The Holy Mountain (1973 film)

Sources and relation to Mount Analogue

The inspiration for The Holy Mountain has often been attributed to John of the Cross's Ascent of Mount Carmel and René Daumal's unfinished novel Mount Analogue. Jodorowsky was familiar with Daumal's book by the late 1960s. In a 1970 interview about his projected successor to El Topo, he described a film in which mountain climbing would function as spiritual initiation and spoke of discovering what Daumal had intended to place at the summit of Mount Analogue. In the same interview, however, he also said that the projected film would be based upon John of the Cross's Mount Carmel. Jodorowsky did not identify Daumal or Mount Analogue as a source in his later audio commentary for the completed film or in his 2010 autobiographical writing.^[6]

Descriptions of the relationship have varied. Some film writers have called The Holy Mountain a mystical adaptation of Daumal's novel or treated Mount Analogue as its principal literary source. Others have described the connection as very loose. Religious-studies scholar David Pecotic argues that the stronger adaptation claim became an "academic urban legend": a proposition repeated through books and online sources despite limited documentation and little close comparison between the novel and film.^[7]

Pecotic identifies the sacred mountain as the principal invariant symbol shared by the two works, but distinguishes their narrative structures. Mount Analogue appears at the beginning of Daumal's novel and governs the whole surviving narrative. Pierre Sogol and his companions attempt to demonstrate the mountain's physical existence, locate its hidden island, cross the surrounding barrier and begin a carefully organised ascent. In Jodorowsky's film, the mountain is introduced only after the extended sequences involving the Thief, the Alchemist and the seven planetary figures; the journey to Lotus Island and the ascent occupy less than a third of the film.^[8]

The expeditions also have different aims. Daumal's travellers seek access to a higher form of human life through guidance, discipline and cooperation. Jodorowsky's Alchemist assembles his companions to reach the summit and take the immortals' secret of overcoming death. At the end of the film the immortals are exposed as faceless dummies, the cinematic apparatus is revealed and the Alchemist tells both the characters and the audience to abandon the mountain because real life awaits them. Daumal's surviving novel neither reaches nor rejects the summit, which is defined as inaccessible even though the mountain's base can be reached.^[9]

Pecotic also distinguishes the symbolic and doctrinal structures of the two mountains. Daumal's novel explains the mountain's invisibility through pataphysics, non-Euclidean geometry, gravitational deflection and a shell of curved space. The expedition enters through a temporary opening created by the setting sun. Life on the island is organised around mountain guides and nearly invisible crystals called peradams, which function both as currency and as signs of spiritual obligation. Climbers may move to a higher camp only after preparing the camp they are leaving for those who will follow them. The mountain is presented as a path between humanity and the divine within an emanationist account of creation proceeding from and returning to the One.^[10]

These elements have no close equivalents in The Holy Mountain. Jodorowsky's mountain is neither invisible nor enclosed by curved space; the film has no solar entrance, peradam economy or succession of camps prepared for later travellers. Its seekers attempt to seize immortality from the beings at the summit, an action closer to the rival expedition described in Daumal's surviving notes than to the disciplined ascent undertaken by Sogol's group.^[11]

The film instead incorporates material from Jodorowsky's Panic theatre, Tarot, alchemy, Kabbalah, Tantra, Zen Buddhism, Latin American shamanic imagery and the Arica training of Oscar Ichazo. The enneagram and the idea that a person must consciously create a soul connect the film with a wider Gurdjieffian milieu, but through a lineage different from Daumal's association with Alexandre de Salzmann, Jeanne de Salzmann and Gurdjieff's French groups. Jodorowsky said that Ichazo taught him the enneagram and that he used it in the film.^[12]

Pecotic consequently describes The Holy Mountain as a Panic transformation of Jodorowsky's own spiritual formation rather than as a completion or direct adaptation of Daumal's novel. Mount Analogue may nevertheless have contributed the general conception of a collective initiatory journey towards a sacred mountain and formed one source within the film's deliberately heterogeneous body of influences.^[13]

Preparation

Before the principal photography started, Jodorowsky and his wife spent a week without sleep under the direction of a Japanese Zen master.^[14]

