if he weren't a fan who has been in the pit for many years and went off the beaten path, few people would know the name of Alessandro Zodulowski. And this name has long been nailed to the "pillar of shame" in the B-level film CULT film by countless cult movie fans, and worshipped it. This crazy old man has created countless heinous surreal images: burning piano, flower-eating girl, bursting blood fountain, rumbling machine of dissatisfaction, hordes of transvestites, countless deformities People...you must be mentally prepared for the first time watching Zordu's movies. The perverse and enchanting voices and pictures and unreasonable narrative structure will destroy the movie concept you have built for many years, and may even subvert your life values.
How did the old evildoers who are scourge of the rivers and lakes develop? This has to start from when Zuodu was a child. He was born in Tocopia, a coastal town in Chile, and his childhood did not leave him many fond memories (see the autobiographical film [Dance Reality] filmed by Zordu in 2013). In order to escape reality, he was immersed in writing and poetry. In creation. After dropping out of college, he began to study acting and drama, especially mime acting. Zordu established a theater of his own to perform impromptu pantomimes that do not require scripts. In 1947, he left Chile and went to Paris, France to continue to study the art of pantomime, under the tutelage of the master pantomime master Etienne de Cluj. In 1957, he picked up the guide tube for the first time, directed and acted in a surreal-style mime short film [Separated Head]. The famous surrealist director in film history Jean Cocteau liked this work very much and personally wrote recommendations for this short film. After a long period of time, Zordu created nearly a hundred plays in Mexico.
In 1967, he made one of his own plays into a feature film [Fanduo and Lisi]. Zordu's first surrealist feature film appeared at the Acapulco Film Festival in Mexico, driving all the audience crazy. Newspapers and public opinion criticized Zordu, and the crazy debut [Fanduo and Lisi] was banned in Mexico. Zordu did not give in, and almost destroyed the entire Mexican film industry and censorship at the time. In his own words, "I make a movie by myself, so why should someone point me at that? I can do it, but not, what do I want to do!"
In 1970, the second feature story [Mole] came out. The sensation this time caused was not limited to Mexico. The film was also popular in North American and European film circles in the form of underground video tapes. It can be called the originator of midnight movies. Thanks to [Mole], the world has really seen his amazing talents, and it is also thanks to [Mole], the Beatles lead singer John Lennon’s admiration for Zordu, the greatest rock singer persuaded him. His agent, Aaron Kren, invested $1 million in Zodulowski’s film business for his next film. Ever since, there is this shocking movie [Holy Mountain]. According to official estimates, the total investment of [Sacred Mountain] is about 1.5 million U.S. dollars (the initial budget is only 750,000), which was the largest investment in the Mexican film industry at that time. Strange
power and chaos, watching the cult of Christmas
Alessandro Zodulowski devoted himself to studying drama and performance for many years before becoming a director. Not only that, he is also a respected scholar with high attainments in the fields of philosophy and religious scholarship. So far, Zuodu has authored 23 philosophical and religious academic papers and a large number of related articles. Especially in the field of religion, Zordu is familiar with various religions such as Christ, Judaism, Buddhism, Zen, Shaman, and Tarot. Obsessed with tarot cards, he also constructed a set of Psychomagic therapy based on the ancient Marseille tarot cards to treat psychological trauma from the subconscious. Therefore, [Holy Mountain] can be regarded as a religious philosophy essay of Zuodu's sound, image and image concrete words. Numerous religious studies, occult studies, and tarot symbols flood the film. He claimed to be an "atheist mystic", and to put it bluntly, he was a great stick.
At the beginning of the film, accompanied by weird music, a mysterious man wearing a black cloak and a black hat sat in the center, with his two female entourages sitting on either side, and the surrounding walls were covered with neat black cross patterns. . The mysterious man slowly wiped the equipment around him, shaved the hair of the two entourages, the subtitles slowly rose, and the title of the film appeared on the screen [Holy Mountain]. The beginning of the film is full of ritual sense, laying the cult atmosphere of mysticism throughout the film. And this mysterious person is not someone else, but the director Zordu himself, he is the god of the film.
