Protagonist Barry’s trip in Panos Cosmatos’s brilliant Beyond the Black Rainbow. The full film features sublime psychedelic aesthetics throughout. A brilliantly unsettling film.
LSD was unwittingly given to American citizens by the CIA as part of the MK ULTRA program over half a century ago. The tables are turned when FBI agent, Van Miller, is dosed by a member of Ray Donovan’s crew in the tv series of the same name. This sequence features Van Miller’s hallucination of a monkey and shifting depth perception. The elongation of a corridor using a dolly zoom is, in fact, a more interesting psychedelic aesthetic than the presence of the monkey. The rest of the episode features other hallucinatory phenomena not present in this clip.
Hi everyone, my name’s Craig Clark and I’m a second year PhD student at Northumbria University. My research is focused on psychedelic aesthetics in film and television. DPV has proven to be an incredibly useful resource in my studies and a couple of my favourite psychedelic sequences (Taking Woodstock and Mad Men) are already on the site. I’d fully recommend checking them out if you haven’t already. Given the topic of my research, I thought I’d offer to contribute to the site and so here I am!
Although I’m not studying music video, the first one I wanted to share is Jhené Aiko’s short film, The Trip, which she released in conjunction with the album of the same name. Both album and film feature strong psychedelic themes and ideation throughout. In the film, Penny (played by Aiko), takes mushrooms with her companion Dante (Ben Whalen) while driving through the desert. They take the mushrooms at the 12 minute 40 second mark. A trip sequence dominated by animated visuals ensues. The whole film has a psychedelic quality to it and is worth watching to put the trip sequence into context.