The central members of the cast spent three months doing various spiritual exercises guided by Oscar Ichazo of the Arica Institute. The Arica training features Zen, Sufi and yoga exercises along with eclectic concepts drawn from the Kabbalah, the I Ching and the teachings of George Gurdjieff. After the training, the group lived for one month communally in Jodorowsky's home before production.^[14] Thereafter, the filming started in early 1972. The film was shot sequentially, entirely in Mexico, at a budget of $750,000.^[14]

Jodorowsky later stated that Ichazo had introduced him to the enneagram and that he incorporated it into the film. Although the symbol originated in Gurdjieff's teaching, the psychological form encountered by Jodorowsky belonged to a South American transmission associated with Ichazo rather than to the French Gurdjieffian circle in which Daumal had participated.^[15]

Jodorowsky was also instructed by Ichazo to take LSD for the purpose of spiritual exploration. He also administered psilocybin mushrooms to the actors during the shooting of the death-rebirth scene.^{[citation needed]}

Initial reception

The film's early reception was closely connected with its sensational publicity, unconventional exhibition and the mythology surrounding its production. Alessandra Santos argues that its promotion helped construct it as a cult object before audiences had seen it. The official trailer announced that nothing in the viewer's experience or education could have prepared them for the film, presenting its obscurity and capacity to shock as attractions rather than liabilities. Publicity concerning John Lennon's support, the scale of the production and Jodorowsky's spiritual preparation of the cast further contributed to its countercultural reputation.^[28]

Although the film did not achieve a conventional wide commercial success, its New York midnight engagement continued for sixteen months. Santos describes the initial response as divided between fascination with its visual invention and objections to its violence, sacrilegious imagery, sexual material and apparent self-importance.^[29] One prominent contemporary controversy concerned the use and killing of animals. In January 1974, writer T. E. D. Klein included The Holy Mountain in a New York Times essay condemning the killing of animals in the production of films.^[18]

The circumstances of its exhibition differed from those of a conventional theatrical release. Its principal American audience was formed through repeated midnight screenings, where the spectacle, publicity and collective viewing environment became part of its reception. The film consequently entered the developing culture of the midnight movie alongside Jodorowsky's earlier El Topo, although the comparatively fragmented distribution of The Holy Mountain limited its initial reach.^[30][29]

Cult status and unavailability

Midnight screenings in the United States continued until 1975, after which authorised copies of the film were largely unavailable for more than three decades. Santos argues that this scarcity increased rather than diminished its cult reputation. Bootleg videotapes, private screenings and the difficulty of obtaining the film encouraged what cult-film scholars describe as fetishistic attachment, fan commitment and the pursuit of otherwise inaccessible works.^[31]

The film's long absence also separated its subcultural reputation from sustained critical evaluation. Matthew Thrift of the British Film Institute observed that Jodorowsky's critical standing eventually began to catch up with a mystique that had been maintained partly by the unavailability of his work. Thrift described The Holy Mountain as the stronger of the two films upon which Jodorowsky's cult reputation principally rested, citing its more formal thematic organisation and its visual imagery.^[32]

The restored theatrical and home-media releases of 2006 and 2007 allowed the film to be reassessed outside the context of degraded bootlegs and midnight screenings. The Criterion Collection later characterised it as a perennial midnight-film favourite and one of the most enduring cult films of its period, interpreting it as a satire of religion, colonialism and consumerism.^[33]

Critical reassessment

The restoration produced a generally more favourable, although still divided, critical response. Reviewing the film in 2007, Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it had survived the passage of time more successfully than El Topo. He described it as a major advance in Jodorowsky's filmmaking and praised the density of its visual imagination, while acknowledging its brutality, grotesquerie and deliberate degradation.^[34]

In a review accompanying a 2020 British re-release, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian found that some of the film's devices had dated but that the force of its strangeness remained. He emphasised its political satire, absurdism, hedonism and Tarot symbolism and called it a key work by a filmmaker committed to provocation and resistance to conformity.^[35]

Other retrospective assessments have remained more critical. Michael Atkinson of The Village Voice praised the film's grotesque representation of colonial conquest and its assault upon Euro-Christian iconography, but argued that its later sections abandoned political precision for increasingly weary symbolism and a self-aggrandising image of Jodorowsky as spiritual master. He described it as an unusually disturbing film about salvation.^[36]

The disagreement reflects a persistent division in the film's reception. Admirers have emphasised its visual construction, comic irreverence, political satire and effort to turn cinema into a transformative experience. Critics have questioned the coherence of its symbolism, its treatment of women, disabled performers and animals, and the authority Jodorowsky assigns to the Alchemist he plays.^[37]

