Mind-manifesting film: an inquiry into reality
Direct experience and perception as a source of knowledge. Words as processes of becoming.
Is this even a real genre
Psychedelic film is known as a genre widely (or imprecisely) defined, generally connected to films produced around the 1960s and 1970s global countercultural movement, most often related to the expressions of the hippie “lifestyle” in the United States. This association means that it is a type of film widely criticised: for what Parker Tyler called the “drug attitude”, relying to heavily on intoxication instead of imagination, reflecting what Anne Powell terms “hedonistic drug taking”. Even filmmaker Stan Brakhage was known for his “disdain for youth culture and drugs” (Kase, 2021), even though other artists such as Paul Sharits argued that his films such as Dog Star Man gain a new dimension of impact when viewed under the influence of LSD.
For me, however, the study of psychedelic film reveals a multitude of common characteristics which, above all, allow to understand the films as expressions of the literal Greek meaning of the word psyche(mind/spirit) - delic (revealing/manifesting). Challenging of the “default” point of view not only through the avant-garde stylistic choices, but by emphasising improvisation, intuition, and direct experience as means to access new sensory territories (Kase, Sontag, Powell, Deleuze, Gosse, Gallagher), and using film as “technical means to pursue the reintegration of self and world”(Noonan, 2021), by diffusing the subject-object boundaries and focusing on the spectatorial participation (Kase, Verplanken, Sharits). Amongst the psychedelic substances, culture, music, and film in the 1960s, Susan Sontag wrote about art as an “object modifying our consciousness and sensibility”, emphasising sensations over ideas as parts of self:
“we are what we are able to see (hear, taste, smell, feel) even more profoundly than we are what furniture of ideas we have stocked in our heads”
(Sontag, 1966, p.300).
This focus on the sensory experience as means to accessing altered states, which can allow for re-understanding of oneself and one’s interconnectedness within the world has been a repeated interest in the writings of that era (Huxley, Watts), and is the inspiration for my own Psychedelic Film Practice.
Wor(l)d flux
I say things and write words, but the idea that a sentence is meant to define what my PhD is about is purely petrifying. Meanings of words fluctuate in my mind and shimmer through time, sometimes making sense and other times appearing completely empty. I wonder if it is the type and state of attention that affects it so strongly - my focus drifts and reorganises, readjusts and remaps constantly. Then a thought: nobody is actually expecting my one sentence to guarantee anything. To predict, provide. I will happily be held accountable for my words. They are processes of becoming and shaping, analysing and inquiring. Being responsible for them is being responsible for one’s ongoing activity of living itself.
I track back - there was a person in my life who would always frantically hold onto words, to seconds, fearful of letting them pass, paranoiacally struggling for control over what he heard and saw, denying subjectivity for himself as well for others - there is only one right way to hear a sentence, everyone else’s experience was inherently wrong and incorrect, because differences in seeing things seemed to threaten his reality. I remember this one situation many years ago when he kept telling me I said something I didn’t - the discussion took a painfully long time, he wouldn’t take it that he might have heard me wrong, or that it doesn’t actually matter, because it was such a trivial thing that I cannot remember it now. This was long before any of his episodes diagnosed as psychotic. Is it that clinging to objectivity, that desire to stop the flux of time and meaning, that actually impoverishes our relationship with the world? Subjectivity is sacred - the only way we can really know anything.
Subjectivity as part of reality
Within the field of psychedelic film, a genre so often dismissed as fuelled by the “drug attitude”, or simply ignored within the film theory and history, there is a fluid and experimentally-driven discussion on ontological status of subjective experiences (Verplanken, 2022). Through mapping “ the limits of inner space” (Kase, 2021) and externalising the inner experience either through the narrative (as in Altered States, 1980, described by Verplanken, 2022), or through the enquiry into the technology of film itself (flicker film, Sharits, Deleuzian “camera as consciousness”), subjectivity is given priority as the essential field of the interaction between the self and the world. The legacy of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s lies in the current psychedelic renaissance, exploring the reality of inner experience as basis of knowledge. Mind-revealing film has been always aware of the Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perception as “interaction between perceiver and perceived, between subject and object” (in Verplanken, 2022), bringing the technological sensory experience into the dialogue as an artistic enquiry into the relationships of the self and reality. Through the time-based audiovisual medium it directly investigates the notion that “true knowledge is found direct experience” (Verplanken, 2022) inspired by William Blake, and explicit in Huxley’s mescaline experience (1956). The experience of filmmaking and film as a quest for knowledge about the self and the world is what motivates my fluctuating, evolving inquiries into the relationships of states of consciousness, intuition, intimacy, subjectivity and neurodiversity with the artistic technology of the medium.
some references:
Gallagher, M. (2004) ‘Tripped Out: The Psychedelic Film and Masculinity’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 21(3), pp. 161–171. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509200490437817.
Gosse, J. (2022) ‘Altered States: Psychedelic Experimental Cinema as Border Crossing in Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS’, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 61(5), pp. 183–209.
Huxley, A. (2004 [1956]) The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell. London: Vintage books.
Kase, J.C. (2021) ‘Outer and Inner Space: Psychedelia and Selected Representations of Altered Consciousness in Experimental Cinema’, in Cahill, J. L. and Caminati, L., Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice. New York: Routledge.
Noonan, P. (2021) ‘An avant-garde of the mind: Ōe Masanori and psychedelic cinema in the global Sixties’, The Sixties, 14(2), pp. 169–196. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17541328.2021.1996792.
Powell, A. (2007) Deleuze, altered states and film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sharits, P. and Markgraf, S.T. (2017) ‘I was a flawed modernist’: collected writings by Paul Sharits, collected stories about Paul Sharits.
Sontag, S. (1966) ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Noonday Press.
Tyler, P. (1995) Underground film: a critical history. New York: Da Capo Press.
Verplanken, V. (2022) ‘Revisionary metaphysics in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980): on the ontological subversiveness of psychedelic sequences’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 20(3), pp. 377–400. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2091887.