La montaña sagrada [The Holy Mountain] (1973)

(YouTube Streaming, December 2022) No, I will not explain The Holy Mountain to you. I did not understand it, and I don’t think that anyone ever did—not even writer-director-producer-star-editor-composer Alejandro Jodorowsky. But I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t matter. Some movies don’t have to be understood. As foreign and alien as it can be for narrative seekers such as myself to abandon rationality in approaching a few films, this is a Jodorowsky joint after all—what do you expect? Maybe surrealist fantasy, maybe acid western, maybe incompetent Science Fiction, maybe unwitting comedy—The Holy Mountain is really just an assault on sensation itself, with a dismissal of logic not far behind. It takes place in the desert, this much is clear—but the rest is really up to you, with psychedelic metaphysical nonsense being at the top of the list. Few will be surprised to learn that LSD and magic mushrooms were involved in the making of the film. I usually despise those movies and probably should hate this one as well, but the panache through which The Holy Mountain is produced is something to behold—all the way to the ending that affirms that we’ve just been watching a movie. There’s nothing else like it and that’s probably a good thing.