Wednesday, August 24, 2011

What's it Meta For?: The Holy Mountain (1973)


By Tom Swift

This movie is Metafor the totality of transformation and its unbearably promiscuous scope, going out and banging all the possible perspectives it can wrap its lusty, signifying limbs around.
The film, a beautiful contrivance of symbolic dialogues based around a thief’s journey to enlightenment, adapts Ascent of Mount Carmel by St. John of the Cross and Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal and regurgitates them as a threnody of mysticism, personal exploration, punetrating lucidity and a deeply contorted pair of spectacles through which to view the world. I pluralize spectacles because the journey taken throughout the movie is under the guise of suspended disbelief, which is constantly undermined by the surrealistic, referential and ambiguous style of the film; the journey finishes upon a mountain top, the Holy Mountain sought and labored for through two and a half artistically diarrheic hours; the Alchemist and mentor for the journey-folk, Jadorowsky himself, yells, “Zoom back cameras!” and the journey becomes two fold as the viewer realizes that he has been part of the journey on as deeply a symbolic level as the characters in the films hoped to be. At that point the viewer’s mind is fucked senseless by the slutty realizations looming on the end credits and/or they pass out from a poorly planned, but successfully breath taking, auto-erotic jog. You should watch this movie…

4 out of 5 stars




Santa Sangre (1989)

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