On a smog dark day early in 1972, a bright neon whirlpool of color and sound and movement circulated through and around the former church and convent of Our Lady of Montserrat, a vacant Baroque ruin in a commercial district near the center of Mexico City. Alexandro Jodorowsky was shooting one of the opening scenes of The Holy Mountain, a film based on The Ascent of Mt. Carmel by St. John of the Cross, and Mt. Analogue by Rene DaumaL It is a film about man's search for enlightenment
Mexican movies have rarely been famous for artistic or commercial excellence, but this one was being followed with great interest throughout the international film community. Allen Klein, manager of the Rolling Stones and three of the Beatles, had put up $750,000 in initial financing. The projected budget was $1, 500,000, not much by Hollywood's measure, but the biggest production in Mexican movie industry history. Alexandro Jodorowsky, born in Chile, had worked with Marcel Marceau in Paris, writing two of the mime's best known pieces, The Mask Maker and The Cage. Later, in Mexico, he directed more than a hundred plays, many of them for national television, and became a major celebrity in the Spanish-speaking world for his radically abrasive theatrical stunts. His first film, Fando and Lis, was denounced at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival as "corrosive and corrupting. " It was shown only briefly in the United States and has never been in general distribution in Mexico.
His second film, El Topo, or The Mole, began playing midnight shows in New York on New Year's Day, 1971, at the Elgin, a former Spanish language house in the not very fashionable Chelsea district. There was almost no advertising but soon long lines began to form Many of the viewers came back again and again. A few wildly favorable reviews and interviews appeared in the underground press. Soon the Establishment began to take notice. It was not anything they could comfortably handle. El Topo was weird beyond description, like nothing anyone had ever seen before.
Summarizing its plot is rather like attempting to synopsize The Faerie Queen or Pilgrims Progress, two classical works in a similar tradition of allegorical complexity. Essentially, El Topo is the story of a heroic cowboy progressing across a landscape of confrontations with other heroes, all of whom he defeats. Then he runs into a Zen master with a butterfly net and winds up defeated himself.
The cowboy in black macho is reborn as a simple dancing fool who lives in a cave with hundhbacks, cripples, dwarves and other social rejects. He falls in love with a midget woman. They come out of the cave and perform comic dances in a nearby town. There is another heroic confrontaion and the dancing fool kills all his enemies and then burns himself alive in a gruesomely realistic scene that recalls those Vietnamese monks. (The effect was created by wrapping a skeleton in beefsteak and pouring gasoline over it) In 1971, The New York Times ran three separate and mutually contradictory reviews of El Topo. Vincent Canby thought it was a con job. Peter Scheidahl called it a "vastly complex, profoundly comic allegory. " Roger Greenspun did not pretend to understand it but guessed that it was probably a lot less pretentious than his friends were telling him. The most important thing about El Topo was that it cost less than $400,000 to produce. Its worldwide gross is said to be near $10 million. Great profits always transcend criticism.
A footnote to the script explains El Topo means the mole in Spanish, a creature who burrows up through the earth searching for the sun, reaches the surface and goes blind. Steven Fuller, who called El Topo "a masterpiece" in Changes, commented, "Ultimately, El Topo is a man who is blinded by the discoveries...experiences the white light and no longer has need of his body and therefore progresses to a higher spiritual plane. "
The Holy Mountain is a continuation of that theme. The of ficial synopsis describes it this way: nine of the most powerful industriaiists and politicians on the planets desire to obtain immortality. An Alchemist tells them of the Holy Mountain of Lotus Island where nine immortals dwell. At one time they were mortals as well, but now are more than 30,000 years old.
"Some men join forces to assault banks and steal money," the Alchetnist tells them. "We must unite our forces to assault the Holy Mountain and rob its wise men of their secret of immortality. But to conquer the secret of the immortals, we too must become wise men."
The Alchemist takes them on a pilgrimage, practicing many kinds of spiritual exercises and visiting many masters until they reach enlightenment. At the end, they find the immortals and the secret is finally revealed to them.
