The Holy Mountain (1973)
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.
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9 films that influenced The Holy Mountain
What critics say influenced The Holy Mountain
Despite all its fanciful Buñuelesque surrealism and echoes of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), it’s not that far removed from the pop-culture movies that surround it.
Watch "The Holy Mountain," and you'll see two naked women have their heads shaved; a man whose face is covered in flies; a cougar; the stem of a flower painfully and almost palpably plucked from the palm of a man's hand; children with their genitals painted green; a quadruple amputee (in a nod to Tod Browning's "Freaks") lighting a joint with the stumps of his arms and legs; a parade of soldiers carrying flayed lambs on crosses; a tourist happily taking pictures of the rape of his wife; songbirds emerging from the wounds of a dead student; and a tabletop re-staging of the conquest of Mexico enacted by lizards dressed as Aztecs and frogs dressed as missionaries and conquistadors.
It is easy to see why Luis Buñuel, the godfather of cinematic surrealism, chose to make his early masterwork Un chien andalou (1929; codirected with the surrealist painter Salvador Dali) only half an hour long.
It is easy to see why Luis Buñuel, the godfather of cinematic surrealism, chose to make his early masterwork Un chien andalou (1929; codirected with the surrealist painter Salvador Dali) only half an hour long.
And its actual ending treads ground already traversed by the much maligned Michael Sarne in his 1968 film Joanna (a case could be made that Jerry Lewis got there even earlier in 1964 with The Patsy).
As should be obvious, the movie is both pretentious -- it is divided into chapters named after sections of the Bible, such as "Genesis" and "Psalms" -- and comically if grotesquely iconoclastic: The ultimate Western hero, John Wayne, is caricatured as a man with no arms who carries a man with no legs in a sling on his back; this composite cowboy (the original "Master Blaster" from the third "Mad Max" film?) is dressed in an outfit similar to that worn by Wayne in "The Searchers."
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El Topo is a kind of cross between Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name in the Sergio Leone westerns and Luis Buuel's pious priest in "Nazarin."
With its Alchemist character ordering events from his tower, it feels not that unlike a trippier version of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (1967) TV film, which was already pretty trippy and unstructured.
The overall premise that the film is leading to is not but a few inches removed from Joseph McGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969), a film just as deliberately messy and scattershot in its satirical targets as The Holy Mountain.
"The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky" includes the director's experimental debut feature, "Fando y Lis" (1968; previously released on DVD in 2003); his whimsical yet eerie Thomas Mann-inspired 20-minute 1957 short, "La Cravate"; and soundtrack discs for "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain."
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Jodorowsky's next film, "The Holy Mountain" (1973), which screens Tuesday through Thursday, by contrast stands the test of time surprisingly well.
One of the results of John Lennon’s interest in El Topo was the teaming of Alejandro Jodorowsky with Beatles manager Allen Klein.
Produced by Allen Klein, then business manager for the Beatles' Apple Corp., who has suppressed it since a limited release in 1973, this follow-up to Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky's Buddhist western "El Topo" is a true original.
After the counterculture smash success of his sophomore film El Topo, which invented the midnight movie and enraptured an entire generation of “head” cinephiles, Alejandro Jodorowsky did exactly what we might have expected from him: He tried to top it.
The El Topo maestro has an impish view of enlightenment, and, after stringing the characters through a Mt.