"I wanted to finish the film with a scene in a Mexican restaurant, which is my idea of paradise." "The Thief, his wife and the monkey would be there and watch a woman we'd hired as she gave birth for real." "But the woman backed out at the last minute and we couldn't shoot the scene." "I wanted to finish the film with a real birth, the new life, the new man." "The master, like a Roshi Zen, hits the disciple on the back to restore her energy." "The master makes them meditate relentlessly." "After meditating, he makes them twirl around because their legs are numb." "The Zen scenes were too realistic." "I did not include them because they took the mystery away and were not perfect." "Here the master, relentlessly, makes them twirl around, like in a dance of the planets or the nine symbols of the Eneagram." "They dance until they faint from exhaustion." "This dance of the planets is an altered version of "The Whirling Dervishes"." "They all whirl around holding the symbol of their planet." "They dance to some ancient Mexican music." "When the disciples are exhausted, the master gives them rice as a reward." "When we went to film in the mountain, this woman arrived." "I think she was a real magician." "She made us smell a plant, which we then had to look for in the mountain." "There were scenes I couldn't use because the guy who played the Thief would take drugs while we filmed, and then he would take the scenes and do useless, stupid things." "While I was learning to climb, I fell." "Luckily, nothing serious happened, but it was dangerous." "It's exciting to see things I had forgotten about." "The wild girl with the ape follows them and imitates everything she sees." "When she saw them rubbing themselves against the plants to gather pollen, she did the same thing to get high and have spiritual visions." "She did the same thing to get high and have spiritual visions." "In this foggy mountain, the master says to them," ""If you learn how to climb a single rock, you can climb the mountain."" "In a moment of general delirium, where they confront their demons and phobias, she, who is dark-skinned, has a phobia for skin." "So she feels as if she were covered in tumors." "Marilyn Manson, the great rock singer, saw a photo of this scene, I suppose, and used it at a music festival." "He used this cross." "The scene of the millionaire's son was taken out because we feared it might be considered as child abuse, as pedophilia." "So we thought it was..." "I didn't think it was necessary." "Film critic and author of the book" ""The Mole and the Phoenix:" "The Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky"" "To talk about maybe the most famous cult movie in cinema history" " along with "El Topo" - "The Holy Mountain", to talk about iconographic and iconological references and to talk about the staging, means immediately entering the universe of an artist." "Alejandro Jodorowsky loves to call himself a poetic alchemist." "He shot "The Holy Mountain" between 1972 and 1973, after been acclaimed the new guru of the millionaire underground." "The first experiments were "Fando and Lis", aka "Tar Babies", shot in Mexico, and "El Topo", which represents the first real underground film shot in homage to all the great masters he loves:" "Namely Glauber Rocha, Fellini," "Sergio Leone, Tod Browning and Pierre Le Fout:" "There is a citation from Godard's film "Crazy Pete"." ""The Holy Mountain", therefore, did not come from nowhere." "It was born after Jodorowsky came to New York from Mexico with "El Topo", and was already acclaimed as the only person who dared - as he himself says - to claim to be the Cecil B. De Mille of the Underground." "This seems like a contradiction:" "Because he is an artist who has wanted to make many citations and use the linguistic subversion of the "counter culture"" "much in vogue at that time." "In the United States he was like a guest:" "Being born in Chile, the son of Russian Jews." "He was a bit Mexican and had French citizenship." "He also studied mime in Paris with Marcel Marceau." "Once it arrived in New York, the rock and art aristocracies of the period, from Andy Warhol to John Lennon and George Harrison were conquered by this western." "It was metaphysical, mystical and like an avant-garde poem." "At that point, "The Holy Mountain" was born" "Alejandro told me that when he arrived in New York, they sent a limousine to pick him up with great ceremony." "In New York, "El Topo" represented something very novel." ""The Holy Mountain", was a more ambitious project than "El Topo" - a low budget film made in Mexico." "Shooting it represented a further challenge, and there was interest from possible financiers, including Beatles members Lennon and Harrison." "Here's a little anecdote about Harrison that Jodorowsky told me when I met him." "Even if Harrisors passed on, we can