The Holy Mountain

1.

'Introduction'

Al Razutis - Visual Alchemy - April 28, 2020
Coming attractions: "Alchemy? In the public eye? In commercial cinemas?"
"Let's talk Jodorowsky and his Holy Mountain then, and see how that ends..."

"I understand it ends badly", said an early theatre goer.
"That's right, it ends badly", said the projectionist. "Not because of the surrealism, but the damned story and the costume drama."

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Al Razutis - Visual Alchemy - May 10, 2020
"On the subject of the man who would be alchemist and king"

Jodo(rowsky) wanted to be a cowboy, so he played one, in a movie he directed (El Topo), the movie that brought him to US and John Lennon fame.

Jodo wanted to be a grand Master, Alchemist, the Director of all things visible, so he played one (in The Holy Mountain), which was produced with Beatles money, a million bucks and no strings attached in that grand year of 1973.

     

It's this second movie, The Holy Mountain, and its use of surrealist memes, tropes, and Jodo's appropriation of alchemical symbols and the 'making of gold' mythology that is of my interest here, to continue the story of alchemy and visual alchemy.

It's not even Jodorowsky's story, but an unfinished novel borrowed from elsewhere. It's conclusion is simple: 'give it up, there are no answers, it's been a waste of time, I'm out of here. With your money'.

So, why the alchemy, the surrealism, the sadism? Why all these allegories with the Tarot, Astrology, Alchemy and its anthropomorphic characters, why game the audience and promise them 'gold' when the game is and has been to play act at making money? Is this the conclusion? 'That if not for the money there would be no gold?'

Well, Jodo was not an alchemist, nor is this film really about alchemy. It does follow a trajectory, though, of popular 'esoteric story telling' using popular 'hermetics', and for that reason it is invaluable - we have to show what people think is at stake here.

Then we can call it fool's gold.

" Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mexican-Chilean film director, life, filmography is all searchable. I have never met him, I admire his tenacity in creating his works though I may not admire his methods or some of his results." (AR)

Bio on Jodorowsky

Al Razutis - Visual Alchemy - May 12 at 1:23 PM
" Who is Alejandro Jodorowsky?"

"He came to cinema by way of mime, by way of theater, surrealism, dada and Artaud's Theatre and its Double. It wasn't about visual arts or simple storytelling, his cinema was one of shock, insult, and mockery of authority, and religions. His surrealism was whatever inspired him at themoment of the 'fortunate accident' or perhaps to more graphically deface the symbols of 'before'.

He played an 'alchemist' only for a film, and that was a toss. Didn't go anywhere either. But there's more to this story than labels, definitions, expectations even.

We need to start with some bio, some interests, some history of the making of this 'The Holy Mountain' and why it went nowhere, but has returned here, at last." (AR)

A good bit of bio in addition to wiki would help:   http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/jodorowsky/

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Al Razutis - Visual Alchemy - May 12 at 1:30 PM, 2020
A few frames from the opening title section of "THE HOLY MOUNTAIN", to further introduce the visuals and this RELEVANT SIDE-BAR:

"...according to Jodorowsky, it was quite possible to keep these audiences interested in philosophical content by putting two naked women onstage during the performances. (3) In a sense, this staging of transgressive and potentially prurient visuals alongside serious philosophical and artistic themes is indicative of the films that he would make several years later."
-- Sense of Cinema, David Church, 2007

"The film's prologue provides the thematic context of the entire film. With a Buddhist monk's chant on the soundtrack we see a man whom we will come to know as The Alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky) in a room with two women - identical twins - who are regaled in fancy dresses, makeup and salon hair. Slowly and methodically, the Alchemist removes all of their accouterments - he wipes off their makeup, removes their press on nails, shaves their heads and removes their dresses, until they are left naked and unburdened of their materialistic desires."
-- Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 19 [2015], Iss. 2, Art. 2, Breckenridge: A Path Less Traveled Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2015

'Jodorowsky and Artaud'

TOWARDS THE HOLY MOUNTAIN -- SETTING THE STAGE:

