Trailer
Plot summary
A man lies in the desert with his face covered in flies and is befriended by a dwarf without hands or feet. Together they travel into the city and make money entertaining tourists. Because the man looks like Jesus Christ, locals make him drunk and cast wax figures from his body, which they sell. A quarrel with a priest ends with him eating the face off one statue and sending it into the sky with balloons. A crowd gathers at a tall tower, where a hook has lowered a bag of gold in exchange for food. Wanting to find the gold's source, he climbs the tower and meets the Alchemist and his silent assistant. The Alchemist turns the man's excrement into gold and takes him as an apprentice.
Cast
- Horacio Salinasas The Thief
- Zamira Saundersas The Written Woman
- Adriana Pageas Isla
- Burt Kleineras Klen
- Nicky Nicholsas Berg
- Luis Lomelías Lut
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Holy Mountain (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jodorowsky was instructed by Ichazo to take LSD for spiritual exploration, and he gave psilocybin mushrooms to the actors while shooting the film's death-rebirth scene.
- A deleted scene in which two children, one a young Brontis Jodorowsky, watch a cross made from television sets was cut because the girl's mother threatened to sue over potential pedophilia and the girl's nudity, Jodorowsky said in his DVD commentary.
- One controversy around the film concerned its use and killing of animals; in January 1974, writer T. E. D. Klein included The Holy Mountain in a New York Times essay condemning the killing of animals in the making of films.
- The film's imagery influenced the staging of Kanye West's 2013–14 Yeezus Tour, with critic Sasha Frere-Jones calling it an evident source for the tour's artificial mountain, masked female ensemble and religious apparitions.
- After its American midnight screenings ended in 1975, authorised copies of The Holy Mountain were largely unavailable for more than three decades.
- The central members of the cast spent three months on spiritual exercises guided by Oscar Ichazo of the Arica Institute, drawing on Zen, Sufi, yoga, the Kabbalah and Gurdjieff, then lived communally for a month in Jodorowsky's home before production.
- Before principal photography started, director Jodorowsky and his wife spent a week without sleep under the direction of a Japanese Zen master.
- Jodorowsky cut twenty minutes of dialogue from The Holy Mountain, aiming to remove as much dialogue from the film as he could.
