Mountains Analogous? The Academic Urban Legend of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Cult Film Adaptation of René Daumal’s Esoteric Novel
Issued Date: 3 Mar 2015
Abstract
The Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker and self-styled spiritual teacher Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film, The Holy Mountain (1973), is often referred to as a ‘surrealistic’ exploration of Western Esotericism, and was a pivotal cinematic moment for what Christopher Partridge (2004, 2005) has termed ‘occulture’. It is often claimed in secondary literature and informally online that the film is based on the unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1952) by René Daumal, French writer and follower of the esotericist G.I. Gurdjieff. The Holy Mountain is thus a clear candidate for testing theories about the cultural production of ‘Gurdjieffian’ film adaptations. A closer reading, however, shows that the two texts share few ideological or even structural elements. In the wake of the film’s reception and Jodorowsky’s growing cultural importance, this article maps the congruence of the film to the novel by focusing on the role played by the eponymous mountain as the only invariant symbol in both. Some of the biographical contours of the two artists’ relationship to Gurdjieffian and wider occultural esoteric discourses will also be traced to reveal the pre-critical and largely self referential narrative of the film adaptation in the secondary literature as a species of academic urban legend-making.
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References
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Jodorowsky, Alejandro (dir.)
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Pasori, Cedar
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2006 Surrealism and Cinema. Berg, New York.
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Scarano, Ross, and Cedar Pasori
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Stermac, Daria, and Alejandro Jodorowsky
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Wellbeloved, Sophia
2003 Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts. Routledge, London and New York.
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Yezpitelok, Maxwell
2011 Translation: The Flash vs. Gurdjieff by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Comics Bulletin (5 October). No pages. Online: http://comicsbulletin.com/ translation-ash-vs-gurdjieff-alejandro-jodorowsky/ (accessed 7 September 2014).
2007 Writing the Fourth Dimension. Comparative Critical Studies 4(1): 121-138. Doi: 10.3366/ccs.2007.4.1.121.
Cobb, Ben
2007 Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Creation Books, London.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K.
2004 Guardians of the Sundoor: Late Iconographic Essays. Fons Vitae, Louisville, KY.
Daumal, René
1992 [1952] Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, translated by Roger Shattuck, preface by Vera Daumal. Shambhala, Boston.
2012 Pataphysical Essays, translated by Thomas Vosteen. Wakeeld Press, Cambridge.
Faivre, Jean-Luc
2006 Grand Jeu, Le. In Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism by W.J. Hanegraaff, A. Faivre, R. van den Broek, and J.P. Brach, 438-41. Brill, Leiden.
Guenon, Rene
2007 [1962] Symbols of Sacred Science. Sophia Perennis, New York.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J., Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek, and Jean-Pierre Brach (eds.)
2006 Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Brill, Leiden.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple
2013 [1983] The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Hua, Vivian
2013 Philosophical Inuence Timeline: Alejandro Jodorowsky—The Holy Mountain. REDEFINE Magazine (August 13). No pages. Online: http:// www.redenemag.com/2013/alejandro-jodorowskys-holy-mountain-inuences-musicians-artists/ (accessed 22 September 2014).
Hutchinson, Ian H.
2007 Astrophysics and Mysticism: The Life of Arthur Stanley Eddington. No pages. Online: http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/eddington/ (accessed 22 September 2014).
Jarry, Alfred
1997 [1898] Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. Exact Change, New York.
Jodorowsky, Alejandro (dir.)
2007 [1973] The Holy Mountain. ABKCO Music and Records, Mexico/US.
2007b Commentary Track by Director. The Holy Mountain.
Kenneck, Daniel
2012 Not Only Because of Theory: Dyson, Eddington and the Competing Myths of the 1919 Eclipse Expedition. In Einstein and the Changing Worldviews of Physics, edited by Christoph Lehner, Jürgen Renn, and Matthias Schemmel, 201-32. Birkhauser, New York.
Kokkinen, Nina
2013 Occulture as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Art. ARIES 13(1): 7-36. Doi: 10.1163/15700593-01301003.