Jodorowsky "...directed a 4-hour 'happening' called 'Sacramental Melodrama' on 24 May 1965 at the Second Paris Festival of Free Expression. In 'Sacramental Melodrama', all manner of chaotic and surreal acts took place, such as his twisting off the heads of two geese while having his leather costume cut off by topless women, using a wooden cross (with a crucified chicken nailed to it) as a giant phallus, the symbolic castration of a rabbi, and a huge plastic vagina spewing live turtles and other objects into the audience - all to the constant sound of a live rock band. This was an expression of Jodorowsky's desire to create theatrical spectacles that, in the absence of a written text, could not be repeated; in an essay on 'The Goal of the Theatre', he stated that the ephemeral character of theatre sprang from a subplot of unforeseen and unrepeatable errors and accidents, not from written texts and object-traces. (5)

"Jodorowsky's ideas on theatre and film are directly inspired by surrealist writer Antonin Artaud; he once cited Artaud's The Theater and Its Double as his 'bible', and it was Artaud's travels to Mexico that inspired Jodorowsky's own work there. (6) Artaud wanted to create a Theater of Cruelty that abandoned written texts and spoken language, instead basing performances upon a visual language of corrosively violent and bleakly humorous symbols (often using marionettes and mime to convey meaning) that would directly affect the spectator's unconscious and provoke a shattering of normative reality through psychic excitation. (7)

"Jodorowsky echoes these sentiments when he claims that his films are densely layered with symbols (e.g. symbols of the Tarot) in order to hopefully activate universal symbols lying dormant within the viewer's unconscious. Various critics have accused Jodorowsky of self-indulgently piling inscrutable layers of symbolism from all manner of religious and mystical faiths in his films, leading the director to defensively assert that his films are only as limited as the viewer's own sense of spirituality, but his invocation of mysticism (much like Artaud's theory of an 'alchemical theater') is a means of searching for an 'objective art' that speaks to a Jungian collective unconscious. People cannot defend themselves against images in the same way that they can defend against semantic properties. (8) Truth can only be found by discarding the logic of semantics and embracing, through filmic images, the universal language of symbols that all cultures share in some form through mysticism." (9)

-- Senses of Cinema, Church 2007

The Alchemical Theater Revisited

Al Razutis - Visual Alchemy - May 12, 2020

" The term 'alchemical theatre' was introduced on this page some time ago - in a copy of the exhibition catalog for 'Visual Alchemy' exhibition of 1977 of holograms (the namesake of the studio too). I used it prominently in my artist statement on the nature of this show.

However, in a parallel vein, you see Jodorowsky's use, and his critics and interpreters uses of the term 'alchemical theatre', which was also used by Antonin Artaud, as Chapter III in the 'Theater and its Double' book which was published by in the last century...

So let's read what Artaud says as I have excerpted it. Those familiar with my films ('Visual Essays') know that I referred to this very same text / book in my 1982 film 'For Artaud'.

'THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE' -- Chapter 3 -- 'THE ALCHEMICAL THEATRE'

"There is a mysterious identity of essence between the principle of the theater and that of alchemy. For like alchemy, the theater, considered from the point of view of its deepest principle, is developed from a certain number of fundamentals which are the same for all the arts and which aim on the spiritual and imaginary level at an efficacity analogous to the process which in the physical world actually turns all matter into gold. But there is a still deeper resemblance between the theater and alchemy, one which leads much further metaphysically. It is that alchemy and the theater are so to speak virtual arts, and do not carry their end or their reality within themselves.

"Where alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Double of an operation which functions only on the level of real matter, the theater must also be considered as the Double, not of this direct, everyday reality of which it is gradually being reduced to a mere inert replica-as empty as it is sugarcoated-but of another archetypal and dangerous reality, a reality of which the Principles, like dolphins, once they have shown their heads, hurry to dive back into the obscurity of the deep."

( ... )

"All true alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is a mirage. And this perpetual allusion to the materials and the principle of the theater found in almost all alchemical books should be understood as the expression of an identity (of which alchemists are extremely aware) existing between the world in which the characters, objects, images, and in a general way all that constitutes the virtual reality of the theater develops, and the purely fictitious and illusory world in which the symbols of alchemy are evolved.

"These symbols, which indicate what might be called philosophical states of matter, already start the mind on its way toward that fiery purification, that unification and that emaciation (in a horribly simplified and pure sense) of the natural molecules; on its way toward that operation which permits, by sheer force of destructive analysis, the reconception and re constitution of solids according that equilibrium of spiritual descent by which they ultimately become gold again. It is not sufficiently understood how much the material symbolism used to designate this mysterious operation corresponds to a parallel symbolism in the mind, a deployment of ideas and appearances by which all that is theatrical in the theater is designated and can be distinguished philosophically."