On Metacritic, the film has a weighted score of 76 out of 100, based on eleven reviews, indicating "generally favourable" reception.^[38] The critical consensus published by Rotten Tomatoes describes it as a visually rich and symbolically dense addition to Jodorowsky's filmography.^[39]

Scholarly interpretation

Film scholarship has increasingly situated The Holy Mountain within the history of cult film, the international counterculture and the political aftermath of 1968 rather than treating it solely as an assemblage of occult symbols. Santos describes it as both an archaeological record of the counterculture and a parody or subversion of the spiritual doctrines it appears to present. Its satire encompasses the commodification of art, organised religion, militarism, colonialism, consumer culture, political spectacle and the commercial packaging of enlightenment.^[37]

The ending has received particular attention. By exposing the cameras, lights and crew, the Alchemist denies the literal reality of the quest and instructs the audience to return to life outside the film. The gesture has been interpreted both as a rejection of cinematic illusion and as a self-critical disruption of Jodorowsky's own position as filmmaker, actor and spiritual authority. Santos argues that the film simultaneously constructs and dismantles its status as a sacred or transformative object.^[40]

The film has frequently been situated within the post-war development of Surrealist cinema, with the Panic Movement providing its immediate theatrical and aesthetic framework. Panic represented a revision or extension of Surrealism rather than a complete rejection of it. Jodorowsky, Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor opposed what they regarded as the institutionalisation, political rigidity and cultural respectability of the circle led by André Breton, but retained Surrealism's attack upon bourgeois rationality, its anti-clericalism, black humour, erotic provocation, dream imagery and use of irrational juxtaposition.^[41][42][43]

Panic combined this Surrealist inheritance with the absurd, Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, the cinematic example of Luis Buñuel and one-time performances known as "Panic ephemerals". These events used simultaneous actions, improvisation, bodily exposure, violent or sacrilegious imagery and sensory excess in an attempt to overcome the passive separation between spectator and performance. Jodorowsky characterised Panic through the conjunction of humour, terror and euphoria, and regarded theatrical shock as a potential means of catharsis or transformation.^[44][42]

These methods continued into The Holy Mountain. Its discontinuous imagery, attacks upon Christianity and bourgeois morality, treatment of desire and the unconscious, visual jokes, metamorphoses and deliberate affronts to conventional taste belong recognisably to the Surrealist tradition. Its ritualised performances, sensory assaults and attempt to transform the audience rather than merely represent an imaginary world are more specifically derived from Panic theatre and Artaud.^[42][45]

Jodorowsky later described himself as "the last surrealistic moviemaker", while adding that he had moved a step beyond Surrealism by directing dream imagery towards healing and transformation.^[46] Scholars have consequently described his cinema both as Surrealist and as post-Surrealist. The latter term indicates his transformation of the movement through Panic performance, mysticism, psychedelic counterculture and therapeutic ambition, rather than the absence of a Surrealist genealogy.^[41][42][43]

The Holy Mountain is therefore better understood as a post-war Surrealist film in a distinctively Panic idiom than as a work whose relationship to Surrealism is fundamentally doubtful. Its combination of revolt, dream logic and scandal with a directed initiatory programme marks both its continuity with historical Surrealism and Jodorowsky's effort to reformulate that tradition as an instrument of spiritual and psychological transformation.

Influence

The film subsequently entered both museum culture and popular entertainment. In 2011, curator Klaus Biesenbach organised a large-scale installation at MoMA PS1 that included the film, storyboards, notes and Tarot material. The film was projected continuously as part of an exhibition presenting Jodorowsky's cinema as a point of reference for contemporary visual art.^[47]

Its imagery also influenced the staging of Kanye West's 2013–14 Yeezus Tour. West publicly cited Jodorowsky during a New York performance, and critic Sasha Frere-Jones identified the film as an evident source for the production's artificial mountain, masked or robed female ensemble, religious apparitions and surreal theatrical juxtapositions.^[48]

The film's continued circulation through repertory screenings, museum installations, music, fashion and stage design illustrates the transition described by Santos from marginal midnight attraction to an acknowledged cult classic. Its former scarcity remains part of its mythology even after restoration and digital distribution made it widely available.^[49]