest endings, as our-and the pilgrims-understanding of reality is merrily disrupted by Jodorowsky himself.

What follows over two hours is one of the most visually striking films ever committed to film. There are too many strange, beautiful, bizarre and disturbing images to describe, from the symbolic sacrifice of a wax sculpture of each of the travellers, together with all of their money, a shot stolen by everything from music video makers to internet commentators, to the ascent of the Alchemist's tower, and the vividly coloured interior in which the thief first meets the Alchemist, to each of the vivid, astrological symbol strewn introductions to the pilgrims, rife with strange imagery.

These alone are beautifully strange, surreal short films, as Jodorowsky turns his lens on everything from how war is manufactured through comics and other childrens media-how, in short, children are told to hate, to the economists who grease the wheels of mass-murder machines, to the art dealers that create-or perhaps co-opt the human form to make empty, abstract art, as a commodity. Even inside these sequences, there are moments of breathtakingly strange, surreal, profane or simply beautiful imagery, from an oft-homaged handgun wielded by the arms dealer with a cruxifix mounted atop it, to a robotic artpiece that the viewer is required to make love to, that eventually opens up into a truly bizarrre mash of lights and panels, and eventually produces a tiny child-like version of itself, to the troupe of ersatz Mickey-Mouse-clad children that appear in the architect's house.

All of this imagery, of course, can be read as part of a treaty, a mystical piece of cinema in which Jodorowsky takes the tarot, personifies it, and depicts the fool's journey. But this is only part of the film. Is The Holy Mountain simply mysticism? No. For one, the film's attacks on religion, on the overtly American tourists in the film's opening sequences, on the characters that accompany the Alchemist, his acolyte and the Thief on their journey are too earthy, too grounded to be part of this. One cannot help but feel, as with all of his films, his distain for American imperialism in all its facets, and if The Holy Mountain has a more grounded theme against its lofty spiritualism, it is a film that is almost breathakingly anti-materialist.

But it is more than this. One can read this film as a psychosexual tract-the film's depiction of sexuality runs the gammut from matter-of-fact to strange and unnerving and one cannot help but read this, in certain sections, as a fear of male impotence, of castration, or as a piece of cinema that puts strong female characters in positions of power. This, after all, was the film where Jodorowsky found feminism, and refused to adapt BDSM novel The Story of O, leading to a thirty year impasse on both The Holy Mountain and El Topo, and the feminist themes of The Holy Mountain do clearly colour how its female characters are depicted.

One could even regard the film as a deliberate takedown of the very idea of seeking for one single meaning-late in the film, the pilgrims are confronted by various failed seekers of immortality for inner meaning, from drugs to physical power, and all of them are outed as fakes, as frauds. Even at the end of the quest, the meaning, in Jodorowsky's spectacular pulldown of the curtain between cinema and reality, between the filmed and the narrative, one is left questioning to what degree even this quest is without one true meaning

And this, perhaps is the point of The Holy Mountain. One travels with the Alchemist and his pilgrims many times, taking many meanings from the film's stunning visuals, its magical themes. The Holy Mountain towers above surrealist cinema, colossal, bizarre and beautiful, a summit of arthouse cinema.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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