( ... )

"The theatrical operation of making gold, by the immensity of the conflicts it provokes, by the prodigious number of forces it throws one against the other and rouses, by this appeal to a sort of essential redistillation brimming with consequences and surcharged with spirituality, ultimately evokes in the spirit an absolute and abstract purity, beyond which there can. be nothing, and which can be. conceived as a unique sound, defining note, caught on the wing, the organic part of an indescribable vibration.

"The Orphic Mysteries which subjugated Plato must have possessed on the moral and psychological level something of this definitive and transcendent aspect .of the alchemical theater, with elements of an extraordinary psychological density, and conversely must have evoked the symbols. of alchemy, which provide the spiritual means of decanting and transfusing matter, must have evoked the passionate and decisive transfusion of matter by mind.

"We are told that the Mysteries of Eleusis confined themselves to the mise en scene of a certain number of moral truths. I believe instead that they must have consisted of projections and precipitations of conflicts, indescribable battles of principles joined from that dizzying and slippery perspective in which every truth is lost in the realization of the inextricable and unique fusion of the abstract and the concrete, and I think that by the music of instruments, the combinations of colors and shapes, of which we have lost every notion, they must have brought to a climax that. nostalgia for pure beauty of which Plato, at least once in this world, must have found the complete, sonorous, streaming naked realization: to resolve by conjunctions unimaginably strange to our waking minds, to resolve or even annihilate every conflict produced by . the antagonism. of matter and mind, idea and form, concrete and abstract, and to dissolve all appearances into one unique expression which must have been the equivalent of spiritualized gold."

And too add for speed readers (from 'Bookrags' page on this book): "According to Artaud, the science of alchemy and theater share a common property: They are both 'virtual.' Indeed, alchemy uses symbols to reflect physical operations at a spiritual level. However, the whole science of alchemy has no actual efficiency; it only serves as a double for something that does not exist. The same can be said about theater, which serves as a copy, or double, of a life that does not exist. In its current, Occidental interpretation, theater is limited to mimicking daily life through scripted dialogues; in truth, real theater should reflect a reality where humans must have little influence or effect. "Theater is thus anchored in an essential metaphysical conflict which it cannot escape. The author associates this essential drama or conflict to an original "will," itself without conflict." (Bookrags)

A PDF downloadable copy of "The Theater and Its Double" by Antonin Artaud, which contains Chapter 3 "The Alchemical Theater" is on my web site at: http://www.alchemists.com/fb/theatre_its_double.pdf

There is no center, no film scholarship in Cinema Canada either

The 'center cannot hold' here because there is no center to this. No profundity. Profanity, yes. And a hubris on the part of Jodorowsky that must be read in this stream of consciousness (Cinema Canada, 1974, 'Two Visions', as per Daria Stermac 'interview - recording') which I will quote in part starting with the beginning:

NOTE on the interviewer Daria Stermac and the standards of Canadian film magazine interviews in 'Cinema Canada' in the 1970's:

Ms. Stermac, who I've never met except through FB, was a York University film student (grad) who met Jodorowsky in 1974 when he came to Toronto to promote his film El Topo, who showed him her student film, and got it on with him by showing more (presumably) -- she described herself to me as Jodorowsky's 'lover' and she's the author of this interview recording and stream of consdiousness by Jodorowsky making his case. Call it a 'mutual self promotion'. (AR)

So the following quote preceding / introducing the interview makes all the sense:

"Daria Stermac feels a great closeness to Alexandro Jodorowsky's work, both in style and philosophy. She showed him her film when he was in Toronto promoting El Topo, and Jodorowsky was so impressed by her vision that he offered to assist her in producing her next film. It was thus that they met and the following interview took place."

PDF of interview on my web site: http://www.alchemists.com/fb/jodo_stermac_cinemacanada.pdf

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"I will tell you why I really don't exist. When I made Holy Mountain I was very interested in alchemy. We opened the picture in Paris three weeks ago with a lot of success and I had the great pleasure to be searched by two alchemists. One was Canceller who writes books about alchemy, very well known, very old. They say he is 130 years old but when you look at him he is young. And we started to speak about the symbol of the Cross and the Rose, because we were speaking about Rosicrucians. He said the Cross is made by the Thorn, a Cross of Thorn, and in the middle is the Rose which starts to burn; but the Rose takes the energy of the Thorn which is the suffering. The more the Rose starts to open the less suffering you have. And in the end there is only the Rose and you have no Thorns.