The plot of the film revolves around the birth of Jesus. The man in [Holy Mountain] is not an omnipotent messenger of God, but Zordu portrays him as an ignorant, aphasia, and crazy thief. There are countless movies that blaspheme the "Bible" and blaspheme against Christ in film history, such as Derek Garman’s [Sebastian], Boa Constrictor’s [万世魔星], and Martin Sikoses’ [The Last of Christ] Temptation] Wait. But to be able to completely subvert and destroy the divinity like Zuodu can only be said that no one can match it. (Pious believers should not watch this film, so as not to cause discomfort, hereby remind)
the most anti-Jesus thief in history, Jesus, is lying on the dusty ground with flies and mud on his face. When the camera switches, empty wine bottles are scattered around Jesus, who is incontinent at this time. A deformed dwarf with a broken arm and a leg passed by, wiping the dirt and flies from his face. A group of bear kids with bare buttocks ran up, plucked out the flowers that grew out of Jesus' hands, picked him up, tied him to the cross, and threw stones at him. Waking up from the "stoning", Jesus drove away the bear child. He and the dwarf shared a cigarette and became good friends.
Saying goodbye to the wild villages and towns, the two set off toward the city together. The city is also a place of non-advanced civilization, and it is also full of strange things. Military trucks transported mountains of corpses, masked soldiers shot rows of students, nobles and celebrities bowed down to the skinned rabbits to salute... The tourists were quite lively, taking cameras to take pictures everywhere, the thief Jesus Helping tourists to take pictures earned their "first pot of gold". They joined the "Toad and Lizard" circus on the side of the road, and their show today is "Conquer Mexico." The lizard dressed in gorgeous Egyptian costume sits on the paper pyramid model and welcomes the toad in the crusader armor. Accompanied by the majestic "Song of the Third Reich Army", the "Crusade" has already overwhelmed the "Egyptian pagans" in absolute numbers. The blood flowed into rivers and the pyramids burst. The performance was very successful, and the thief Jesus and the dwarf earned their second pot of gold. A store is performing the Passion of the Christ, and the thief is obliged to carry the cross, and the "third pot of gold" is within reach. The boss invited the thief Jesus to drink. After getting drunk, the boss turned his body and face into a plaster Jesus model. When he woke up, in the warehouse filled with his own plaster statues of Jesus, the thief Jesus screamed in terror and angrily smashed the plaster statues. The thief Jesus carried the last plaster statue and continued to wander with the dwarf. A blind priest refused to admit that Jesus was cast as the thief Jesus himself, and the heartbroken thief Jesus ate the plaster face. He used red and blue balloons to upside down the plaster statue and ascended into the sky, and all the people on the ground watched this ascension quietly. Living beings gather in the center of the square, where there is a towering obelisk. The hooks from the top will put down food and gold, and people greedily ask for it. The thief Jesus climbed onto the hook and climbed to the upper minaret to find out.
Zordu has constructed a chaotic world of slaughter, promiscuity, power, and blasphemy, in which Jesus the thief loses himself. Don't pay too much attention or deliberately to deconstruct the religious connotations and refracted metaphors in the images, and even Zuodu himself in the guide and commentary does not bother to explain them one by one. Just like that, just like this cult monster, so Jesus, the most wretched and most unbearable in film history, was born. At the beginning of the creation of the film, another member of the Beatles, George Harrison, was also a fan of Zodo’s brains and wanted to play the protagonist Jesus, the thief, but the many bold nude scenes in the script made him discouraged, and Zodo firmly disagrees with the use of naked substitutes. In the end, George Harrison had to give up. Director Zodorovsky is just that wayward.
