The beautiful weirdness never ends in Jodorowsky cult classic THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
LIVE SOUND CINEMA: THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Friday, June 27, and Saturday, June 28, $16, 12:05 am
Series runs June 27 – July 26
212-924-7771
www.nitehawkcinema.com
www./twitter.com/alejodorowsky
Inspired by Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain also involves symbolically non-Euclidean adventures in mountain climbing, funneled through Carlos Castaneda, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and magic mushrooms and LSD galore. What passes for narrative follows a Jesus look-alike thief (Horacio Salinas) and an alchemist with a thing for female nudity (Jodorowsky) on the path to enlightenment; along the way they encounter the mysterious Tarot, stigmata, stoning, eyeballs, frogs, flies, cold-blooded murder, naked young boys, chakra points, life-size plaster casts, Nazi dancers, sex, violence, blood, gambling, turning human waste into gold, death and rebirth, and the search for the secret of immortality via representatives of the planets, each with their own extremely bizarre story to tell. Jodorowsky, who is credited with having invented the midnight movie with the 1970 acid Western El Topo, literally shatters religious iconography in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of jaw-droppingly gorgeous and often inexplicable imagery composed from a surreal color palette, set to a score by free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and Archies keyboardist Ron Frangipane. (Frangipane also worked with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who produced this film with their business manager, Allen Klein.)
The Holy Mountain — which brings a whole new insight to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle — is filled with psychedelic mysticism centered around the human search for transcendence in a wilderness of the sacred and profane. Jodorowsky’s work can move you deeply, but don’t expect it to make much sense. Sit back and let in pour in and over you — you’ll feel it. You may hate it, but you’ll feel it. Although you’ll definitely hate the very end. The Holy Mountain is kicking off Nitehawk Cinema’s “Summer of Surrealism” series, screening June 27 & 28 at 12:05 am with a live score by Guizot; meanwhile, Jodorowsky’s brilliant, surreal autobiographical The Dance of Reality is playing an extended run at the Landmark Sunshine. The Nitehawk festival, influenced by the forthcoming January 2015 publication of Adam Lowenstein’s Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media, continues through July 26 with such other crazy films as David Lynch’s Inland Empire, Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room, Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man.