The film is an allegorical comment on the moral neutrality of technology and the potentially destructive powers of propaganda. Blackwolf’s secret weapon is propaganda, used to incite and motivate his legions and terrorize the good fairy folk of Montagar; Blackwolf also utilizes technology for evil ends. However, in the end, it is Avatar’s willingness to use a technological tool (a handgun pulled from “up his sleeve”) which saves them all. Bakshi also states that Wizards “was about the creation of the state of Israel and the Holocaust, about the Jews looking for a homeland, and about the fact that fascism was on the rise again”.
I just went to see the last Michel Gondry (movie director: Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, La science des rêves ; videoclip maker: Crystalline – Björk, Rolling stones…) movie yesterday night, an adaptation of “Froth on the Daydream” (French: “L’Écume des Jours”), a 1947 novel by the French Surrealist novelist Boris Vian.
“Colin is a wealthy young man with a resourceful and stylish man-servant, Nicolas, as well as a fantastic olfactory-musical invention: the pianocktail. With dizzying speed, Colin meets and weds Chloé in a grand ceremony. Generously, Colin bequeaths a quarter of his fortune to his friends Chick and Alise so they too may marry…”
Gondry succeeds here to translate the hyper-surrealistic environment depicted in Vian’s novel.
Enjoy the trailer, and I hope you may have the opportunity to see the movie soon !
For its 3rd birthday the DPV is featuring a series of psychedelic videos specials which will run between the 22 and the 28 of April 2013. Stay tuned for more of our psychedelic specials.
It is surprising how many of the earliest films contained psychedelic elements. In the field of animation especially one finds not only many psychedelically styled videos, but even 1920s videos focusing on the mind-altering effects of drugs. And while these films don’t feature the fancy CGI effects of today’s videos, they have a special kind of charm.
Emil Cohl – Fantasmagorie (1908)
“Fantasmagorie” by French caricaturist and animator Emil Cohl,“the father of animated cartoon”, is considered by film historians to be the first animated cartoon.
Watching Fantasmagorie today, the inherently psychedelic character of animation becomes even clearer. The film make me think about how it must have been for the first viewers of this video, one of the earliest of animations, when they watched it more than a hundred years ago. How did they react to the fantastical world on the screen in which things appear out of nowhere, and bottles of wine are transformed into flowers? Interestingly, it is right after our hero, who removes many hats worn by the lady in the front, arrives at a smaller hat, which makes the woman look like a mushroom (0:29), that weird things start happening…
Emil Cohl – Hasher’s Delirium (1910)
Two years after Fantasmagorie, the topic of intoxication becomes explicit in another video by Cohl titled “Hasher’s Delirium”. In this video our hero, who drinks wine and absinthe in a restaurant, enters into various states of delusion. The psychedelic transformations of objects reach new levels here.
Walter Ruttman – “Das Wunder” – Kantorowicz liquor commercial (1922)
This highly amusing early Kantorowicz liquor commercial was created by experimental film maker Walter Ruttmann at a time when alcohol was already illegal in the US. The Kantorowicz liquor is created by a magician who uses the basic elements of the universe. Later the liquor performs the impressing feat of appeasing the angry and fighting men, eventually even making them kiss each other. No wonder the film is called “The Wonder”…
Pat Sullivan – Felix the cat – Felix dines and pines (1926) (Trippy sequence starts at 4:13)
Silent era’s Felix the cat went on occasional and sometimes unintended hallucinatory trips. In this first video from 1926 Felix eats some food from the garbage and consequently enters a long and highly trippy hallucination.
Pat Sullivan – Felix the Cat – Woos Whoope (1928)
In this video from 1928, Felix drinks too much in Whoopee Club and enters into a state of delirium full of intimidating hallucinations.
Max Fleischer – Betty Boop Nitrous Oxide film (1934) (Trippy sequence starts at 4:00)
Still one has to have a Fleischer video in a post about psychedelic oldies. Here is one my favorites. His nitrous oxide video… The funny trippy part starts at around 4:00)
Oskar Fischinger – Allegretto (1936)
German-American abstract-animator Oskar Fischinger had to fight for his film “Allegretto”. The video which was created by Fischinger in 1936 in synchronization with a tune by Ralph Rainger, was altered by Paramount Pictures who changed the Technicolor imagery to B&W, and intercut the abstract images with live action scenes. Fischinger eventually asked to be let out of his contract, and completed the film by himself in a way which suited his vision. The colorful result, which remains visually engaging even today, is considered “one of the most-screened and successful films of visual music’s history.”