The top of the sacred mountain
[Holy Mountain] is divided into two chapters, before the obelisk and after the obelisk. The towering obelisk is the Tower of Babel leading to heaven. Inside, the guide leading to the truth lives-the mysterious director Zodu himself at the beginning of the film. The first half of the film is completely dismantled and destroyed the belief and three views of the thief Jesus, and then it will be a process of reconstruction. Jesus, the thief who entered the obelisk with a dagger, is hostile to the mysterious man, and the two fight. The thief Jesus was immobilized, and the mysterious man cut off a tumor of evil thoughts from the back of his neck (well, a blue octopus) and asked: "Do you want gold?", "Yes!" The thief Jesus finally said The first line in his film.
The mysterious man and his entourage have finished bathing the thief Jesus with incense, and the most bizarre Cult scene in movie history is about to happen. The mysterious man is also an alchemist. He ordered the thief Jesus to pull a piece of shit in a vessel, heat, distill, purify, refine, and crystallize it in an extremely complicated alchemy tool. The shit was finally transformed into a piece of gold. gold. Zuodu confessed one of his most powerful lines, "You are dung, and you can turn yourself into gold." The simple truth that I was born to be useful is to use a tuft of golden dung that transforms decay into magic. It is enough. Beyond imagination, this has also become Zuo Duqi's most famous Cult image.
In the secret room with full-body glass (you can even notice the camera wearing a gang), the mysterious man told the thief that Jesus has a soul in everything, and then used Tarot to teach him how to create a soul. "To understand, to challenge, to ask, to silence", "The power of a vulture to attack a cow is equivalent to the power of a cow to give back to a vulture", "The fish think about their hunger, not the fisherman"... The mysterious people also assembled at the same time The other seven spiritual fighters and a group of nine will go to the legendary sacred mountain. The holy mountain is Mount Sumi in India, Mount Kunlun of Taoists, Mount Karakum in the Himalayas, mountain of philosophers, mountain of Rosicrucian, Mount Kabbalah of Holy Cross John, all legends The ultimate mountain. They will search for the nine undead old people on the mountain and attack them to obtain the eternal secret of conquering death. Burned their own belongings and wax statues representing themselves, gave up everything, and the nine people were united in one mind and set off on the road calmly.
Along the way, they experienced the torture of the soul and the flesh, the epiphany of nothingness and reality, liberated their minds, and set foot on the Lotus Island, the location of the holy mountain. They resisted the temptation of various desires from the Lianhua Island Station, climbed over steep cliffs, faced the fear of death illusion in the labyrinth garden, reached the top of the sacred mountain, and faced the nine undead old people. When I walked in front, I discovered that the legendary undead old people were all puppets, and the only living person was their guide, Zuodu himself, and everyone laughed loudly. They are just mortals, and there is no secret of immortality in the world. Zuodu said: "But at least we have achieved reality. We started from mythology, and now we are going to return to real life, but is this life real? No, this is just a movie! The camera is pulled back!"
Good one, "The camera moves towards Pulling back", Zuodu simply and rudely broke the fourth wall of the film, and the entire film crew's lighting, sound, video and other staff entered the screen one after another. Everyone stared at the screen closely, "We are images, dreams, and photos. We don't have to stay here! Prisoners! We want to break the illusion, this is magic!" Nine people got up and overturned the round table, "Goodbye Now, Holy Mountain. The real life is waiting for us!" Everyone walked away, and the film slowly ended. A majestic adventure of a psychedelic cult, and finally fell on the philosophical proposition of returning to reality. Zodulowski used the entire film to construct an ultimate belief, and the ending is very cunning to break that all this is just the illusion in the image dream. Destroying beliefs and dispelling everything, all living beings are still blinded by all falsehoods, trapped by desires, and suffering.
[Holy Mountain]’s psychedelic, cult, anti-religious, and surreal expression methods form the image style and audio-visual language, even today, more than 40 years after its release, it is still a weird work that no one can replace by advanced pioneers. Alessandro Zodulowski and his [Holy Mountain] have reached a height in the field of CULT films. There is no one before and after. People are racing to look at the top of the mountain, but there has never been someone who can surpass this peak.
Originally published in "Watching Movies" in December 2014, with revisions
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