The Holy Mountain · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Jodorowsky's third feature is perhaps cinema's most concentrated exercise in **impulse-image**: its planetary-initiate vignettes — each a mordant tableau exposing how an industry (arms, advertising, art, religion) is simply another carnival of appetite — are not dramatic scenes but ceremonial disclosures of the drive itself, greed and sanctimony stripped of their civilized disguise. This is the direct inheritance from Luis Buñuel's *L'Âge d'Or*, whose tactic of anticlerical shock-juxtaposition — sacred iconography cut against transgressive bodily imagery — Jodorowsky scales into a full allegorical architecture, each planet-chapter its own blasphemous ceremony. What makes the film formally rigorous beyond provocation is its commitment to **mise-en-scène** as doctrine: Rafael Corkidi's frontal, symmetrical compositions treat every shot as a living tarot card — figures arranged as friezes, the frame densely packed with symbolic objects, each planetary initiate color-coded to an industry — so that meaning is sealed inside the image before any edit occurs. The camera reads rather than watches. This is also why the film belongs to the register of **opsigns & sonsigns**: the planetary chapters function as pure optical situations, spectacles that demand interpretation rather than actions that compel response. The allegorical-initiatic structure, which Jodorowsky derived consciously from the Sufi *Conference of the Birds* and René Daumal's *Mount Analogue*, does not move through sensory-motor logic but through an accumulation of contemplative shocks — images that, like tarot cards laid across a table, wait to be read rather than lived.