Poster for The Holy Mountain (1973)
Recalling his first experience with Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, Jesse Pasternack explains why he recommends going into a film blind.
One of my favorite moviegoing experiences at the IU Cinema was a midnight showing of The Holy Mountain (1973). I saw my friend and fellow blogger Aja Essex there, and sat in between two other friends. There was an air of excited anticipation in the Cinema that night as we all waited for the movie, which had achieved international acclaim decades ago for its surrealist vision. Then it began, and The Holy Mountain astonished us, just as it did its first audiences at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.
Now, at this point in my normal pieces for the blog, I would write a brief plot summary of this movie. But this time, I’m not going to do that. The reason why dates back to something I learned from my professor Dr. Ryan Powell, who I had at IU for Hollywood II and American Independent Cinema. Dr. Powell taught Hollywood II in the Cinema, where he would lecture and we would break into small groups to discuss the films we had seen two nights earlier. One day, as he lectured on the idiosyncratic American cinema of the late 1960s, he told us that these films were experiences. The original people who saw them went in cold, with no idea of what they were about to witness, and left them feeling wowed or weird, or more probably some combination of the two. To give us that experience, he showed us Head (1968) that same class session. Watching that late 1960s psychedelic fantasia on celebrity with no idea of what to expect is a fun memory for me, and I’m glad I went in cold without an idea of what would happen next.
Original poster for Head (1968)
The Holy Mountain is that type of movie. Any plot description would not do justice to what you would be about to witness. I could write about its writer-director-producer-composer-costume-and-production-designer Alejandro Jodorowsky (who also played The Alchemist in this movie) and his background, but I suspect that even the brief description I just gave of him may have given too much away. I could also write about the stunning imagery, which Jodorowsky accentuated by removing 20 minutes of dialogue from this movie so that it would be more of a visual experience. But, again, the surrealist delights which he cooked up are best experienced firsthand without any prior knowledge. Seeing them myself for the first time at the IU Cinema, with little idea of what they would be and surrounded by people who had as little knowledge of what to expect as I did, was an experience I would recommend again and again.
In this day and age, it would be easy for you to research The Holy Mountain before seeing it. You could watch the trailer on YouTube or read about it on Wikipedia. But I would suggest that you don’t do either of those things. Instead, find a DVD of it, invite some friends over, and watch this movie without having any idea of what will happen. It’ll be an experience which you will never forget, just like my first viewing of this stupefying and spectacular film.
IU Cinema previously screened The Holy Mountain earlier this month on December 1 as well as in September 2017.