Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Year Released: 1973
Rating: 4.0
One of the great, mad, lost movies: Jodorowsky followed the equally outlandish El Topo with this, a lashing take on religion, war and immortality. Contains one of the most memorable shots in all of cinema: the Jesus figure (whom the movie starts off with, re-creating the Passion Play as something Matthew Barney and Harmony Korine might envision) stuck in a room filled with hundreds of life-size models of himself and screaming out of agony - the effect is beyond description. The entire movie is just as oddball, piling on perverse sexuality (Jodorowsky once said, "Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles" - and he couldn't have been more disturbingly accurate) along with its own haunting dream logic; the cumulative meaning, like with El Topo, must be supplied by you, the viewer (although the director gives several hints along the way). No one makes experiments like this anymore, and it's a real shame - Peter Greenaway once complained that cinema has been just 'filmed text;' Jodorowsky's pictures are filmed hallucinations. The Holy Mountain is the work of one of the ignored visionaries of the medium.