Leitch, Thomas
2003 Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory. Criticism 45(2): 149-71. Doi: 10.1353/crt.2004.0001.
2008 Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads. Adaptation 1(1): 63-77. Doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apm005.
Mathjis, Ernest, and Jamie Sexton
2011 Cult Cinema: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, London.
Moore, James
1990 The Enneagram: A Developmental Study. Religion Today 5(3): 1-5. Doi: 10.1080/13537908808580627.
2006 Gurdjieff, George Ivanovitch. In Hanegraaff et al. 2006: 445-50.
Partridge, Christopher H.
2004 The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 1. T&T Clark International, London and New York.
2005 The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 2. T&T Clark International, London and New York.
Pasori, Cedar
2014 Kanye West Meets One of his Greatest Inuences, Filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. COMPLEX (29 June). No pages. Online: http://www.complex.com/ style/2014/06/kanye-west-meets-alejandro-jodorsky (accessed 22 September 2014).
Patterson, William Patrick
2000 Voices in the Dark: Esoteric, Occult, & Secular Voices in Nazi-Occupied Paris 1940–44. Arete Communications, Fairfax, CA.
Pecotic, David
2012 From Ouspensky’s Hobby to ‘Groundhog Day’: The Production and Adaptation of ‘Strange Life of Ivan Osokin’. In Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production, edited by Carole M. Cusack and Alex Norman, 331-50. Brill, Leiden and Boston.
Peterson, Richard A., and N. Anand
2004 The Production of Culture Perspective. Annual Review of Sociology 30: 311-34. Doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.30.012703.110557.
Quinn, William
2006 Guenon, René Jean Marie Joseph. In Hanegraaff et al. 2006: 442-45.
Rawlinson, Andrew
1997 The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions. Open Court, Chicago, IL.
Rekdal, Ole Bjørn
2014 Academic Urban Legends. Social Studies of Science 44(4): 638-54. Doi: 10.1177/0306312714535679.
Richardson, Michael
2006 Surrealism and Cinema. Berg, New York.
Rosenblatt, Kathleen F.
1999 René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide. State University of New York Press, Albany.
Scarano, Ross, and Cedar Pasori
2013 Kanye’s Holy Mountain: The Inuence of Alejandro Jodorowsky on the Yeezus Tour. COMPLEX (22 November). No pages. Online: http://www.complex.com/style/2013/11/kanye-west-jodorowsky-holy-mountain/ (accessed 22 September 2014).
Sismondo, Sergio
2005 Boundary Work and the Science Wars: James Robert Brown’s Who Rules in Science? Episteme 1(3): 235-48. Doi: 10.3366/epi.2004.1.3. 235.
Stermac, Daria, and Alejandro Jodorowsky
1974 Two Visions. Cinema Canada 13: 61-63.
Tippett, Benjamin K.
2012 Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacic. Online: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.8144v1.
Wellbeloved, Sophia
2003 Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts. Routledge, London and New York.
Wikipedia contributors
2013 Mount Analogue. Wikipedia (8 October). No pages. Online: http://en. wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mount_Analogue&oldid=576301793 (accessed 8 September 2014).
2014a Rene Daumal. Wikipedia (20 May). No pages. Online: http://en. wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ren%C3%A9_Daumal&oldid=609350256 (accessed 18 August 2014).
2014b The Holy Mountain (1973 lm). Wikipedia (8 August). No pages. Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Holy_ Mountain_(1973_lm)&oldid=625917410 (accessed 17 August 2014).
2014c Alejandro Jodorowsky. Wikipedia (5 September). No pages. Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alejandro_Jodorowsky&oldid=624286531 (accessed 17 August 2014).
Yezpitelok, Maxwell
2011 Translation: The Flash vs. Gurdjieff by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Comics Bulletin (5 October). No pages. Online: http://comicsbulletin.com/ translation-ash-vs-gurdjieff-alejandro-jodorowsky/ (accessed 7 September 2014).
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