tell it because it's funny." "He wanted to appear in "The Holy Mountain", together with others who were competing to be protagonists or even extras in the latest delirious film by a new director of real brilliance." "In the end, Harrison refused because "The Holy Mountain" is filled with naked men and he didn't want to show his behind." "Maybe this is just a joke, but Jodorowsky has always told it as if it were true." ""El Topo" was a spiritual western with references to the cinema and Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty." ""The Holy Mountain", however, is a punch in the stomach" " even from a visual point of view - for moralists everywhere, mainly because of it's 3 part format:" "A structure which is comparable to "The Divine Comedy"." "It is a poem - it can't be described in any other way - that depicts the chaos, the violence and the exploitation of South American countries, who's regimes - supported by Uncle Sam" " Jodorowsky chips away at as an artist, not a politician." "This is very important because the artist could allow himself to conclude the film with a magical stage trick:" "The fact of revealing that the crew and the lights could be make-believe." "Therefore, the film may not be a visionary poem made solely to weave a spell from beginning to end." "In the end - with a sense of provocation uneard of in cinema " "Jodorowsky, who carves out the role of protagonist, namely the alchemist who wants to take his ex-capitalists and masters of the earth towards immortality, reveals the trick, saying: "Is this reality real?" "...No, it's a film"." "He calls back the zoom and reveals his cards." "The magic, the illusion, that incredible, highly imaginative architecture which goes from high to low, not only in an alchemical sense." "That's to say what's high and what's low:" "This is the main symbolic structure of Jodorowsky's cinema." ""The Holy Mountain" is it's actualisation and a rare materialization, because it's hard to find a film this visionary, even by other artists" "There are a few in cinema history, I'll give some examples for those who want to study or revaluate Jodorwosky's cinema:" "Certainly Cocteau," "Bunuel, Fellini or Ken Russell." "There are images in his films that have undeniable links with those of Jodorowsky" "In the face of this iconographic chaos of references" " above all to the alchemical arts - and depiction of past centuries, we find, for example, the nine powers that be who are then stripped of their might." "These like are images seen in many 17th century engravings:" "The nine wise men on the mountain, which represents the lid of the Athanor, the alchemist's cauldron." "Jodorowsky is very well versed in the esoteric scholarship that can be identified in the history of thought." "He was really the first in cinema." "We have seen very few cineastes like this - not even Tod Browning." "Jodorowksy adores "Freaks", and has shown physical deformity in his films" "There are also citations to Bunuel's cruel Mexican period, of "Las Hurdes", Nazarin." "From this viewpoint, we can say that it's not so important to interpret or be exacting about Jodorowsky's symbols." "It's more important to understand that for Jodorowsky, this film is not just a piece of cinema." "It's a type of "Theatre of Panic"." "That's his background." "He worked with Arrabal, a Spanish dramatist with whom he didn't get on." "They argued and haven't heard from each other in years." "And he worked with Topor, the writer and illustrator." "The "Theatre of Panic" meant "no make-believe"." "Everything had to be real:" "The cruelty, the violence." "Even the obscene images on show had to have an extreme realism." "It has been very difficult to this extremism in the cinema." "Before making "The Holy Mountain", Jodorowsky went into a "commune"" " as they were then called." "He took all the actors and together with a certain Ichazo, the son of a Bolivian general, trained in Zen Buddhism." "The film is nothing but the application of a crash course in mysticism." "When I interviewed Jodorowsky in Paris, he confessed:" ""Buddhism was useful at the time, but now it's finished." "It's a means, not an end." "Meditation is no longer important for me." "There's other stuff to think about."" "At the time, the film sprang from a deep knowledge of Zen wisdom." "The tarot will teach you how to create a soul." "I have always been drawn to things I found interesting but couldn't understand." "The tarot fascinated me because it was very strange." "I started studying the tarot card by card." "I saw its structure - 22 Major Arcana, 56 minor Arcana." "I saw the suits - swords, wands, cups and pentacles." "I identified them and so on." "But I didn't understand the tarot." "Then I started mixing the cards." "I saw I could put them together and realized that the 78 cards could be joined in a