Psychedelic film as a bridge for study of sensory perception and human consciousness.
Notes on how it starts with the heard, the seen, and the felt against the skin.
This week I started digging into the literature review but with a new, focused point in sight: psychedelic film. So far I have been jumping between topics of cinema, consciousness, selfhood and perception. My recent supervision tutorial allowed me to realise that I should take things one by one. I will start with the field of psychedelic film.
I will have to look into what the name has been ascribed to historically, in order to position my work. Again, this will involve not only describing what my practice is inspired by, but probably mostly defining what it is not. That being said, psychedelic film is indeed a lot more than references to American counterculture, and the directors of the 1960s cashing in on the LSD boom by making whole films look like acid visual confusion and potential mental turmoil, out of which the characters, as well as the viewer, emerge usually with a sense that it was all not worth it, and that the pain of being alive and flawed has finally leaked into the hippie ideal.
At seventeen, I was all for the utopian hippie vision. I din’t know much of the world, but my tendency doesn’t come as a surprise considering that the previous generations were, where I come from, represented mostly by grocery shop fronts full of middle-aged day drinkers, sweating cheap Tyskie and 9% Karpackie Mocne, the alcoholic fog raising towards the summer’s midday. Raging and wild-eyed polski punk of the 1970s and desperately depressed, suicidal polski blues trailing between the thousands of balconies in the housing blocks, smothered by eternal DIY sounds of the neighbourhood, perpetually in repair of the tiny flats, drills and shrills or children in the midst of family arguments, each block ten steps away from the next one, in all directions, an ants’ nest of polskie życie na osiedlu.
The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, Quicksilver Messenger Service and The Doors seemed to be a world far away, where people dressed just like my parents did in their old photos - Polish rebells against their polka-dot-lace-and-ironed-collar mums and dads, the 80s and 90s youth imitating the 60s and 70s freak fashion tendencies of the USA counterculture. Going through my mum’s bottomless wardrobe was always the highlight of my developing fashion sense, alongside the second-hand shop hunts for oversized flowery fabrics and geometric Op-arty patterns that would take me as far away as possible from the stench of middle-aged unemployment and the rising wave of tight jeans and cut american-flag tops of the 2000s girlies.
Fashion fluctuates, there are always individual emotional motives that spread like butter on warm toast, like revolution, the choices of music and clothes as the first acts of collectivity and activism. It starts with the heard, the seen, and the felt against the skin as sources of knowledge about the surrounding world, the generational gaps and conditions of the communities.
I grew up in a poor, ants’ nest, Bloki na Beskidzkim, and to escape the sense of alcoholic-unemployment doom, you either became a punk or a hippie. Angry outlook, glany boots, or a carefree demeanour and long hair, it all boiled down to the attitude of radical freedom. Curiosity and fight for a better future. No desk jobs, jebać policję, legalise marijuana, jebać PIS, don’t care about football. I looked mainly like a hippie, but found myself drifting between all these groups: the punks, the metal heads, the actors, artists, drug-fascinated aspiring pharmacologists, and musicians. If we weren’t all pre-employment teenagers living in their parents’ homes, I could almost imagine it as a Ken Kesey inspired commune, or the way neuroscientist Evan Thompson (2015) remembers his childhood, growing up in a house full of interdisciplinary thinkers, scientists, visionaries, and spiritual practitioners who all shared the desire for knowledge and freedom. We were all philosophers and activists in our own individual ways, gathering strength against the failures of previous generations, craving intellectual and sensory stimulation in opposition to ideas of the right-wing government, dazed and confused in anticipation of the future just around the corner.
It all felt so big precisely because of the music, the fashion, the weed, Shulgin, Leary, Kesey and McKenna, Huxley and Watts. Psychedelic was, for me, never just a word to describe a chemical component that causes a change in consciousness so distinct from narcotic action of opiates and opioids, and of stimulating amphetamines (disclaimer: not that I did that much of any of it, but one just read and knew these things as common knowledge, education being a primary tool against the misinformation of war on drugs policies). Psychedelic was a culture of visual, sonic, tactile, aesthetic and philosophical approaches to every day life.
The term psychedelic film is usually immediately linked to the 1960s American counterculture, indeed classed by some as a lifestyle. There are Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967) which explicitly aim at portraying scenes of LSD-induced reverie of colours, surreal sexually charged scenes. There is also the non-fiction film Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (2011) by Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, which brings together the footage filmed by the Merry Pranksters on their famous bus journey across the States, narratively chaotic, a patchwork of unsynchronised sound and image, retrospective interviews with the participants, a colourful home movie collage of a monumental moment in time - which, as I argued in my dissertation, is a psychedelic film in that it asks the viewer to abandon the search for cohesion, and to become immersed in the sensory trip. This is also certainly what Ben van Meter’s SF Trips Festival: The Opening does, operating an overlay of three day’s footage from the famous light-show, music and acid fuelled event in January 1966.
In a great recent book of essays Cinema of Exploration (2021), J. C. Kase inspired by Dziga Vertov and Stan Brakhage, argues for cinema as a “sensory prosthesis, a technological device that can radically modify perception, transform ways of seeing, and eradicate familiar patterns of visual understanding”. This is the only written explanation for using the name “psychedelic film” I found so far that expands beyond the direct connection to psychedelic substances and culture based around them. It actually looks into why the psychedelic trips could have been informing filmmaking decisions, considers the visual tendencies of the times not as merely a cinematic intoxication, which would sell in the culture of LSD popularity but should now be looked at with pity and burned out sarcasm, but as a valid tool in which the perceptual differences can be instructive, enriching, and transformatory for the filmic point of view. Indeed, like Ken Johnson writes, psychedelic tendencies transformed modern art (2011), and so it happened in filmmaking. This, however, can only be admitted and treated seriously, if one ceases to focus on pros and cons of so called drug-use and talks about psychedelic as a term that carries cultural, aesthetic, philosophical meanings, bridging the contexts of sensory perception and interests in personal identity and human consciousness, ultimately becoming a perfect field for studies that explore filmmaking and film as a transformatory practice.