LAB CLASSICS: THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
Happy birthday to Alejandro Jodorowsky! To celebrate his 95th birthday, we’re bringing his mystical magnum opus The Holy Mountain back to our cinema in a beautiful 4K restoration. Often venerated as the ultimate cult film director, father of the ‘midnight movie’ and self-described “Cecil B. DeMille of the underground,” the Chilean artist shot to prominence as a 1970s counter-cultural icon thanks to classics like El Topo and The Holy Mountain.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mystical magnum opus The Holy Mountain firmly established the Chilean filmmaker as an auteur of Surrealist Cinema and sparked serious controversy at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival due to its sacrilegious imagery and raw existential symbolism. In this mystical masterpiece, Jodorowsky himself plays The Alchemist, a guru who guides a troupe of pilgrims, each representing the planets in the solar system, on a magical quest to Lotus Island where they must ascend the Holy Mountain in search of spiritual enlightenment.
The Holy Mountain takes Jodorowsky’s psychedelic allegorical mastery to another level. Grotesque, transgressive and hypnotizing, it remains a mind-bending excursion into the meaning of earthly wealth and immortality and still serves as a counter-cultural influence on artists as diverse as Peter Gabriel, Erykah Badu and Marina Abramovic, as well as filmmakers such as David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn.