mandala, in just one image." "You see all the tarot at once and realize it is a unit." "And then you study the different parts." "Once you analyze this, you learn to see the tarot." "You must not talk about the future." "The future is a con." "The tarot is a language that talks about the present." "If you use it to see the future, you become a conman." "You are just a charlatan." "For me, the tarot was something more serious." "It was a deep psychological search." "When you work with the tarot, you see that chance exists, synchronicity exists, everything is linked." "But nothing is a matter of probability." "If you set your spirit to something, that phenomenon will happen." "When you are determined, when you deeply enter that dimension that I call the dance of reality, the world dances around you and gives you what you seek." "One day a dumb man came to see me." "I don't know how old he was." "He said, "I am a descendant of the Camoin family," ""who have been printing the tarot for two centuries." ""I need you to help me restore the Marseille tarot."" "He had the wooden sheets of the old tarot, he had tarot collections..." "He gave me all the material I needed and we restored the tarot." "We left it exactly as it was in 1400." "We couldn't go any further, because there is no data." "But it's as ancient as you can get." "We restored the 11 colors, the symbols, everything." "Everything symbolizes something in the tarot." "It's an encyclopedia of symbols, it's a great optic language." "All the card games you know come from the tarot, even the poker cards." "It's a card game." "It doesn't have 78 cards, it has 26 cards less." "In the Kabbalah, 26 is the number of God." "Poker is a card game without God." "Everywhere I went, I found a different tarot." "I got to have about 1,500 different tarots." "I had a collection." "But I knew there was a tarot that all the others came from." ""The only secret, true tarot is the Marseille tarot"," "Breton said. "I don't understand it, but I respect it."" "So I studied the Marseille tarot." "The Madman - total freedom, no limits, no definition." "The Magician is the beginning, the choice, the right choice." "The Papess - gathered experience." "The Empress - an explosion of creativity with no sense of direction." "The Emperor - material stability, total stability." "Stable." "The Pope - one step beyond stability, the beginning of spirituality." "The Lover - to finally do what you enjoy, to establish a relationship with the world." "The Can't - action in the world." "Complete action in the world." "Justice - to get what you deserve." "The Hermit - deep connection with yourself, to go through a crisis to rise the lamp, that is, to find your inner light." "The Wheel of Fortune - the end of a cycle." "We need something to help us pass on to another dimension." "Force - to deeply feel your libido, your animal forces, and to materialize them." "Twelve, the Hangman - to deeply get in touch with your spiritual side, to stop choosing, to momentarily get away from the world, to stop the world and get in touch with yourself." "Thirteen - the Arcana with no name." "It's not Death." "It's the Arcana without a name." "It's the big, big revolution and transformation into something new." "Fourteen - healing." "To heal yourself." "Fifteen - the Devil." "To get in touch with your creativity without fear of seeing yourself." "To be aware of your drives and make them materialize." "The House of God - what used to be closed is now open." "To push the boundaries, to go beyond your mental limits." "To go beyond your emotional limits, beyond every limit." "To open up." "Seventeen - the Star." "The star means finding a place and once you find it, to act in the world." "To receive from the cosmos and give to the Earth, to purify life." "Eighteen, the Moon - the great archetype of receptivity, the Mother Goddess." "Poetry, madness, receptivity." "The Sun - the beginning of a new life, total love." "Twenty, the Judgment - the whole work, at last, when you have discovered the animus and the anima, your feminine side and your masculine side." "The creation of an androgynous thought that leads to a superior mind." "And the World - total awareness." "Your feminine side, your masculine side, your intellectual side, your sexual side, your emotional side and your earthly side." "We go from the Madman, who symbolizes total freedom..." "We go through all the Arcana until we get to the World, to complete union." "Union, yoga, religion..." "All of that means union." "A cellular organism is alive when it's linked to its environment." "If the organism cuts its ties with its environment, it dies." "The same is true of the human spirit." "If you don't have links, if you don't relate, you die." "The Madman goes to the World to get linked to it." "When you are linked to everyone, there are no enemies."