Holy Mountain

I am a big midnight movie goer and I decided to check this one out because of a friend's recommendation. If you aren't aware, midnight movies are when a local theater likes to play cult movies at midnight on friday and saturday nights. They are usually pretty fun and I just thought I would comment on this type of movie experience too. Anyway, Holy Mountain is a very trippy film from the 70s directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. John Lennon and Yoko Ono helped helped produce the film and as a result the film is a big budget feature with a very psychedelic look to it. I think this movie poster is pretty clear.

The whole film is very strange and intense, and reminds me a lot of Kenneth Anger's work in its cult and drug references. That being said, I feel that Jodorowsky is sometimes way too direct with his use of metaphor and imagery but the whole film is still an interesting experience. I think my opinion of this would be more relatable if I was part of the generation that this is speaking to though because in many ways I can see this as a vietnam protest. Jodorowsky also comments on the negatives of the drug culture of the time which I very much appreciated. At first I felt very quickly that the film was too didactic, but towards the second half I began to get a different reading, especialy when the camera was revealed in the film. By the end, I realized that I actually really liked it and appreciated all the imagery.

My final comments are about Jodorowsky's imagery. Some of the funnier moments are his art machine which consists of an assembly line of painted asses that all sit on pieces of paper and his model of the spanish conquistadors taking over south america, but everyone is represented as lizards and frogs. There are also some very sad but beautiful moments, like the scene where birds fly out of a dead protester's wounds. These examples barely describe the imagery though, but they resonated with me. Anyway, if anyone is looking for an under-the-radar cult classic, Holy Mountain is worth checking out.