Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Holy Mountain
1973 · Alejandro Jodorowsky · The Holy Mountain on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how often figures face the camera dead center. (camera)
Corkidi and Jodorowsky arrange each shot like a tarot card, bodies centered, the frame dense with objects, movement slow and processional rather than a handheld chase.
Payoff: The film wants you to read each frame like a picture, not follow it like an action scene. In the reading: the readable image. The reading calls this a lectosign: an image that will not tell you what to feel, so you must read it.
Watch each planet's initiate perform inside a sealed set. (staging)
Every initiate you meet gets one fully designed room built around their industry: guns, cosmetics, toys, war. Nothing story-like connects the rooms, each is staged as its own display.
Payoff: You are walked through an exhibit of appetites, one display case at a time, instead of a plot. In the reading: attraction-image (montage of attractions). The reading calls each staged vignette an attraction-image: a figure mounted to argue an idea rather than to happen as drama.
Notice each character's costume and set share one color. (light)
Every planetary initiate is keyed to a single palette that colors their costume, their props, and their whole set. The color scheme sorts the cast the way a uniform would.
Payoff: Color functions here as a label, telling you who someone is before they say a word.
Listen for jazz and chant colliding under the images. (sound)
Don Cherry's free jazz mixes with percussion, chant, and dissonant bursts. The music does not underline feeling the way a conventional score does. It estranges the scene instead.
Payoff: The soundtrack keeps you off balance on purpose, so nothing here ever settles into comfort.
Watch costumed lizards reenact the Spanish conquest in miniature. (setting)
Early in the thief's city, tiny armored toads and chameleons restage a historical massacre as a bestiary. It is the same hunger and violence found in the human street outside, just made literal.
Payoff: The costumed animals say the raw appetite under the story is the same, whether the actors are human or not.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Read each frame like a tarot card before you look for a plot. Jodorowsky built a machine that turns waste into gold.