Ritual, transgression, the sacred-profane collision the tradition keeps reaching for. An alchemical-spiritual quest film of overwhelming symbolic density, financed in part by John Lennon and George Harrison.
Why the Bureau files it. Alejandro Jodorowsky builds The Holy Mountain as a sequence of ritual tableaux, the alchemical and the obscene placed deliberately in the same frame. That collision, the sacred and the profane forced together until neither is stable, is the instinct the occult-and-ritual end of the tradition works, the territory Coil, Psychic TV and the death-industrial scene draw on. The film reaches it through cinema rather than sound, but the governing idea is shared.
The production is itself a transgressive act: Jodorowsky reportedly trained with a spiritual teacher, imposed regimes on the cast, and built the film as much as ordeal as shoot. The financing came in part from John Lennon and George Harrison through Allen Klein, the thin thread to the music world, though the film owes nothing to any tradition figure. Its density of symbol, tarot, alchemy, religious parody, refuses ordinary reading in the way the tradition's ritual work refuses ordinary listening.
The Bureau files The Holy Mountain as the fullest cinematic statement of the ritual-transgressive sensibility, a film that treats the screen as a space for ceremony and shock rather than narrative, alongside its companion entry Santa Sangre.
This film is filed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.