The Holy Mountain (1973)

The Holy Mountain arrives from 1973, which is to say from a time before the current vocabulary of social virtue had been assembled. Alejandro Jodorowsky's film concerns an alchemist who gathers seven personifications of the planets, each embodying a planetary vice, and leads them toward immortality. We get a weapons manufacturer, a millionaire art dealer who trades in erotic machines, a political advisor who recommends thinning the population for fiscal reasons. They burn their money and their wax effigies. This is anti-materialism, certainly, and it earns the film a modest place in the eat-the-rich ledger. But the gesture is mystical, not legislative. The gold is transmuted from excrement. The critique aims at the soul, not the tax code.

Elsewhere the ledger stays empty, and we should say so plainly. Women appear as archetypes and cosmetics, not as subjects with grievances. The cast is Mexican by geography and by accident of production, not by any stated commitment to representation. Race goes unexamined. The climate does not enter the frame. No character's body is celebrated, no mind is diagnosed, no historical record is corrected. This is a film about a tower, a dwarf, a thief who resembles Christ, and a great deal of defecation, and it has no interest in the categories we now bring to it.

There is, however, a final sermon. The alchemist turns to the camera, orders it to zoom back, and reveals the lights and the crew. He then instructs the audience to leave the mountain because real life awaits. That is lecturing, of a metaphysical and avant-garde sort, delivered by a man who has just dismantled his own illusion. It is preachy in the way a Zen koan is preachy. The film has opinions about transcendence and almost none about society. We can respect the ambition and still mark the absence.