The Holy Mountain

Watching The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s second film, made in 1973, is like poring over a blueprint of the man’s mind; a mind so clearly abundant with ideas, insight and wisdom, so attuned to spirituality, ancient teachings, arcana and mysticism, that it’s something of a privilege, and a rare pleasure, to be granted access to it. Jodorowsky, now 80 years old, has made seeking enlightenment his life’s work and, like, for example, Lynch, Herzog and Tarkovsky - geniuses and visionaries all - sees it as his duty to use cinema to further our understanding of humanity, ourselves, the world and our place in it. It’s an admirable cause, certainly, and one you wish was more prevalent throughout filmmaking.

It’s not always easy - in fact, it’s never easy - to decipher the complex creative vision of a guy like Jodorowsky, but you wouldn’t want it any other way. The satisfaction of the experience comes, not with fighting to comprehend the workings of his brain, and his methods for converting the output into image form, but with simply immersing yourself in his ideas, his prescience, his skewed humour, his craziness. Jodorowsky may not possess the technical acumen of a director like Stanley Kubrick, for example - few do - but his every frame manages nonetheless to be a new, fresh and spellbinding work of art, a brief but pure and potent snapshot to add to the collections of images we’ve each stored away in our minds. Explaining this film - this masterpiece - is beyond someone of my intelligence, but, and it’s a cliché, yes, you really won’t have seen anything like it.