The Holy Mountain
Short description
Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain follows a thief who is drawn into the tower of an alchemist and subjected to the early stages of an initiation. The alchemist then introduces him to seven powerful figures, each linked to one of the planets, who are willing to give up their worldly lives in exchange for the secret of immortality. The group undergoes strange mystical rites before setting out for Lotus Island, where they intend to climb the sacred mountain and confront the immortal sages said to live at its summit.
Jodorowsky directed, wrote and produced the film, and also plays the alchemist, heading a cast that includes Horacio Salinas as the thief, Zamira Saunders, Juan Ferrara, Adriana Page and Burt Kleiner. It was his second feature, arriving between El Topo in 1970 and Santa Sangre in 1989. Shot in Mexico with American backing, it mixes religious imagery, ritual and satire in a way that made it a cult item rather than a mainstream success.
The film's reputation has held up over the decades. On IMDb it holds a 7.7 rating from around 52,000 votes, and on TMDB a 7.5 from roughly a thousand. A critics' score of 7.4 from 25 reviews puts professional opinion broadly in line with the audience response, suggesting that the film's dense symbolism still divides viewers less than its provocations might imply.
What's left behind the scenes
- Before filming began, director Alejandro Jodorowsky spent a week without sleep meditating under the guidance of a guru, and lived with the film's cast in a commune for a month.
- The lamb carcasses shown crucified on crosses in the film were borrowed from a local restaurant and, upon their return, were cooked and served to customers.
- The first ritual scene in the film depicts gestures and movements that constitute a tea ceremony. Alejandro Jodorowsky later revealed that the women in the scene were not actresses.
- A small octopus, purchased at a local market before filming, played the role of the tumor being removed from the neck of one of the thieves.
- The film crew did not have permission to film a helicopter landing on a city street. One of the actors simply put on a police officer's uniform and stopped traffic on the street for the duration of the filming, after which the entire group hastily retreated.
- During the beheading scene, the actor dealt Alejandro Jodorowsky a genuinely serious blow, cutting his neck and nearly killing him. As the director and lead actor later recounted, he would have died if the sword had been real.
- The film is based on the treatise “Ascent of Mount Carmel” by the Christian mystic and reformer of the Carmelite Order, Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591), and the philosophical novel “Mount Analog: A Novel of Alpine Adventure, Non-Euclidean and Symbolically True” by the poet and prose writer René Daumal (1908-1944).
- Alejandro Jodorowsky dreamed of filming a scene in which his characters jump into the “infinite waters” of the ocean. The actors jumped into the ocean and immediately began to drown. Chaos ensued. While the film crew pulled the actors out of the water, no one was thinking about filming. As a result, the director abandoned the scene altogether.
- The ritual scene at the beginning of the film is accompanied by Buddhist chants. The word “Shakyamuni” means Siddhartha Gautama, i.e., a descendant of Gautama, successful in achieving his goals.
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