The Holy Mountain · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Alchemist seals the thief's excrement in a glass vessel, heats it, and lifts out a brick of gold. "You are excrement," he says. "You can change yourself into gold." Keep that image close, because it is the whole film performed once in miniature. The Holy Mountain is a machine for transmutation, and nearly everything base gets fed into the retort: money, ego, the body, and finally cinema itself.

Deleuze hands us an exact word for where the film begins, and it isn't flattering. He calls it the impulse-image. Most movies run on what he names the movement-image: a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting stitches perception to action. Jodorowsky refuses that circuit from the first reel. The thief wakes in a degraded carnival city, covered in flies, robbed by children, hauled up and crucified for tourists' cameras. This is naturalism in Deleuze's technical sense — not grit but a world where raw drives erupt beneath the social crust, appetite and waste running on a slope toward death. Deleuze says such a milieu is only the skin over an originary world, a savage substrate. The true face of this Mexico City is the toad-and-chameleon restaging of the Spanish Conquest: costumed reptiles in tiny armor, history collapsed into a bestiary of hunger. The old coarse tag "impulse-image" was right; it just never said what the impulse was for. It is the lead the film means to transmute.

Because Jodorowsky doesn't stay in the gutter. He lifts the material out of it, and the form that lifting takes is the reading's finest key: the reflection-image, and inside it the device Deleuze borrows from Eisenstein, the montage of attractions — the attraction-image. Here action is pulled out of cause and effect and mounted as a Figure, a staged thing that argues instead of happening. The long central movement is built entirely this way. Each planetary initiate walks into a sealed diorama and performs an idea: the weapons manufacturer who designs guns as erotic and devotional relics, the cosmetics-and-art capitalist, the industrialist mass-producing war toys. No one dramatizes anything. Each set is an allegorical exhibit, and the cut between them is blunt, symbolic adjacency rather than story. This is why the film feels less like a plot than a guided tour of the century's appetites.

And you are asked to read those exhibits, which is the third concept. Deleuze's lectosign is the image that has lost its self-evidence, that no longer tells you what to feel or do and instead demands to be deciphered. Corkidi shoots frontally and symmetrically, figures flat to the lens and the frame crowded with ritual objects, so that each composition arrives like a tarot card laid on the table. Color is assigned by program — a palette and an industry keyed to each planet — so the cinematography is itself part of the argument. You don't watch these frames so much as construe them. The film trusts you to be a reader, which in 1973 was a genuine wager on the audience.

The bodies are read the same way. Deleuze's gest is a posture that exposes a relation rather than expressing a character, and Jodorowsky's cast — mostly non-professionals chosen for physical type, often nude, submitting to ceremonial direction out of his Panic and theater-of-cruelty background — are held as living symbols, not people. Salinas plays the thief as an icon acted upon. Nobody has an inner life to perform; they have a station in the diagram.

All of this is descent made visible. The anticlerical shock of cutting the sacred against the transgressive comes straight from Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or. The frontal tableau-as-diorama and the anti-naturalist body-as-emblem are Paradjanov's invention in The Color of Pomegranates. The exact craft team and the acid-Western initiate-quest come from Jodorowsky's own El Topo — Corkidi's paintings, Don Cherry's free-jazz cornet — while the episodic provocation-by-scene method was already running in Fando y Lis and his Panic co-founders' Viva la Muerte. Jodorowsky's addition is scale and totality: he directs, writes, scores, designs, and plays the master, so the film is one sensibility with no seam.

Then he detonates it. In the closing gesture the camera pulls back to expose the crew, and the Alchemist orders, "Zoom back, camera. We are images, dreams, photographs. Real life awaits us." This is the film's true climax, and Deleuze names its power. The spiritual-automaton is the image that forces thought by refusing to resolve — Artaud's version, thought confronted with what it cannot think. The finale reframes every preceding tableau as fabricated, converting the mysticism into a noosign, an image that thinks about its own making, the screen turned into a brain examining itself. The pilgrimage to unseat the immortals ends not with the gods but with the discovery that the mountain was a set. The debt here is precise: it is Fellini's 8½, the fiction dissolved by baring its apparatus, pushed from confession into initiation. Fellini exposed the artist; Jodorowsky exposes the audience.

What did it do to film as an art? It proved you could make a feature that abandons the sensory-motor contract wholesale — no reaction, no resolution, only figures to be read and a final door thrown open onto "real life." It made the midnight movie a form of ritual, where the watching was itself the rite. See it again and notice how little happens, and how much is nonetheless done to you. The gold was never on the mountain. It was the excrement, changed.