Walt Disney – Fantasia (1940) (Trippy sequence starts at 5:00)
The whole film is psychedelic in style, but the sequence above is particularly distinguished for its synesthetic qualities.
The name “Fantasia” in itself alluded to a fantastic other-worldly land, perhaps the kind which can be discovered through the ingestion of substances from a chemical family which was known at the time as the “Phantastica”.
This might be a bit farfetched, but maybe not. Acording to Peter Stafford’s “Psychedelic Encyclopedia” the chief visualist for Disney’s Fantasia (1940) participated in the mescaline experiments conducted in Germany by Kurt Beringer in the 1920′s. Artist Paul Laffoley claims that Disney himself experimented with Mescaline “On a regular basis” during his stay in Germany in the 1930′s. Many other theories regarding the relations between Disney and psychedelics exist, and you can find out about some of them here in this fascinating article.
Walt Disney – Dumbo the flying elephant (1941)
A year after Fantasia, Disney released Dumbo the Flying Elephant. In it Dumbo starts drinking the contents of a bucket, following which he begins to hallucinate highly peculiar visions, which you can see in the scene above.
For its 3rd birthday the DPV is featuring a series of psychedelic videos specials which will run between the 22 and the 28 of April 2013. Stay tuned for more of our psychedelic specials.
The term “psychedelic’ which is etymologically derived from the Greek psykhe- “mind” + deloun “make visible, reveal,” from delos “visible, clear,” was invented by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1957 to describe the effects of hallucinogenic psychotropic drugs inducing altered states of perception. From consciousness modification to consciousness transformation, the term was deeply explored during the turbulent 1960’s. All over the cultural spectrum, many artists attempted to recreate the psychedelic experience through various Media.
Today, a new generation of artists goes back to the sources of historical psychedelia to bring what we call the third psychedelic revolution (the second was the creation of electronic music in the 80’s).
The idea of consciousness expansion is developed through stage-performance, community and “total art” phantasm. Thus, we will be tempted to refer to psychedelic experience instead of general psychedelia: There is no psychedelic art, only experiences.
In contrast to the clichés of “flower power” and the summer of love, French psychedelia is an experience of numerous, miscellaneous and fundamentally experimental forms.
From music clips to cinema, through cartoons and video art experimentation this collection has no pretension of being exhaustive, but I assume it covers a part of the range of French psychedelia!
Enter the Void // Gaspard Noé
A drug dealer becomes interested in death and re-incarnation after reading “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”. Suddenly dead, his soul floats through Tokyo observing the dramas of his friends and foes. An oath determines his next step ‘as a soul’.
Alain Bashung – Variations Sur Marilou
A 9-minutes musical short film on the famous song by Serge Gainsbourg, “Variations sur Marilou”, interpreted in 2006 by Alain Bashung.
The song rests between reality and fantasy. The music video explores this aspect by showing Marilou’s gestures, parallel to the imaginary world of desire, all at once. It thus responds to the very daring worlds of Bashung and Gainsbourg. Maxime Bruneel’s challenge was to create images which won’t be too shocking… The result is closer to Gustav Courbet’s “Origine du monde” than to today’s pornographic films.
Serge Gainsbourg // Histoire De Melody Nelson
“Histoire de Melody Nelson” is a 1971 concept album by French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. The Lolita-esque pseudo-autobiographical plot involves the middle-aged Gainsbourg unintentionally colliding his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost into teenage nymphet Melody Nelson’s bicycle, and the subsequent seduction and romance that ensues. Histoire de Melody Nelson is considered by many critics and fans to be Gainsbourg’s most influential and accomplished album.
Billy Ze Kick – Mangez-Moi
Billy Ze Kick are a French band from the 1990s, with lots of psychedelic references and overtones. Their song “Mangez-Moi” (eat me) in which the band goes mushroom picking in the forest and different magic mushrooms beg them to eat them and promise to open their minds, was a big hit in 1990s France. Apparently not everybody realized what the song was really about…
Barbarella // Roger Vadim
In the far future, a highly sexual woman is tasked with finding and stopping the evil Durand-Durand. Along the way she encounters various unusual people.
Marcel Duchamp – Anemic Cinema
Anemic Cinema or Anémic Cinéma (1926) is a Dadaist, surrealist, or experimental film made by Marcel Duchamp. The film depicts whirling animated drawings — which Duchamp called Rotoreliefs — alternated with puns in French. Duchamp signed the film with his alter ego name of Rrose Sélavy.
Rotoreliefs were a phase of Duchamp’s spinning works. To make the optical “play toys” he painted designs on flat cardboard circles and spun them on a phonograph turntable that when spinning the flat disks appeared 3-dimensional. He had a printer run off 500 sets of six of the designs and set up a booth at a 1935 Paris inventors’ show to sell them. The venture was a financial disaster, but some optical scientists thought they might be of use in restoring 3-dimensional sight to people with one eye.
In collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret, Duchamp filmed early versions of the Rotoreliefs and they named the first film version Anémic Cinéma.
Chris Marker’s “La Jetée”
Seven and a half minutes of the 26-minute film that inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
A man (Davos Hanich) is a prisoner in the aftermath of the Third World War, in a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris where survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. Scientists research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods “to call past and future to the rescue of the present”. They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, but eventually settle upon the prisoner, whose key to the past is a vague but obsessive memory, from his pre-war childhood, of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) he had seen on the observation platform (‘the jetty’) at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a startling incident there. He had not understood exactly what happened, but knew he had seen a man die…
Ultimaya lab. Productions // Cosmic Joker // Travel in illusion
Ultimaya impulsion is a virtual area that promotes the investigation into consciousness mainly through the medium of Video Feedback and its modulations. It supports multidisciplinary research into video, sound, art, science, advaita vedanta … We explore the interplay of reality and illusion, attempting innovative mystical, shamanic-like approaches.
Ultimaya is an open collective of artists performing visual and musical experiments, reflecting their vision of a sub-conscious interconnected global psyche.
Gandahar (René Laloux), is a French animated science fiction and fantasy film released in 1988 in the U.S. It is based on Jean-Pierre Andrevon’s novel Les Hommes-machines contre Gandahar (The Machine-Men versus Gandahar).
The peaceful people of Gandahar are suddenly attacked by an army of automatons known as the Men of Metal, who march through the villages and petrify their victims with lasers. The resulting statues are then collected and transferred to their base. At the capital city of Jasper, the Council of Women orders Sylvain to investigate. On his journey, he encounters the Deformed, a race of mutant beings who were accidentally created via genetic experimentation by Gandahar’s scientists. Despite their resentment, they are also threatened by the Men of Metal and offer to help Sylvain.
We also published a post about his master piece titled ” Fantastic planet”, here is the link to get a picture:
Gong is a Franco-British progressive/psychedelic rock band formed by Australian musician Daevid Allen. Their music has also been described as space rock.
and here, an other video DPV already published in the past!
A French band who never made a single success in France, but filled up the Red Place in Moscow…
Le Lit de la Vierge – Philippe Garrel
A Philippe Garrel movie from 1969 depicting enigmatic variations of the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ and world after may ’68.
La montagne sacrée // Alejandro Jodorowsky
The Sacred Mountain is a 1973 cult film directed by Chilean-French Alejandro Jodorowsky who also participated as an actor, composer, set designer, and costume designer on this film. It’s a masterpiece and a must-see!
The film is based on Ascent of Mount Carmel by St. John of the Cross and Mount Analogue by René Daumal, who was a student of G.I. Gurdjieff. In this film much of Jodorowsky’s visually psychedelic story follows the metaphysical thrust of Mount Analogue. This is revealed in such events as the climb to the Alchemist, the assembly of individuals with specific skills, the discovery of the mountain that unites Heaven and Earth “that cannot not exist” and symbolic challenges along the mountain ascent. Daumal died before finishing his allegorical novel, and Jodorowsky’s improvised ending provides a way of completing the work (both symbolically and otherwise.)
NB: I want to dedicate this birthday post to my beloved dog “Trakass”, aka “Blondin” who died last Saturday after a tragic accident…May his soul escort us along the rest of our lives…R.I.P my boy…
For its 3rd birthday the DPV is featuring a series of psychedelic videos specials which will run between the 22 and the 28 of April. Stay tuned for more of our psychedelic specials.
One of the things I like best about the psychedelic experience is humor. On a psychedelic trip, everyday situations can suddenly change their meaning in ways that make them hilarious. This can happen when normal stuff suddenly appears very weird, or when you find new and surprising meaning to ordinary occurrences. It can happen when one goes on a train of thoughts and arrives to some awesomely far out mental places, or when you suddenly realize that you and your friends look very weird, or are behaving in a very weird way. Regaining perspective on yourself can be exceedingly funny. Psychedelic humor, at its highest forms, can be a realization of the inherently humorous aspect of existence itself, a sort of metaphysical-humor state of mind cherished by some of the world’s religious traditions, like Zen Buddhism.
The psychedelic humor videos below combine the different elements of psychedelic humor described above in ways that I find hilarious. Here are my psychedelic humor favorites.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – The Hotel Scene
The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hotel scene, is one of the classic psychedelic comedy scenes in cinema. The scene makes use of a distinct kind of psychedelic humor where the joke lies in the gap between reality as it is perceived by the tripped-out protagonist and the actual ‘objective’ reality as it is captured by the camera/others. (See here for another example of this kind psychedelic humor, featuring Jack Black).
