A collection of adventures in the film's story where people have abandoned their quest for the sacred mountain and instead engage in drugs, poetry, or craftwork. Leave behind them, climb the mountain. Each has a personal symbolic vision that represents his worst fears and anxieties. The rest are confronted by the immortal, hidden, who appear to be mere dolls without a face.
This is an extraordinary visual concoction, loaded with stunning primary colors, anti-religious caricatures drawn from Diego Rivera and a succession of dreamlike, grotesque vistas worthy of Dalí at his most deranged.
Halfway through we're introduced to nine industrialists and politicians -- they narrate their heinous biographies in Godardian voiceover -- who embark up the title mountain to become immortal. Dude.
So loaded with symbols and religious references that the frames of the films flash by as if Jodorowsky were shuffling a deck of his beloved tarot cards...
Jodorowsky loves to confront the viewer with endless brutality and grotesque decadence and degradation, but here he expresses it with a rich, densely visual imagination.
Neither for the faint of heart or the linear of thinker, The Holy Mountain qualifies both as a fascinating period relic and an enduringly transfixing jaw-dropper.
a kaleidoscope of vibrant colours, free-floating archetypes and picaresque episodes, all packaged to disorient and confound us with its sheer exuberance, before finally bringing us right back to exactly who we are and what it is that we are seeing.