Alexandro, of course, plays the Alchemist. Thesee first scenes in Mexico do not feature him, but center on a character not mentioned in the synopsis, the Thief, who wanders through a series of episodes emblematic of the ills of modern society, accompanied by an armlesss and legless little man.
Our Lady of Montserrat was a remarkably poetic setting, its cracked dome a broken stone skull with empty sockets that once held brilliant stained glass eyes. It is not mentioned in any of the popular English guide books, but a file in the archives of the Colonial Monuments section of the Mexican government Department of History and Anthropology reveals that it dates back to 1884 and was begun with funds donated to Benedictine monks by Catalan colonists who had been granted miraculous relief from a plague after praying to the Virgin of Montserrat.
For the filming of The Holy Mountain the church courtyard was hung with white bunting and a mariachi band played as masons patiently chipped at blocks of stone for the restoration. A crowd of people peered in from the street, where two big trailer trucks oozed black tentacles of power lines. They were watching 50 young soldiers in gray uniforms with gas masks and helmets and rifles dancing solemnly, each in the arms of a male partner dressed in ordinary work clothes. Inside the church, out of sight of the dancing men, a soldier and a workman leaned against a wall embracing passionately. At one end of the domed sanctuary there was a stone altar set with a gold communion service and an ancient Bible on whose open pages crawled fat pink worms. A dusty net of spider webs drooped over the entire display as if accumulated by centuries of unremembered time.
Down at the other end, a brass bed lay half buried in the earth floor, a live owl sitting at its head. A nearly naked young actor, Horacio Salinas, "Lacho," was crawling across the floor dragging a lifesized plaster Jesus which he placed upon the altar. The image had his face and body. He crawled back to the bed, slowly pulled back the cover, revealing a gray old man in black bishop's miter and habit sleeping in the arms of another life-sized plaster Jesus.
The bishop woke angrily, shouting in Spanish, "It is not your Christ!" It is my Christ!" Wheezing heavily he got up, pulled the Jesus from the altar and replaced it with his own. Suddenly a man in a brown business suit appeared in the center of the room, arguing furiously in Spanish. He looked like a military of ficer in civilian clothing. "Stop!" he yelled. "You are making a black mass! This is the Devil's work, blasphemy and filth! I will not let you hippies and homosexuals desecrate this holy site one moment longer! Stop or I will kill you!" It was the President of the Society of Charros, a group of wealthy traditionninded gentlemen who own the church. They had unwittingly leased Our Lady of Montserrat to Producciones Zohar, for one day's shooting of The Holy Mountain. Great outraged eloquence in rapid Spanish spat back and forth betveen Jodorowsky and the charro. The director exploded The charro collapsed. Business nanagers and friends offered soothing words. The captain of police assigned to the production, as elegantly polished and handsome as an officer on the cover of a Spanish novel, smoked a cigarette with no particular expression and whispered to the charro, who then angrily left.
During this encounter, Lacho, the naked actor, shifted patiently from bare foot to bare foot. He had played the scene at least 20 times. It was growing dark outside and his feet were numb from the cold, earthen floor. He was entering a state of controlled physical agony, like Christ approaching the Cross. Once again the lights came on. Once again the scene with the bishop was repeated. Then the set-up was shifted. This time the bishop hustled Lacho to the door, then threw the plaster Jesus out after him.