Louis CK Animation
“In animation you can do anything” is the premise of this video by Louis CK, where the comedian uses the force of animation to become a kind of superhero. For other writers it would probably just mean flying in the air or fighting huge monsters, but Louis CK, being Louis CK, uses this new found power in order to very thoroughly work out his feelings of bitterness towards his father and infest him with guilt “which will make him age 50 years in a day”…
Pikachu on Acid and the stoned British soldiers
Pikachu goes on an extended acid-trip after being attacked with acid by another Pokémon. This is the proof that the American and British armies had the right idea when they experimented with LSD as a battlefield incapacitating weapon, which was an hilarious occasion in itself.
This is how we trip – The Good Neighbor
Dennis and his friends dose on DXM (cough suppressant) and go into time-portals while Dennis’s mother knocks on the door demanding an explanation. An hilarious video-portrait of a lively fucked-up bunch of suburban tripsters by the “Good Neighbor” group.
Two renegade cops take “memory medicine”
Two renegade cops is a brilliant and pretty psychedelic 13 episode 70’s style YouTube comedy show. In the 5th episode Brick and Steel go on a visit to the past, after smoking some “memory medicine” given to them by their hippie friend.
Arise – Church of the Subgenius
The instructions part for the video tape by the Church of the Sub Genius is an exceedingly deranged, far out video-instructions manual created by a demented video director. The result is unbelievable and hilarious.
Charlie the Unicorn
Grumpy unicorn Charlie, who just wanted to quietly watch TV, is continuously harassed by two particularly weird unicorns who take him on a far out trip to the banana king who teaches Charlie a peculiar lesson about life.
Musicotherapie
The highly stressed ape psychiatrist of an animal’s hospital mental ward is driven to madness by the never ending noises created by his annoyingly musical patients. Strangely, following the advice of the Banana King from the video above, doesn’t help either…
The stoned ape theory
Mckenna’s stoned ape theory, mixed together with elements from Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey and rendered to extreme by animation, makes for a particularly hilarious journey into the psychedelic roots of human civilization.
The Mighty Boosh & Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy
“Television needs a madman! I want the show to be psychedelic and beautiful but have charm and personality. If Dali made a show hopefully it would look like this” said Noel Fielding about his television work.
Fielding gained fame and acclaim with his highly successful show The Mighty Boosh, created together with Julian Barratt. He later embarked on a solo career, launching the Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy show.
Both shows are hilarious, surreal, mystical, and highly psychedelic, featuring many magical plots, shamans, drug dealers, a talking gorilla and variety of other bizarre characters.
Many of the episodes of both shows are available to watch on YouTube, and if you are a fan of psychedelic comedy, you’ve got to watch at least a few episodes. You won’t regret it.
Cranky Yankers – Cough syrup
Cranky Yanker’s Ed calls the pharmacy and asks for some cough syrup. Which kind?
“the happy kind”, “the kind that makes you sleepy”. The ensuing conversation is accompanied by his hallucination as he goes into a cough syrup Neverland.
Story from North-America
The “Story from North America” is beautifully animated video with which combines vivid images, evocative moral issues and a funny song to create a precious 4 minute lesson about the value of life.
According to Grizzly Bear’s tumblr in the video for “gun-shy” the members of the band are trying to extract the essence of creativity from their bodies. To do that they use a lot of medical lab equipment. This is the occasion for director Kris Moyes to present a slick blend of psychedelic and medical visualizations. This mix might be surprising at first but it also makes a lot of sense. Like deep-sea and outer space in the 19th century, the unknown space of the mind and the microcosm of the human body have been explored, mapped, imagined and visualized (I guess also colonized) since the beginning of the 20th century. In a way all those fantastic worlds take part in the metaphor of the “other space”… and in many ways they all provide excellent material for trippy videos. Look for yourself!
On another planet in the distant past, a Gelfling embarks on a quest to find the missing shard of a magical crystal, and so restore order to his world…
This is 1982 fantasy movie showing puppets in a long adventure, and contains some psychedelic parts !
When do we eat is a film about a Seder meal that goes wrong, but then actually right, after the father of the family has been surreptitiously dosed with MDMA and LSD. Except for the ending it is a pretty awesome psychedelic comedy which actually deals in a funny intelligent way with the psychedelic experience. Stick around for the last 40 seconds of the video to catch the trippy bits.
The Daily Psychedelic Video 