• Bible Films Blog

    Looking at film interpretations of the stories in the Bible - past, present and future, as well as preparation for a future work on Straub/Huillet's Moses und Aron and a few bits and pieces on biblical studies.


    Name:
    Matt Page

    Location:
    U.K.












    Monday, September 22, 2014

    The Holy Mountain (1973)

    Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain is, I suppose, a Jesus film of sorts. But it's not hard to see it's rarely discussed along with more conventional takes on the story. Jodorowsky's dark surrealist vision is riddled with images that will tend to offend the kind of people who tend to watch Jesus films, and many others besides.

    I don't know a great deal about surrealist films and so I'm not going to pretend I do, nor pass much judgement on what Jodorowsky has produced. Certainly it's hard to know what to make of it all. But the images are undeniably striking and vivid and arresting and the sounds so utterly disconcerting that the hellishness of it all is hard to miss. Nevertheless it's not hard to see why it's not more widely known or even discussed. It's form is so very far from the mass appeal of Hollywood.

    It was financed heavily by John and Yoko and it's not hard to speculate as to  common ground. Nevertheless it remains Jodorowsky's vision of the hell that man can inflict on his fellow man and religion's impotence and at time complicity with that. Yet for all that, it's also kinda dull as the scores of naked bodies rapidly lose their appeal and the occasionally impressive camera tricks begin to form a parade of the grotesque that never really reaches it's destination.

    1 Comments:

    • At 7:39 pm, December 21, 2014, Blogger Tom said…

      Two new Bible films have been released on Netflix. Gospel of John: King James Version, and Gospel of John: New International Version. Both are very well done, but the same group, Lumo. They plan on releasing three more of the Gospel films using the same approach as Gospel of John. Very well done.

       

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