The Holy Mountain review – a spiritual journey to make you love the world

Films in the 1970s had every reason to be “trippy.” While America was waging a senseless war in Vietnam, citizens on both the Old and the New continents were trying to find answers elsewhere, in drugs, cults, and music. But behind this somewhat pejorative and patronising word, one can find some deeply engaging films that employ psychedelic imagery not to simply provide a temporary escape from reality, but instead to push the viewer to rise to a new level of consciousness. 

Alejandro Jodorowsky has devoted his art to helping people rethink their relationship with themselves and, as a result, the world. His chosen vehicle for this great enterprise of reconnecting human beings to the universe has been cinema, where symbols, sounds and montage allow for a type of expression that gently guides the viewer while leaving plenty of room for personal interpretation. His 1973 film The Holy Mountain, a restoration of which is currently in cinemas thanks to Arrow Films, indeed has only a few lines of dialogue: Jodorowsky prefers the openness of images to the limitations of language. Images can better be experienced like life itself, in all their ambiguity and secret signification. 

The Holy Mountain begins by following a Christ-like figure (Horacio Salinas) as he naively wanders into the world and discovers money and the exploitation it engenders. But rather than being horrified by these sights, the man is simply fascinated: in a word, he is a fool, unaware of society’s rules and expectations, completely vulnerable and open. This figure would seem too absurd in another filmmaker’s hands, but Jodorowsky employs it with a clear method and intent, based on his careful study of another creative medium: tarot. The Fool is the first card in tarot’s major arcana, a series of 22 cards that represent one’s life path from complete ignorance to perfect union with the world. What The Holy Mountain depicts, rather than a narrative, is a series of tests and learning experiences that the fool will go through in order to attain enlightenment. 

Jodorowsky approaches cinema like one approaches tarot cards: their power lies in their colours, composition, and the mystery of the characters that populate them. Early in his adventure, the hero of The Holy Mountain encounters an Alchemist (Jodorowsky himself), a figure in the major arcana typically called the Magician and representing personal power and deliberate action, who lives at the top of a tower. On its tarot card, the tower is seen ablaze which, despite its somber connotations, evokes radical change and the crumbling of old structures. Jodorowsky represents it intact in his film, perhaps because when the Fool climbs the tower to meet the Alchemist, he is then introduced to a series of negative characters who rule the universe. Each of these 7 people exploits the citizens of his or her planet and promotes violence using commerce: the take-down of capitalism is not subtle, but just like tarot, Jodorowsky works in a heightened, abstract, and evocative register. His images are bright, his camera is swift, and his characterisation is limited to powerful archetypes. 

The tower doesn’t catch fire, but all the rulers of the universe and our Christ-like hero (who could be seen as the ruler of our world) come down to leave in search of the Holy Mountain, where mages are told to hold the secret to immortality. Their journey is a humbling one, and so is The Holy Mountain for its spectators. If some of Jodorowsky’s more outlandish images can take one out of the film, the accumulated effect of his colourful extrapolations on human nature and the possibilities that the universe holds is exhilarating. The apotheosis of the rulers’ trip – and, according to tarot, of one’s life if it is well lived – is an overwhelming sense of being present in the world as the world, like every rock and every leaf, beyond all preconceived gender, social, economic, or racial identities. But Jodorowsky, in his extreme fashion, takes the humbling further, including the spectator directly in his tale of mystical awakening. “When you are linked to everyone, there are no enemies,” Jodorowsky has said, and as he obliterates the limit between the Alchemist and himself, the film and reality, he invites us to see The Holy Mountain as part of the world, and part of us.