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March 22, 2007

The Holy Mountain

The Alamo Drafthouse kept playing trailers last week for their double feature of those new prints of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo and The Holy Mountain that have been going around, and it killed me that I wouldn't be there to catch it. But I lucked out, because the NuArt scheduled a three day run of Holy Mountain this week, and I just got back from the second-to-last screening of it; what better way to spend a Thursday afternoon than in pursuit of circa-1973 enlightenment?

Jodorowsky is one of those filmmakers I came to know before I even saw a frame of his work, through my tattered copy of Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion. The 1991 edition that I received for my 10th birthday had a review of Santa Sangre and long, fascinating and, to my mind, frightening interview with Jodorowsky. The ideas of the images of the dead brides rising from their graves, or the trapeeze artist having her arms lopped off, were planted and quickly bloomed in my mind; by the time I got around to seeing Santa Sangre when I was in high school, it wasn't the images themselves that shocked me so much as the colorful, almost ribald physicality of them. Those brides weren't the ephemeral wraiths I'd imagined, but tangible, garishly made up corpuses. This, I think, accounts for much of Jodorwosky's power; he makes the grotesque and fantastic entirely tangible.

I saw El Topo a few years ago, on the same bootleg Japanese VHS tape that I think everyone of my generation has seen it on, and loved it with qualifications. It's an unapologetically symbolic film, but for every dalliance into mythical pretension, there are at least a dozen unforgettable images. It's this same lurid profundity that would elevate Santa Sangre so far above its pulpy narrative two decades later, and it's all there in Holy Mountain, too, along with a serious case of counter-culture idealism. Certain sequences resembles a puree of Fellini and Tout Va Bien-era Godard, with some bluntly obvious satire. Others are deliriously hippy-dippy and sometimes painfully dated; there's a good portion of the film that's hard to watch with a straight face (or, at the very least, an unaltered minset). But through it all, that imagery - strung together with an ellipitically perfect rhythm - prevails. Jodorowsky is a master of the graphic. His symbols are searing, even when they're obvious.

Furthermore, the sheer scale of the film is so impressive, especially in the early sequences, that I was shocked to read that it only cost in the neighborhood of a million dollars (all John Lennon's) to produce. And Jodorowsky's name pops up so frequently in the credits that the film winds up feeling as distinctly handmade as it is unique.

But back to that imagery. I should note that much of it involves animals, either alive, dead or somewehre in between. I don't have too much trouble separating cruelty from craftsmanship when context and cultural standards serve as buffers - the climax of Apocalypse Now is a prime example - but there are certain scenes in here that are tough to justify (I wrote about this conundrum at greater length a few years ago). I'd never for a second discourage anyone from seeing Holy Mountain simply because of some of its more egregious content; but at the same time, that content does force me to consider my own rather muddy delineation of standards. I look down on some of the images in the film, but what about the film stock itself, which is a bi-product of those images?

Regardless; I'm excited about the imminent release of El Topo and Holy Mountain (alongside Fando Y Lis, which I've never seen) on DVD. Even better, now that they're legal again, is the possibility of tours of the very midnight movie circuit that brought Jodorowsky to fame in the first place.

Posted by David Lowery at March 22, 2007 10:19 PM

Comments

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