"When you start to make a picture you are starting to do with your suffering a work with your own Rose. You put all your suffering, all your violence, all your experience inside a picture. When you are really able to put all your life inside a picture - you don't exist anymore. You are astonished to see me as a normal person. All my abnormalities are put inside my picture.

"There is a woman writer in the U.S. - Anais Nin. They say that she does not write books. She writes a continual novel because she writes her life. As for me, I am not making one or two pictures. I am making a continual picture which is my search for consciousness. I want to have cosmic consciousness, to unite myself with the whole universe.

"They say that I am a madman. But I say what is madness? What is bad? What is good? Why do you need to insult a person? Why do you need to pick apart a person? Why do you need to be destructive? Every person has a god inside himself, has a soul which is beautiful. And the soul is like the universe with plenty of light. Our life puts a subjectivity which is darkness around this internal beauty and light. This darkness we call the personality and we hate the darkness of others. But in order to know the others we need to jump into them. You must at first die from within in order to begin living." (Jodoroswky)

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Titles and Prologue

A panel of frames from The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky title section

"The film's prologue provides the thematic context of the entire film. With a Buddhist monk's chant on the soundtrack we see a man whom we will come to know as The Alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky) in a room with two women - identical twins - who are regaled in fancy dresses, makeup and salon hair. Slowly and methodically, the Alchemist removes all of their accouterments - he wipes off their makeup, removes their press on nails, shaves their heads and removes their dresses, until they are left naked and unburdened of their materialistic desires.

To restate Jodorowsky's interests in 'shock' and nudity as part of his narrative approach:

"...according to Jodorowsky, it was quite possible to keep these audiences interested in philosophical content by putting two naked women onstage during the performances. In a sense, this staging of transgressive and potentially prurient visuals alongside serious philosophical and artistic themes is indicative of the films that he would make several years later."
-- Sense of Cinema, David Church, 2007

"The Holy Mountain is a film with no traditional narrative arc to it, in fact, there is hardly anything of a narrative at all (what plot the film has takes up very little screen time) but this process of purification can be more easily seen as being the foundation of the film's structure. The Holy Mountain is not divided into segments, as El Topo was, but we can still discern a three-act structure to the film."

Summaries quoted from:

Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 19 [2015], Iss. 2, Art. 2
"Breckenridge: A Path Less Traveled"

PDF of this article on my web site: http://www.alchemists.com/fb/jodo-path-less-traveled.pdf

2. 'ACT 1'

Al Razutis - Visual Alchemy - May 13, 2020
"3 Acts Badly Done" - Continuing on 'The Holy Mountain' and 'alchemy' by Al Razutis 2020, and other authors where cited.

'Where are we that we would need a guide?' We are in a horribly sad city, filled with those who have and those who will never be.

A panel of frames from The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, this section referred to as ACT 1

"The first act in fact serves no real function aside from presenting us with a world overrun by debauchery and decadence and, outside of the context of the rest of the film, can seem like little more than exploitative gratuity. But this sequence, though perhaps far longer than it needs to be, is essential to Jodorowsky's idea of enlightenment." (Breckenridge)

The plot of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain is conveyed by a series of stiff, badly acted, gaudily dressed and loosely connected scenes, tableauxs, and other indulgences such as grotesque or gratuitous sexual scenes, degradations or sadistic acts.

In short, it's a gaudy mess of confusions, projections, and hallucinations induced by Jodorowsky's own penchant to mix LSD sessions with his 'writing', and to liberally borrow from the Tarot, Alchemy, and other hermetics or religious symbolisms. He makes a mess of the whole thing. And that's for starters.

Others see a 'profundity' in his methods, a kind of 'cleansing' by invoking first 'how bad things can be' then subjecting the protagonist to initiation (cleansing), before finally tossing the whole thing, the whole plot, all the symbols, conceits, interpretations in the 'bin'. I found no profundity, no wisdom, only the imitation of the 'alchemical theater' of which others speak.

