Late last night I put on a DVD that film fanatics have been waiting for years against all hope to see. A restored transfer of Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain. I feel... I've never taken acid but I feel like I did last night. Check out the box set here.
In the first ten minutes of this movie alone I saw:
A scary looking priest figure shaving the heads of two naked women in the weirdest set I've ever seen.
A bunch of insanely beautiful Cornell box style collages that seem to have some psychotic meaning.
A Jesus looking guy covered every inch in flies peeing himself.
A group of naked kids throwing stones at him with the help of a quadruple amputee after they pluck a flower from his palm stigmatically.
Fascist soldiers carrying flayed dog crucifixes.
Tourists taking pictures of innocents getting rounded up and shot in the streets and then sparrows fly from their bodies while the soldier has sex with a tourist woman while the husband films it laughing.
A reenactment of the arrival of Spanish conquistadors to the Mayan Empire played out entirely by real frogs and toads complete with blood and explosions on a scale model of Mayan temples.
Right after film school, eminently unemployable, having just used up all my money making a disastrous tour documentary... I took a job at Scarecrow Video. Seattle residents will know what I mean when I say the place is legendary. The video store employee gets an unfair rep in my book. First of all there's something about video stores that makes people stupid - an ether field of idiocy that affects PHDs as well as porn fanatics. I admit I myself get confused in the video store a lot. Everyone who worked at Scarecrow was a lowly paid passionate weirdo who did the job out of sheer love for the thing. Pay was terrible. But the owners did have us all on health insurance if we were full time employees.
These weren't geeks in the normal sense of the word. These were people who all had a shared love for the really deep shit, the rarest, most obscure, most exciting filmmaking from anywhere in the world. The DVD import market combined with an all region player made titles from around the world available before they had a minimal shot of getting a US theatrical release. You'd hear about Chan Wook Park and eight hour cuts from Italy of Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World and twenty year old guys who were desperate to find the bootleg copy of Turkish Star Wars before anyone would write it up on the Internet. Rare out of print Gamera movies rubbed shoulders with personal videotapes from director's home collections that required a deposit to take out. Bresson got as much play as Giallo. Film school couldn't touch the depths this place offered. There was analysis, and there was having your hands on every film ever made, even the out of print stuff that the film professors wouldn't want you to see anyway.
And the holy grail was The Holy Mountain. Which is impossible to describe. It's a nonstop surreal barrage of ritualistic, profane and profound religious iconography from every culture imaginable. Every second of the film you'll either see one of the most disturbing, funny, or insane images of your life - most of the time concurrently. It was funded by the Beatles' manager Allen Klein after John and Yoko freaked out over Jodorowsky's El Topo (the other holy grail which comes out as part of the box set). 30 years later the producer and director have finally settled their feud and for the first time people can see the movie without it being a third generation VHS dub of a region 2 dvd made from a japanese laserdisc.
I will warn you that The Holy Mountain is not easy viewing; but unlike most obscure artsy nonsensical films it somehow has a sense of pace and humor that makes it less difficult to watch than you'd think. What it is however is an assemblage of some of the most bizzare imagery ever recorded in front of a camera. You can't spoil the plot of this movie, but one thing I will give away: there's a moment where a half body shaven 80 year old man squirts milk out of cheetah head boobs that magically appear. That's one moment amongst thousands. Most people who see the film remark that it is the single strangest film they've ever seen. And the fact you can rent it at Blockbuster now, well that's some kind of remarkable. It's full of trangressive, subversive, sacriligeous, violent, freakish imagery (there were two points where I nearly turned it off, and there's some animal cruelty that's sad). But I can promise you seeing this film will do something deep in that synaptic core of yours, somehow.
In the first ten minutes of this movie alone I saw:
A scary looking priest figure shaving the heads of two naked women in the weirdest set I've ever seen.
A bunch of insanely beautiful Cornell box style collages that seem to have some psychotic meaning.
A Jesus looking guy covered every inch in flies peeing himself.
A group of naked kids throwing stones at him with the help of a quadruple amputee after they pluck a flower from his palm stigmatically.
Fascist soldiers carrying flayed dog crucifixes.
Tourists taking pictures of innocents getting rounded up and shot in the streets and then sparrows fly from their bodies while the soldier has sex with a tourist woman while the husband films it laughing.
A reenactment of the arrival of Spanish conquistadors to the Mayan Empire played out entirely by real frogs and toads complete with blood and explosions on a scale model of Mayan temples.
Right after film school, eminently unemployable, having just used up all my money making a disastrous tour documentary... I took a job at Scarecrow Video. Seattle residents will know what I mean when I say the place is legendary. The video store employee gets an unfair rep in my book. First of all there's something about video stores that makes people stupid - an ether field of idiocy that affects PHDs as well as porn fanatics. I admit I myself get confused in the video store a lot. Everyone who worked at Scarecrow was a lowly paid passionate weirdo who did the job out of sheer love for the thing. Pay was terrible. But the owners did have us all on health insurance if we were full time employees.
These weren't geeks in the normal sense of the word. These were people who all had a shared love for the really deep shit, the rarest, most obscure, most exciting filmmaking from anywhere in the world. The DVD import market combined with an all region player made titles from around the world available before they had a minimal shot of getting a US theatrical release. You'd hear about Chan Wook Park and eight hour cuts from Italy of Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World and twenty year old guys who were desperate to find the bootleg copy of Turkish Star Wars before anyone would write it up on the Internet. Rare out of print Gamera movies rubbed shoulders with personal videotapes from director's home collections that required a deposit to take out. Bresson got as much play as Giallo. Film school couldn't touch the depths this place offered. There was analysis, and there was having your hands on every film ever made, even the out of print stuff that the film professors wouldn't want you to see anyway.
And the holy grail was The Holy Mountain. Which is impossible to describe. It's a nonstop surreal barrage of ritualistic, profane and profound religious iconography from every culture imaginable. Every second of the film you'll either see one of the most disturbing, funny, or insane images of your life - most of the time concurrently. It was funded by the Beatles' manager Allen Klein after John and Yoko freaked out over Jodorowsky's El Topo (the other holy grail which comes out as part of the box set). 30 years later the producer and director have finally settled their feud and for the first time people can see the movie without it being a third generation VHS dub of a region 2 dvd made from a japanese laserdisc.
I will warn you that The Holy Mountain is not easy viewing; but unlike most obscure artsy nonsensical films it somehow has a sense of pace and humor that makes it less difficult to watch than you'd think. What it is however is an assemblage of some of the most bizzare imagery ever recorded in front of a camera. You can't spoil the plot of this movie, but one thing I will give away: there's a moment where a half body shaven 80 year old man squirts milk out of cheetah head boobs that magically appear. That's one moment amongst thousands. Most people who see the film remark that it is the single strangest film they've ever seen. And the fact you can rent it at Blockbuster now, well that's some kind of remarkable. It's full of trangressive, subversive, sacriligeous, violent, freakish imagery (there were two points where I nearly turned it off, and there's some animal cruelty that's sad). But I can promise you seeing this film will do something deep in that synaptic core of yours, somehow.
1 Comments:
wait, I do know who Alejandro Jodorowsky is... I was recently reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_West
only to notice it was John Lennon's favorite film. Shit is going in my queue.
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