Review of The Holy Mountain (1973) by Alecks V — 29 Aug 2008

Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain" is one of the most feverishly bizarre things, in any genre or medium, that I have ever seen. It contains footage of such things as a naked woman pleasuring a giant mechanized vagina, a group of captives being executed, who upon dying, bleed not blood, but paint and sparrows, an alchemist creating gold out of human sweat and feces, an armless, legless amputee playing the bass drum, women gleefully fondling a giant penis ice sculpture, a goat blood fountain, and of course, a toad and chameleon circus.

I thought Jodorowsky's previous film, El Topo, was near perfect. It was subversive without losing its "meaning" (an extraordinarily relative term.

My biggest issue with The Holy Mountain is how repetitive it is: the film's opening scenes, for example, while visually startling in their presentation, essentially retread a great deal of material from El Topo, while the introduction of the planet individuals keeps going back on itself. Essentially, we see a group of people who work in various perverse occupations. Sadly, Jodorowsky's symbolism here is severely over-arching: we get nothing out of the moment to moment scenes, only a realization at the end of them that we've seen the same thing working to the same end eight times over.

The film tries to find its footing again, as it builds slowly to a surprisingly mundane and one-dimensional climax (one that would be echoed later in Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry).

El Topo was like a mad puzzle, like a Pynchon novel, something that remained fascinating despite (or perhaps, because) of its increasing elusiveness. After finishing El Topo, I got the feeling that yes, it means something, as a whole, something which anyone viewed it could theorize about to no end.

Conversely, I'm not sure The Holy Mountain stands for anything, or at least not anything worth ruminating over. It's a collection of scenes, some of them great (a store selling Christs, a group of harlot Disciples following The Thief, a montage in which each person seeking immortality has fleeting visions of their deaths), but they act only as a shabby dressing, one that can't quite hide the emptiness of the rest of the film.