I know the psychotic properties of LSD, as did many of my generation. It's a profound and wonderful mind-altering drug, used to experience the the 'sacred' and the 'limits of consciousness', and not a party drug, nor a 'creative pick me upper' to be triffled with when making a film and subjecting so many to one's hallucinations which ride the horse of hubris, called the director's chair. (AR)

ACT I - Narrative action

A panel of frames from The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, this section referred to as ACT 1

"The first act begins with the introduction of the Thief (Horacio Salinas) who we first see passed out in a ditch in a crucifix pose, covered in flies and urinating himself. Jodorowsky wastes no time jumping into the desecration of religious imagery. The Thief is awoken by a limbless man (uncredited) and a group of naked children (recall the dual interpretation of the naked child from El Topo) who wake him by hanging him on a cross and throwing rocks at him.

"One thing to note in this sequence is the procession of symbols Jodorowsky presents to us. There is the obvious one of the crucifixion but we also see the limbless man approach with a tarot card strapped to his back and pluck a white rose from the Thief's palm. The rose plucked from the hand has a vague connotation of stigmata to it, but Ben Cobb in Anarchy and Alchemy, informs us that a white rose is an alchemical symbol for 'purity, innocence and unconditional love,' as well as symbolizing the initiation of new members into the alchemical world. Cobb also informs us that the tarot card on the back of the limbless man 'identifies him as an agent of some grand mechanism.'

"I have already asserted that Jodorowsky is perhaps the most symbol-obsessed director in film history and while we see extensive use of them in El Topo, in The Holy Mountain they are used so extensively as to become as overwhelming to the viewer as the film's sex, nudity and violence. And while some, like the crucifixion, are obvious, even in the heyday of New-Age mysticism Jodorowsky is setting his expectations rather high if he expects his audience to know the meanings of tarot cards and the alchemical significance of white roses.

"However, I would suggest that, while an exhaustive analysis of the film's many symbols would most likely yield some fruitful understanding of the film, we can take an easier approach and recognize the value of unrecognizable symbols towards the film's ideas on spirituality, which is to say that a lack of understanding actually holds value." (Breckenridge)

A panel of frames from The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, this section referred to as ACT 1

"After waking up, the Thief and the limbless man set off together on an excursion through an unnamed city. We see soldiers ruthlessly mowing down student protesters in the streets but birds fly from their bullet wounds as buses full of middle age, middle class American tourists disembark to get their photos taken with the executioners and corpses (one particularly memorable moment has one of the soldiers deciding to have sex with one of the American women, who gladly consents and smiles for the camera as the husband takes pictures of the two of them going at it) while a deranged military cult marches through the streets with skinned rabbits nailed to crucifixes.

"We also see a range of blasphemous acts, including an animalistic bishop who speaks only in grunts sleeping in bed with a statue of Christ and a group of mostly naked women praying at an altar to the Virgin Mary (one of whom falls in love with the thief and has a companion chimpanzee for reasons that are never explained beyond a vague suggestion that the chimpanzee is a similar companion for her that the limbless man is for the thief). In short, Jodorowsky is careful to ensure that all seven of the deadly sins are on display here as well as many of the venial sins.

"The first act in fact serves no real function aside from presenting us with a world overrun by debauchery and decadence and, outside of the context of the rest of the film, can seem like little more than exploitative gratuity. But this sequence, though perhaps far longer than it needs to be, is essential to Jodorowsky's idea of enlightenment.

"Interestingly, where most films become increasingly gratuitous as they progress, The Holy Mountain actually becomes less so, with the long first act serving as the high (low?) point of the film's depravity. It is also worth noting that, while there is a great deal of satire to be found in this film (especially in the second act), much of the first act doesn't even reach the level of satire. Jodorowsky wants the audience to wallow in the filth of Western culture, stripped of any real philosophical adornments." (Breckenridge)

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" We can stop here, and examine some details, images of what has just happened in the first 30 or so minutes of this film, 'ACT I' (panel of images by AR) which precedes the 'Thief' climbing the Alchemist's tower and submitting himself to the rituals and scenarios of ACT II (which I will also comment on next as containing and referring to the alchemical 'Opus')." (AR)

-- to open a enlarged view of the panel see: http://www.alchemists.com/fb/jodo-3-jodo-act1.jpg

REFERENCE PAGES LISTED:

'Act 2 - Alchemical Theater'

'Act 3 - The Story Unravels'

Essays on Alchemy and Visual Alchemy - Razutis

Visual Alchemy Home Page