Jodorowsky at The House
The Holy Mountain
For our Film Club, we went into Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, which might be one of the strangest films we have watched together. It is full of religious imagery, alchemy, violence, sex, capitalism, death, spirituality, animals, tarot, ritual and an almost overwhelming amount of symbolism. It feels less like watching a conventional film and more like being dropped into someone else's dream, except the dream seems to have been designed by an occultist, a painter and a political satirist at the same time.
And perhaps that is exactly why Jodorowsky is so fascinating.
He was never particularly interested in cinema behaving politely.
The Holy Mountain doesn't really follow the rules of conventional storytelling. Characters appear almost like archetypes rather than psychologically realistic people, images replace explanations, and one symbol seems to lead to another without ever giving you a comfortable place to stop and say, okay, I understand now.
Instead, Jodorowsky asks you to look.
And then look again.
The film follows a thief who encounters an alchemist and is taken on a journey with a group of wealthy and powerful people towards the mythical Holy Mountain, where they hope to discover some form of enlightenment or immortality. But the journey quickly becomes something much bigger than a quest. Along the way, Jodorowsky takes apart religion, consumerism, political power, colonialism, sexuality and the idea that wealth or knowledge can somehow make us spiritually complete.
It is an enormous amount to put into one film.
And he does it without much concern for subtlety.
There are moments where the film feels almost deliberately excessive, as though Jodorowsky is testing how much imagery a viewer can take before they stop trying to interpret it and simply surrender to the experience.
That was probably one of the most interesting things to talk about afterwards.
What are we supposed to do with a film like this?
Are we supposed to decode every symbol? Is the alchemist telling us what the film means? Is there an actual answer hidden somewhere inside all the religious and occult imagery?
Or is the point that we keep looking for an answer because we are uncomfortable with not having one?
Jodorowsky's cinema sits somewhere between film, ritual and provocation. He was interested in the possibility that art could do something to the person experiencing it, rather than simply entertaining them. He famously approached cinema as a kind of spiritual or transformative experience, and The Holy Mountain feels like the clearest expression of that ambition.
You are not really meant to sit back comfortably and consume it.
You are meant to be confronted by it.
Sometimes that confrontation is beautiful. Sometimes it is grotesque. Sometimes it is funny without you being completely sure whether you are supposed to laugh.
And that is part of the experience.
There is also something fascinating about the way Jodorowsky uses excess. Everything in The Holy Mountain is turned up: colour, costume, bodies, religious imagery, violence, money, desire, spectacle. It is almost impossible to watch the film without feeling that you are being shown too much.
But perhaps that excess is itself part of the argument.
We live surrounded by images, objects, advertisements, symbols and things telling us what to want. Jodorowsky takes that visual language and pushes it until it becomes absurd. Religion becomes spectacle. Capitalism becomes ritual. Wealth becomes grotesque. Consumption becomes almost indistinguishable from worship.
The film keeps asking what we are actually worshipping.
Money?
Power?
Sex?
Knowledge?
God?
Ourselves?
And then, just when you think you might be getting somewhere, Jodorowsky pulls the rug out again.
This is also why The Holy Mountain felt like such a good Film Club film.
It is almost impossible to have the same interpretation of it.
One person can spend the entire conversation talking about religion, someone else about capitalism, someone else about the imagery, someone else about whether any of it makes sense at all. You can love one scene and hate the next. You can find something profound and completely ridiculous within the same five minutes.
And eventually you realise that perhaps the disagreement is the experience.
The film gives everyone something different to hold onto.
There is something quite beautiful about watching a film like this with a group of people because it reminds you that interpretation is also a form of connection. You bring your own experiences to a film, someone else brings theirs, and somewhere between the two versions something new appears.
Maybe that is why Jodorowsky still feels so radical.
He doesn't treat the audience as passive.
He doesn't want to give you a message and have you leave with it neatly packaged.
He wants to disturb you a little.
He wants to make you question what you are looking at, what you believe, what you desire and perhaps even why you came to the cinema in the first place.
By the end of The Holy Mountain, you may not have found enlightenment.
You may not even be entirely sure what you watched.
But perhaps that is the point.
Sometimes a film doesn't need to give you an answer.