“I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of hallucinogenic drugs.”
– Alejandro Jodorowsky

Actor, director, producer, puppeteer and comic book writer Alejandro Jodorowsky is the humble architect of beautifully controlled chaos on the silver screen. His modest output of esoteric and brutally surreal movies have shocked, abhorred and awed cult film enthusiasts for decades.

A highly revered and influential filmmaker, Jodorowsky’s first full-length film “Fando y Lis” set off a full-scale riot at its premiere at the Acapulco Film Festival of 1967. A level of traumatizing uniqueness and a proclivity toward all things over the top permeate Jodorowsky’s films as he mocks, mutilates and disfigures conventional cinematography. A reel of film in his hands becomes grotesquely beautiful art that demands the viewers’ utmost attention and critical thought.

His movies bear little, if any, similarities to the bulk of the forgettable nonsense defacated by Hollywood’s marketing machine. The lover of predictability and cinematic banality will be hard-pressed to nurture an appreciation for work this abstract.

“I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of hallucinogenic drugs,” Jodorowsky once said.

His films have oftentimes been perceived as artistic declarations of war against everything that conventional moviemaking stands for. Dreamlike imagery of disfigured midgets, eastern philosophy and a penchant for the iconoclastic permeate his work.

In 1970, his violent spaghetti-eastern film titled “El Topo” caught the attention of George Harrison and John Lennon, who were instrumental in not only getting the movie shown across North America, but also in co-funding his next feature, the tour de force known as “The Holy Mountain” (1973).

Unfortunately, the biggest problem movie viewers have with a Jodorowsky film is not the content, but tracking down copies of them. Disputes over film ownership rights between Jodorowsky and ABKCO records founder Allen Klein have only recently been resolved.

For decades his work could only be seen on poor quality bootlegged VHS tapes. Lucky for those in the Milwaukee area, a copy of the print of “The Holy Mountain” turned up two years ago and the film will be screened at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Theater on Thursday, April 6, at 7 p.m.

The viewer should be forewarned that this is a film that should be viewed with an open mind and is not intended for the squeamish at heart.

How the film made it to Milwaukee

Stumbling upon a screening of Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain” in Madison last November, Bill Rouleau and Dan DuChaine, film buffs and owners of Rush-Mor Records in Milwaukee’s absurdly hip South Side, decided to bring the film to town.

Rouleau and DuChaine began butting heads with ABKCO records and Criterion for several moths in order to obtain the print of the film and screen it here. After gaining the approval of Jodorowsky himself, the two acquired the film and secured the screen at the Union Theater for one night.

“This is a film that people have to see,” says DuChaine. “The visuals are so over the top and there’s a meticulous detail in the props. This is a film of a grandiose scale.”

Indeed, there will be no time to make a popcorn run or make out with your significant other once the film starts.

“The print of the film that we will be showing is a bit rough, but almost all of the film is intact,” says DuChaine.

Not too bad, considering no copies of the actual film were known to exist until a few years back. Perhaps even more important is the fact that this is the last time this movie will play in a North American movie theater.

“Before we received the print, the film had shown in Argentina, France and Sweden,” says DuChaine. “Criterion, who now owns the distribution rights to the film, didn’t want to send it back to the Midwest, so again we had to contact Jodorowsky himself. After showing him how enthusiastic we were about wanting to show the film, he gave us the thumbs up and got the film sent to us.”

In 2007 The Criterion Collection will be releasing the film on DVD.

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