The Holy Mountain

In Brief: The Asheville Film Society's Budget Big Screen series makes its triumphant return with one of the strangest (and best, in my opinion) films ever made – Alejandro Jodorowsky's magnum opus, The Holy Mountain. The Chilean-born writer-director-actor had come to the attention of John Lennon and Yoko Ono when his previous film, El Topo, played at the Elgin Theater in New York and initiated the phenomenon of the midnight movie. Lennon's desire to work with Jodorowsky lead to investment from Beatles manager Allen Klein, and while Klein's involvement would lead to a rights dispute that shelved The Holy Mountain for decades, it also allowed Jodorowsky to make a film that was significantly more ambitious in its scope than any of his previous work. If El Topo was a Kabbalistic Western, The Holy Mountain could be described as a primer on esoteric spirituality writ large — although this doesn't come close to doing the film justice. It's a psycho-spiritual journey and a transformative religious allegory, it's a work of Surrealist filming that could rival Bunuel in its sheer audacity, it's a mind-bending exploration of the aspects of human consciousness — in short, it's one of the damndest things you're ever likely to see, and is absolutely essential viewing. In addition to introducing, I'll be on hand to offer free Tarot readings based on Jodorowsky's massive book detailing his exhaustive work restoring the symbolism of the earliest Tarot decks in existence — I'll be employing the methodology established by the man himself and using the deck he reconstructed, so don't miss out!