The Holy Mountain: Jodorowsky's Alchemical Provocation

The Holy Mountain (1973) exists because a Beatle liked El Topo. That is the short version of one of the strangest financing stories in cinema: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, evangelised by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s midnight-movie sensation, leaned on Allen Klein’s ABKCO to bankroll whatever the Chilean provocateur wanted to make next. What he wanted to make was a million-dollar avant-garde epic about the alchemical transformation of the soul, staffed by non-actors he had reportedly put through weeks of spiritual and physical training, and ending on a gesture designed to detonate the very cult that had funded it. It is the most beautiful hostile act in the history of cult film, and half a century on it has lost none of its capacity to dazzle and offend in the same breath.

The thief and the tower

The film opens on a Christ-like thief (Horacio Salinas) sprawled in the desert, face crawling with flies, and proceeds through an hour of loosely connected tableaux that function as a portrait of a rotten society. This is Jodorowsky at his most caustically satirical: a conquest of Mexico re-enacted by costumed toads and chameleons on a tabletop diorama that ends in gunpowder; a factory that manufactures Christ statues; tourists photographing a massacre; a planet of the powerful rendered as a freak show of appetite. Each vignette is a stinging little cartoon of capitalism, militarism, religion and celebrity, staged with the ceremonial excess that is Jodorowsky’s only register.

Then the thief ascends a tower and meets the Alchemist (Jodorowsky himself, in white robes and a shaved head), and the film shifts into its true subject. The Alchemist gathers nine wealthy, powerful figures, each named for a planet and each a monster of their industry — a weapons manufacturer, a cosmetics tycoon who sells youth, a war-toy designer, an art dealer trading in political murder. He proposes to lead them, and the thief, up a sacred mountain to displace the immortal masters who supposedly rule the world and seize their secret of eternal life. The back half becomes a pilgrimage, a stripping-away, a journey toward a summit that the film has every intention of refusing to let anyone reach in the way they expect.

Why the images hold when the meaning slips

You can argue endlessly about what The Holy Mountain means, and people have. What is not arguable is that Jodorowsky is one of cinema’s great composers of the single overwhelming image, and this is the film where he had the money to realise every one of them at full scale. The craft argument lives in the production design and the symmetry. Where El Topo was sun-blasted and grimy, The Holy Mountain is lacquered, geometric, saturated — Jodorowsky and his collaborators build frames of ecstatic colour and ritual balance, then fill them with something grotesque or blasphemous, so the eye is seduced and assaulted at once. He frames like a Tarot card, which is deliberate: Jodorowsky was a lifelong scholar of the Tarot, and the film is arranged as a sequence of arcana, each tableau a fixed emblematic composition you are meant to read as much as watch.

The editing logic is associative rather than narrative, and the film earns that freedom through sheer density of invention. There is no dead frame. Every set is built, every costume is a statement, every extra is placed for compositional weight, and the cumulative effect overwhelms the rational objection that none of it quite adds up. Jodorowsky is running the same Panic Movement stagecraft he brought from his theatre years with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor — the film as a rite that assaults and exhausts the participant into a receptive state. The excess is the method; the film wants to batter your defences down so the ending can land.

The legend around the production is inseparable from the film, and some of it is verifiable. Jodorowsky has long said he put his principal cast through a regime of spiritual exercises, meditation and communal living before shooting, treating the making of the film as its own initiatory ordeal, and whatever the exact truth of the training, the actors carry themselves onscreen with the fixed, ceremonial stillness of people performing a rite rather than a scene. The eclectic score, with contributions including the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, works the same seam of the sacred and the strange, refusing conventional dramatic scoring in favour of drones and ritual textures. Every department is pulling toward the same effect, which is why a film this fragmented still feels like a single sustained pressure rather than a sketch reel.

It should be said plainly that some of that method has aged into cruelty, and the film’s use of real animals and its treatment of certain bodies as spectacle sit badly now. An honest revisit holds the beauty and the ugliness together and does not pretend the provocations are all still profound. A share of them are simply a young rich man’s dares. The film survives that reckoning because the peaks are so high.

The Jodorowsky triptych

The Holy Mountain is best understood as the centre panel of a triptych, and this is the collector’s route into it. It is the glossy, moneyed sequel to El Topo, the acid Western that invented the midnight-movie cult and earned Jodorowsky the ABKCO cheque in the first place — watch them in order and you see a filmmaker handed a real budget and using it to enlarge every instinct he already had. It then rhymes forward to Santa Sangre, his 1989 comeback, where he finally fused the imagery to a story with a beating emotional heart. The three films together form a complete map of a filmmaker learning what his own overwhelming images are actually for, and The Holy Mountain is the moment of maximum ambition and maximum control.

The film that argues with it most productively is Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, made two years earlier from the opposite pole — a film equally obsessed with liberation and the body, and equally willing to blow up its own form, but wired to politics where Jodorowsky is wired to mysticism. Program them together and you have the two great early-1970s experiments in the cinema of provocation.

The verdict

The Holy Mountain is not a film that can be recommended the way a well-made thriller can. It is uneven, deliberately exhausting, occasionally indefensible, and completely singular. Nothing else looks like it, and nothing else has its particular nerve. For every viewer it repels there is another for whom it opens a door, and even the sceptic has to concede that image for image it is one of the most visually inventive films ever funded. It is a spectacle built to seduce a counterculture and then turn on it, and the fact that it works as both the seduction and the turning is its lasting achievement.

Come to it for the sheer overwhelming craft of the imagery, and stay for the ending, which is one of the great acts of directorial sabotage. Seek the ABKCO restoration that finally emerged once the decades-long rights dispute between Klein and Jodorowsky cleared. Watch it late, on the largest screen you can find, with your guard down.

Spoilers below

The ending is the whole reason the film matters, and it is a masterstroke of anticlimax weaponised into insight. The pilgrims reach the summit of the holy mountain and prepare to confront the nine immortal masters who supposedly rule the world and hold the secret of eternal life. The masters are revealed to be faceless dummies, propped figures seated around a table — there is no secret, no cabal, no magic to steal. The quest was a fiction the whole way up.

Then Jodorowsky breaks the film itself. The Alchemist turns to the group and to the camera and calls for the zoom to pull back, and the frame widens to reveal the film crew, the lights, the clapperboard, the apparatus of the production. He announces that they are actors, that this is a film, that the illusion is ending, and instructs everyone — the characters and, pointedly, the audience — to leave the sacred mountain and return to real life. It is a hostile blessing aimed straight at the cult that had made El Topo a religion: Jodorowsky refuses to be anyone’s guru and burns down the temple he has spent two hours building. The gesture could read as a cheap trick, and in lesser hands it would. Here it is the earned punchline of a film that has been about the seduction of secret knowledge all along, and it lands as both a joke and a genuine teaching. The mountain gives up no immortality; the only thing on offer is the instruction to stop looking for one.