As twilight thickened and condensed into liquid night, Lacho embraced the image and began to eat the face, slowly and lovingly, biting out big, soft chunks and so allowing them gratefully. "Cut," shouted Alexandro. The lights went out. Another day's shooting of The Holy Mountain was finished. "So far on this picture I have been in three locations and I have been kicked out of every one," Alexandro said happily. "This is Mexico," said Valerie, his girl friend of 10 years, mother of his three children. "We hate Mexico. We shit on Mexico. " "She says this because she is a Mexican," Alexandro commented. "You cannot say you hate Mexico. It is not Mexico. It is the planet. There are no countries. It is an idea. There are no cultures. It is an idea. Every culture is the continuation of another. "There are so many concepts we must change. When that Marco says to me, 'I will kill you. 'I say 'Okay, kill me, but I will kill you' And he was afraid, because I really want to kill him, to break every one of his bones, millimeter by millimeter- not the bones of his body, the bones of his mind. "We need to kill some mind space. We need to kill to survive, to destroy minds. When I say 'to destroy' I say to open. We must make room for new life. Always I am having dead scenes and always I am putting new life in dead places and dead things. I don't know why. Maybe I am a prophet I really hope one day there will come Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha and Christ to see ma. And then we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies, no? And I'll have a nice day. "You are Hungry, Lacho?" Alexandro asked fondly. "Come, you will eat with us. " "I am not hungry," said Lacho. "I eat the Jesus. What it was I do not know. It was sweet like bread, but not bread. Never did I taste anything like this." His voice was filled with a quiet wonder that was truly religious in feeling. "What was this I eat, Alexandro?" "I don't know. Taicher do this. It is a miracle, no?" The face of the Jesus was made of almond paste, but Lacho never did find that out and the incredibly sweet and satisfying experience no doubt still remains simply a miracle to him. It may be that when you peek behind the scenery you find that all miracles are made up of almond paste and hunger. No matter what the ingredients, the ability to produce miracles is a miraculous talent. That was the role Alexandro had written for himself. The business of The Holy Mountain was not so much the production of a film but the production of changes of consciousness in the people making it.
Long before the actual shooting had begun, Alexandro had put the main members of the cast through a three month training program of the Arica Institute, an eclectic enlightenment factory that has recently replaced the Esalen Ipstitute as the chief fountain of inspiration in that sector of society seeking satori. Arica, whose home base is a Chilean town of the same name that also happens to be one of the chief centers of cocaine smuggling in the Western Hemisphere, has branches all over the world, charges $3000 per student and claims to effect mystical experiences in 73 per cent of its adherents.
Two Arica group leaders, Max and Lydia, were temporarily detached to dute with Producciones Zohar. They were quiet and pleasant, always available to provide instant Mongolian massages as ith a wooden spoon, their only flaws their stubbornly unenlightened complexions. Not everyone on Alexandro's team loved them. Luis Urias, who had been with him for several years as a production assistant, said, 'I do not trust gurus with pimples. "
"The film is my own search for enlightenment,' Alexandro said. 'I want to be a Master. I think [about] how is a Master. I read [about] how is a Master. I dress like a Master. I act like a Master. I become a Master. " Costumed for his role in a white satin suit of 17th-century knickers, stockings, blouse and cloak, his hair shaved back in a high, bald Benjamin Franklin effect and bleached silver white, Alexandro became a figure out of the days of the sorcerer, the dyed and the miracle rabbi, his presence so forceful and confident that even the most cynically skeptical realists in his circle found themselves accepting him as a kind of high priest of a mystical church thes had once known as theater.
'This is the heaviest trip that anyone here has ever been on. " said Lenns Gaines, a sly old Allen Klein surrogate who was supposed to be watching the money. He believed in Alexandro. The fervor of his devotion to the myth of Alexandro Jodorowsky transcended mere commerce. If Lenny Gaines was an unlikely disciple Alexandro Jodorowsky was an even unlikelier master. Born February 7, 1929, in Iquique, Chile, an isolated fertilizer port on the Pacific coast, he was the son of a militant atheist Russian Jewish immigrant who had come there to deal in gold and wound up selling dry goods. Ten years later they moved to the city of Santiago. "When I am 13 years old," Alexandro recalled, 'my father say to me, 'Now it is time for you to decide if you want to be bar mitzvah. If you say yes you will have a big party and get many presents. But you will no more be atheist. ' I say to him, 'I will not be Bar Mitzvah. I will be atheist."'
