The Holy Mountain

Filmmaker, artist, musician, and philosopher Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in 1929 in Tocopilla, Chile.  After dropping out of college, he became a circus clown and also began a career as a theatre director. In 1947, he founded his own theatrical troupe, the Teatro Mimico, and the following year he wrote his first play, El Minotaura (The Minotaur). Jodorowsky subsequently moved to Paris, and began studying mime with Étienne Decroux and joined the troupe of one of Decroux's students, Marcel Marceau. It was with Marceau's troupe that he went on a world tour, and wrote several routines for the group, including The Cage and The Mask Maker. After that, he returned to theatre, working on the music-hall comeback of Maurice Chevalier in Paris. 

In 1960, Jodorowsky moved to Mexico, where he settled down in Mexico City.  Continuing his interest in surrealism, he founded the Panic Movement in 1962, aimed at going beyond the conventional surrealist ideas by embracing absurdism. Its members refused to take themselves seriously, while laughing at those critics who did. Jodorowsky's film, Fando y Lis, premiered at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival, where it instigated a riot amongst those objecting to the film's content, and it was subsequently banned in Mexico.

It was in Mexico City that Jodorowsky encountered Ejo Takata, a Zen Buddhist monk who had studied in Japan before traveling to Mexico in 1967 to spread Zen. Jodorowsky became a disciple of Takata and offered his own house to be turned into a zendo. Subsequently, Takata attracted other disciples around him, who spent their time in meditation and the study of koans.  

In 1970, Jodorowsky directed and starred in the film El Topo.  The violent and surreal film played as a "midnight movie" in the United States and attracted the attention of rock musicians and countercultural figures.  The film received word-of-mouth publicity among the underground and soon developed a legendary status as a profound psychedelic and mystical masterpiece. I saw El Topo sometime in the mid-1970s.  I'm quite sure I was quite high when I saw it, because it was me in the mid-70s and I was quite high when I did most things.  It was a mind-blowing, surreal experience, and I remember virtually none of it.  I've often wondered how it would hold up if viewed today - surrealist masterpiece or pretentious hippie bullshit?  

Fans of El Topo included John Lennon, who convinced Beatles' manager Allen Klein to finance Jodorowsky's next film, The Holy Mountain. During filming, Jodorowsky received spiritual training from Oscar Ichazo of the Arica School, who encouraged him to take LSD and guided him through the subsequent psychedelic experience. Around the same time, Jodorowsky participated in an isolation tank experiment conducted by John Lilly.

Back in the day, word on the street was that The Holy Mountain was even more "out there" than El Topo and full of profound mystical insights.  Not only that, but it had the John Lennon seal of approval, which still counted for something in 1975.  But unfortunately, both El Topo and The Holy Mountain were taken out of circulation for some 30 years due to some sort of contractual dispute between Jodorowsky and Allen Klein. I never got to see El Topo again, or see The Holy Mountain at all.

Until last night.  Atlanta's Plaza Theater screened a 35-mm print of the newly-available The Holy Mountain last evening.  While I would love to say I was there, I wasn't partially because I couldn't find anyone interested in going with me and also because I realized that the film was also available for rental on Amazon Prime.  So last night, at around the same time as it was being screened at The Plaza, I watched The Holy Mountain from the comfort of my home.

Unfortunately, I would be lying if I didn't say that in 2021, the film seems more like pretentious hippie bullshit than profound mystical revelation.  It actually seems like three different films spliced together.  The first part, my favorite portion, makes very little narrative sense but follows one character in a series of bizarre encounters with religious and authoritarian figures.  There's no dialog for the first 30 minutes of the film - everybody communicates through grunts and barks and laughter - and the symbolism is as heavy handed as something from an early Paul Verhoeven film.  But the visual style and imagery is so startlingly original and surreal that it's fascinating to watch, as you have literally no idea what you're going to see next. The opening third of the film, while a failure in narrative story-telling, is a tour de force of surrealism and psychedelic imagery.

The middle third of the film is my least favorite portion.  If there were no words in the first third, there were way too many in the middle third.  This portion of the film provides the backgrounds of the spiritual seekers who will accompany the messianic figure of the first third of the movie on his quest to the Holy Mountain.  It amounts to seven little set pieces about reach one, and the acting is amateurish (the characters aren't people per se, but symbols or archetypes for industrialism, the military, the clergy, education, etc.).  After a while, the scenes all sort of seem the same, as the characters interact, poorly, with clumsy props and all-too-obvious symbols.  It's the sort of thing you might expect from an undergraduate film project in the late 1960s, with none of the daring visual experiments of the first third of the film.

The final third of the film fares a little better as the seekers literally ascend the Holy Mountain.  There are some more skits about the various temptations and spiritual challenges they face, but at least we get to watch the characters out of doors in some beautiful mountain landscape.  It's sort of like bargain-basement Herzog for the very, very stoned. It's still a little tedious, especially the end where Jodorowsky himself directly addresses the audience and instructs the camera to pull back, revealing the film-making machinery (lights, cameras, booms, etc.) behind the scene.  You see, it's really just a movie!, he tells us, as if we weren't already quite aware of that.

There's a lot of nudity in the film, both male and female, if you're concerned about such things.  I don't object to nudity, per se, but the film does handle it a somewhat misogynistic way.  Almost every female is topless at some point in the film, often for no apparent reason, and Jodorowsky seems incapable of showing bare breasts without zooming in for a close up of nipples. There's one scene where several female characters all appear in sheer, see-through blouses for some reason, and the camera closes in one each woman's breasts for a lingering shot before getting on with the scene. Perhaps nudity in and of itself was considered a radical anti-establishment statement back then, but today it just seems a little cheesy and gratuitous.  To Jodoworsky's credits, there's a lot of dick on screen, too, so there's that.

Yes, I'm glad I finally did see it, after wondering since the mid-70s what the film was like.  Yes, I would recommend it to those interested in the history of cinema, in psychedelia and surrealism, and 60s and 70s counter-culture.  But if you're a "normal" person, this movie is probably not for you.

I see that El Topo is also on Amazon Prime and one of these nights, I'll finally re-watch that one.  There are also some later Jodorowsky films on Amazon, including his horror film Santa Sangre.  They may not be quality cinema, but they certainly are singular and original works.