Watching Gaspar Noe’s new film is a death and re-birth experience. definitely the most psychedelic film I’ve ever seen, it’s like going into the mind of another person, and experiencing this conciseness change, from normal to a full-on DMT trip, to a near death experience an beyond. The photography and artistic design are absolutely incredible, I have no idea how most of the scenes were shot.
This one is a real beauty!
The THX demo trailer needs not a word to promise us “experience of a different kind”. In a way the psychedelic promise was always present in the way new media and new media technology did connect with our daily lives. It expected us to be longing for “new experience”, “new” in a way you could not have had it before. New technology did kind of guarantee you that it wouldn’t be just more of the “same old”. “New ways of seeing”, “new ways of hearing”! once you had to get lost trying to return home to your wife from a defeated troy, had to keep silent while your friends were eaten by a cyclops and stuff like that before you finally saw things with different eyes. But suddenly in the second half of the 20th century all you had to do was “tune in turn on and drop out.” The subject had changed. Experience had changed, indeed.
Everything is alive! all you ever need is different eyes.
I remembered the idea Terrence Mckenna expressed, about mainstream culture becoming psychedelic because it’s creators are directly influenced by the psychedelic experience, when I saw Jackson’s “Lovely Bones”. Jackson’s most popular films -the Lord Of The Rings series, take place in a fantasy world, and have an according design that is 100% fairytale illustration. the “psychedelic” manifestations in his work are therefor found in other films, where a realistic happening is suddenly juxtaposed with a completely surreal and colorful delirium. this transition from a more or less realistic cinematic expression to a visually packed fantastic one, has more in common with the use of psychedelic drugs than a film that is fantastic from beginning to end. I believe Jackson chose to use visuals that are characteristic of psychedelic trips (ie – the melting background, brighr colors, radiant objects, flying and the intensification of Nature) in places where he wants to depict a liminal state – between life and death, between sanity and psychosis, childhood and adulthood.
(Directed and written by: JULIE TAYMOR, 2007)
At once gritty, whimsical and highly theatrical, Revolution Studios’ Across the Universe is an original movie musical springing from the imagination of renowned director Julie Taymor (Frida, Titus, and the Broadway smash hit musical “The Lion King”) and writers Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais (The Commitments).
A love story set against the backdrop of the 1960s amid the turbulent years of anti-war protest, mind exploration and rock ‘n roll, the film moves from the dockyards of Liverpool to the creative psychedelia of Greenwich Village, from the riot-torn streets of Detroit to the killing fields of Vietnam. The star-crossed lovers, Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), along with a small group of friends and musicians, are swept up into the emerging anti-war and counterculture movements, with “Dr. Robert” (Bono) and “Mr. Kite” (Eddie Izzard) as their guides. Tumultuous forces outside their control ultimately tear the young lovers apart, forcing Jude and Lucy – against all odds – to find their own way back to each other.
Frank Zappa’s 1971 feature film (93 minutes, directed with Tony Palmer) is not for the week at heart: it’s super intensive, slapstick psychedelia with a hardly noticeable plot line to follow – something about a band on an endless crazy tour. Zappa fans love it, to judge from imdb message boards, while the rest render it “unwatchable”; still no one claims to understand it.
200 motels features The Mothers Of Invention (Zappa himself plays a side role as a musician in the band), animation by Charles Swenson, Kieth Moon in drag as a Nun, and Ringo Star as Larry The Dwarf, who pretends to be Frank Zappa.
“Blueberry”, A.K.A “Renegade” (2004) is one of the most psychedelic films I’ve ever seen. It is a rare film which has a trip-like feeling from beginning to end.
This sequence, portraying an Ayahuasca experience undergone by the hero Vincent Cassel near the end of the movie, is one of the most breathtaking depictions of the psychedelic experience ever created. Lo and behold.
Peter Parks was behind the spectacular visual effects of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. A Wired article gives more details about the effects work.
Son Chris has followed in his father’s footsteps and together they run a company called Image Quest 3D. More examples in the links and in this showreel by Chris:
some people can’t fall asleep. falling asleep can be the hardest thing to do. most of us have experienced this for a period..
but is falling asleep actually something you do? something you can achieve or fail at? you can not force it – it’s not a matter of will. it’s more like a habbit. (it’s more like a rabbit).
sleep is something that has to be given to us.
when we are falling asleep – falling like Alice in that rabbit hole – we can never put our fingers on it, like: there, you see, the border to sleep. we know, we fell asleep, we know we woke from sleep, but we can never say where or when exactly. this is a fundamental discrepancy of knowledge and experience. we can never say: now!, this is it. just like we know we were born, we know we shall die, but we will never experience it. it’s the limit of ego, the limit of selfconsciousness and certainty. since “i” (ego) can never say it in the present. so this is the limit of the certainty of the ego, that seemed so complete in its cogito or dubito. we never have our death, never have our birth, never have sleep. it is given to us by the others.
sleep transcends consciousness.
sleep is beyond sovereignty.
since the metaphysical entities no longer have the power to make our lifes understandable to us, we hardly have more than consistency to tell us what is real. and sleep – like birth and death – is inconsistency to the absoluteness of consciousness.
as you fall asleep, you become one with the room around you.
how are sleep and psychedelic culture connected?
alice’s story is one of a young girl dozing off in the hot afternoon and it is a common reference point for 20th century psychedelic culture. and let’s not forget all the eating of mushrooms and.. the caterpillar.
but this is merely pointing at a surface.
(alice in wonderland is an exploration into symbolic logics. so it might have something to do with language.)
we can state the similarity of dreams and trips, but what we need is a question that leads us further.
“couriouser and couriouser”
the question is important when we want to talk about (and experiment with) expanding consciousness – or consciousness-expanding practices and substances. the question is: where do we expand our consciousness to? what does this mean or what could it possibly mean?
are we all alone in our trips, like we are in sleep and death? or is it the other way around? is birth, death and sleep, is what transcends the limits of ego “community”: that what is given to us by others only?
but what could “be there” beyond consciousness, what could be there but consciousness to expand to? when we can expand our consciousness to it, how would it be any different from the consciousness we were so eagar to transcend in its absoluteness?
not being able to sleep, not being able to let go is not so trivial a matter. when we have only consistency to go by, who or what guaranties, we will find it again, once we let go?
what we can lose is the “world”, identity.
so that “world” is what we win, when we wake again.
if inconsistency is not dared, consistency can not show, since there is no substance to it, but what is found again.
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