Cinema Psychedelica presents a week long program of films, film lectures, and a live cinema dance/trance performance. The experiments with the medium of film and art that are central in the US avantgarde film in the 1960s took place in cultural context of freedom movements, anti-Vietnam protests, and the rise of popular culture. The legal and widespread use of psychedelics at the time, calls up the image of flower power, hippies, swirly movements, intense colors, lava lamps and Woodstock. After the declaration of the ‘war on drugs’ by president Nixon in 1972, psychedelics faded away from popular attention. Today, however, we are in the midst of a revival of psychedelic culture, closely related to a renewed interest in therapeutic use of psychotropic substances. Michael Pollan’s book and Netflix series How to Change Your Mind marks this ‘psychedelic renaissance’.  In a series of four lectures, a live cinema performance and five feature films, Cinema Psychedelica will explore and compare the 1960s psychedelic film culture to the current wave of psychedelica in cinema. Each lecture will include several short films and film clips.

In the introductory lecture ‘Tripping on Film’ Patricia Pisters will talk about the difference between East Coast and West Coast avantgarde cinema in the 1960s, and how this resulted in different forms of expanded consciousness and expanded cinema; she will compare these avant-garde films to experimental cinema and its resonances in psychedelic Hollywood today. In ‘Media Junkies’ Amir Vudka will zoom in on the addictive qualities of media and film, then and now. Central in his lecture is the work of William Burroughs and David Cronenberg. Filmmaker and ethnographer Vincent Moon will take us on an audio-visual trip through his vast collection of psychedelic rituals in a hallucinatory ‘Live Cinema Performance’.  In ‘Trance Cinema’ Erica Biolchini will transport us via film into the trance states of the medium, initiated by Maya Deren and others; and more recently as evoked by the trance avantgarde work of the Mexican art collective Colectivo Los Ingravidos. In ‘Queer Trans Cinema’ Slava Greenberg investigates queer and trans legacies in psychedelic cinema from the 1960s until now. If there is one general characteristic that could capture the change in psychedelic film culture, it would be a shift from rebellion and freedom in the 1960s to therapy and collective healing in the current psychedelic revival. But of course, this trajectory is full of mind revealing and mind expanding experiments that escape these descriptions.

Cinema Psychedelica Feature Films:

Lions, Love (… and Lies) - Agnes Varda, 1969

Agnes Varda’s ‘forgotten’ feature film Lions, Love (… and Lies) brings together East Coast avantgarde cinema with West coast hippie culture of the 1960s. The film assembles Viva, of Warhol’s Factory, and James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who created and starred in the rock musical Hair. They form a community in the Hollywood hills and are soon joined by underground director Shirley Clarke, playing herself as well as functioning as a surrogate for Varda. Drifting in and out between fiction and documentary, the film captures the trippie hippie atmosphere of the 1960s against a violent political background of the murder of Bobby Kennedy and the assault on Warhol. Lions, Love (… and Lies) sets the stage for Cinema Psychedelia.

Naked Lunch – David Cronenberg, 1991

An exterminator develops an addiction to the substances he uses to kill the bugs, accidentally takes the life of his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in a port town in Africa. Based on William Burroughs’ 1959 ‘unfilmable’ novel, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is a surreal and hallucinatory cult classic. Partly based on Burroughs own life and his addiction to various substances, it also talks about paranoia, politics and the mysteries of creation. As the film draws close parallels between media technology and perceptions influenced by psychotropics this film creates a bridge between ‘media junkies’ in the past and in our contemporary days.

A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006)

In a recent interview in Sight and Sound Richard Linklater said that in his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel,  he wanted to capture Dick’s druggy weirdness and stay true to the novel’s authenticity, the realness of a paranoid mind and the fear of surveillance technology. The hypnotic visuals of the rotoscope animation and the eerie atmosphere of a posthuman future provides a perfect combination of an anticipated psychedelic dystopia that is still darkly visionary today.

In the Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021)

After Wheatley’s psychedelic historical cult classic A Field in England (2013), In the Earth is a hallucinatory horror film that radiates the post-Covid atmosphere of our age. A biologist wants to find spores in nature to make crops more efficient. Soon he discovers that it is ‘funny in the woods’. In the Earth integrates experimental cinema’s psychedelic forms in complete original ways into a weird and dangerous mindscape that represents where the search for the spirits of nature may go wrong.

Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015)

Embrace of the Serpent follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the Indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle. One journey is with a German ethnographer and the other with an American botanist, both on the search for a rare psychotropic healing plant. Dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures, the film presents a soulful and mystical critique on Western invading practices into shamanic cultures and healing practices through ‘plant medicines’ that is also a commentary on the current psychedelic and spiritual tourism in the jungle and on the destruction of Indigenous cultures.