In another interview, Alexandro said. "The other boys of Iquique persecute me for two things: I was white and my sex had the form of a mushroom. " The interview er commented, "Oh, you were circumcised. " Alexandro had evidently never realized thaws what it was. 'That's right,' he said in the voice of a man receiving a revelation, I am circumcised!"
Once, he claimed, the boys attached him to a great kite and flew him up into the sky. "For hours, I was like this," he said. "It was terrible. Inside the clouds I saw a cemetery of airplanes from the 1914 war. And in the airplanes was the corpse of the aviators. And inside the corpse was white vampires. And when I came in close, the vhite vampires began to move.
And then the corpse of the aviators make movement. I was very afraid to see this. This was my childhood." Alexandro experimented in the theater. "I am called the new Rimbaud when I am 15," he said. "There was in this circle all queers and woman who want young boys. I become interested in puppets and attach strings to actors and make them into human marionettes."
He w ent to Paris and was so broke that he sometimes had to look for coins in the streets to buy food. He was a housepainter and for a while worked in a factory wrapping suppositories. Despite all the success that followed, he has remained that solitry outsider from Iquique.
Throughout most of his career, Alexandro Jodorowsky has been an outrageous personality, but merely one among many, working in that somehow very rational French school of the earnestly far-out that dates back to Dada, Cocteau and Dali. His high-flying excesses were very securely noored to such respectable weirdnesses as the semantics of Korzybski and the non-Euclidean geometries of Lobachevsky and Riemann. He had a library filled with scientfic, mathematical, psychological and philosophical books. He was also a great reader of science ficion. Then, some time after his film Fando and Lis, a friend gave him The Book of Zohar, a medieval lewish cabalistic text. Alexandro gave away every book in his library and went on a grand binge through the occult.
This combination of influences defines Alexandro and his audience, but his work does not suit every taste. El Topo found great favor among young hip intellectuals (as perhaps The Holy Mountain will) because it was genuinely different and obscure, the perfect vehicle for a new cult. Like The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot's symbolist pastiche, or Joyce's Ulysses, it was thick with material for analysis and interpretation, as if created especially for academic theses and term papers and clever conversations. It was something to talk about. At the same time there was an antic mockery underneath it all that often was hilarious.
Finally, Alexandro was truly shocking. Craig Vetter once asked, "When will the movies show a real taboo-picking your nose and eating it?" Alexandro hasn't done that but he has confronted his audiences with everything that they did not want to see, not merely violence and sexual deviation, but the grotesque and the ugly and the squalid- the entire world that does not appear in the conventional motion picture, does not show up in Fellini- the world of not the butterflies, but the moths. For some people, seeing El Topo was an act of purification, purging aesthetic standards that seemed rational but were in fact artistic bigotry.
One afternoon during the filming of The Holy Mountain, Alexandro sat for an interview. The location was a mattress favors nils in Nacaulpan. an industrial zone that managed to combine all of the brutalities of the assembly line with the unreconstrued filths of the Dark Ages. Just as the tape recorder began operating, a huge ventilating fan directly behind him roared on. Alexandro refused to move to a quieter place.
"Why do you get into these ugly tripsăthe noise, the dirt, the flies?" he was asked.
"We have not ugly place," Alexandro answered. We have not noise. We have not flies. A very strange meaning, these flies. In the Egyptian jewels they use flies. It was a sacred animal. I think if you kill all the flies, the world will come to a finish. Why he's here, I do not know, but I think the fly has a secret meaning for the ecology. Every fly, it is a bee, because he is making his own kind of honey. Maybe it's shit. I don't know. But to him it is honey.
"You must not hate flies. You must not hate the ugly place. You must not hate noise. What is the difference between noise and music? The music is only different because it have little moments of silence. If you have silence within you, you have no noise, because every noise you put into your silence and make music. When you have light inside you every ugliness become a master work."
It may be that this litlle sermon seems merely charming and facile, a Pollyanna exercise, but when you listen to the tape something very curious and convincing happens. The roar of the fan does not cease. Yet for a moment there is a kind of deep pause, a brief calm, a strange harmony.
Alexandro's work and its success may perhaps be explained as manifestations of the psychedelic revolution. During the past decade the world seems to have been divided into two mutually opposing groups- those who have taken LSD and those who have not. Jodorowsky's main audience is found among those who have taken acid, not once but repeatedly. There is a kind of satisfying synchronicity in the relationship between this fact and the realization that the psychedelic revolution began in Mexico when Timothy Leary ate the magic mushrooms by the side of that swimming pool in Cuernevaca. There has been a great turning back to the art and ideas and culture of the America that existed before the Conquest, the America of the corn gods and the hallucinogenic mushroom and the native Indian. Mexico is one of the great centers of that culture and Alexandro Jodorowsky's films are pre-eminendy Mexican. Only in this context can you really begin to understand their violence. There is a loving obsession with pain and death in Mexico.
In red Aztea of Mexico, by G. C Vaillant, there is this matter-of-fact listing from the Aztec ceremonial calendar: "Sixth Month: Ceremonial robbing, rain ceremonies, fertility rite, drowning boy and girl in canoe filled with the hearts of sacrificial victims." The Aztecs did not rule the Mexican peninsula very long and it is clear that they were not loved by their subject peoples. They were the Nazis of their time. Yet they appealed to an inherent strain in the Mexican character or they could not have succeeded as long as they did. That flavor still exists in modern Mexico. One American girl swore that she had seen a Mexican nurse in the emergency room of a hospital spray a burned man with rubbing alcohol and laugh with the rest of the staff as he writhed and screamed.
When El Topo was cut for showing in Mexico none of the violent scenes were removed, but a half-hour of sex and political innuendo was censored. According to Sam Askenazy, the entertainment editor of The Matrix City Nova, an English-language daily, Alexandro, who financed his movies from his own sources, was allowed to operate because of the foreign exchange that he brought into the country. "They admire his guts," he said. "It's kind of a macho thing. None of the other producers have any balls."
In the American intellectual community there is a certain feeling that much of Alexandro's madness is simply madness that he is not to be taken seriously, his symbolism merely surface with no depth, off-the-wall sleight of hand. That is not quite true. Virtually every frame in The Holy Mountain is the product of elaborate research. Each of the nine main characters represents a planet, and has all of the astrological and mythological qualities associated with it. It is true, however, that if there was no particular symbolism behind his effects, Alexandro could provide some.
One afternoon at the end of June 1973, the Technicolor image of one of the snow-covered mountains of Mexico lingered for a long moment on the screen of a small private theater not far from Times Square, then began to dissolve into whiteness that came on brighter and brighter until there was no picture left at all, only the brilliant light. "What is there to say?t'Alexandro announced happily when the roorn lights went on. "It is fantastic! It looks like a $10million production." It was fantastic and it did look like a $10 million production. A little while later, Alexandro sauntered up Seventh Avenue holding hands with a tall, brown-haired girl. Tomorrow he was going to the Bahamas to visit Valerie. They were married now. In a week or so, maybe he would go to Denver to stay in a chalet in the mountains. He was thinking of making The Story of O as his next picture. There was no hurry to decide. He was completely free. The Hol Mountain was finished. Alexandro Jodorowsky floated off into the city.
Back at the screening room, the print of The Holy Mountain was already packed in its flat fiber case and waiting for the air messenger service to take it back to Hollywood where final adjustments of sound, splicing, and titling would be made. Then the process of manufacturing additional prints would begin. In December, Tbe Holy Mou(ntain would be in general distribution. There was no way to predict what the critics would say about it.
By nightfall, The Holy Mountain was in the air, on automatic pilot. All the magic had been done. Now the mechanical unfolding of the vision began. Like a seed in the gut of a bird, the final print of The Holy Mountain headed toward its destined place of germination. Some days hence leaves of light on the tree of consciousness would flutter open. But at this moment, the contrails of the big jet added one more deposit of smog to the once transparent stratosphere.

Copyright (C) Jules Siegel 1973, 1998. All Rights Reserved.
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