In 1973, film producer Arthur P. Jacobs optioned the film rights to Dune but died before a film could be developed. The option was then taken over two years later by director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who proceeded to approach, among others, Peter Gabriel, the prog rock groups Pink Floyd and Magma for some of the music, artists H. R. Giger and Jean Giraud for set and character design, Dan O’Bannon for special effects, and Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson and others for the cast.
Frank Herbert traveled to Europe in 1976 to find that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky’s script would result in a 14-hour movie (“It was the size of a phonebook”, Herbert later recalled). Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship. The project ultimately stalled for financial reasons. The film rights lapsed until 1982, when they were purchased by Italian filmmaker Dino DeLaurentiis, who eventually released the 1984 film Dune, directed by David Lynch.
For you German psychonauts… An amazing film about the oneness which vibrates in us all, and the unity of all existence according to modern day science and to various mystical theories. Beautiful.
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.
“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 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.
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!
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…
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 !
2012 was a very good year for psychedelic video, which is not surprising. The revolution in the means of video production and dissemination which occurred in recent years through the introduction of evermore powerful computers and the appearance of YouTube have led us to a point where more and more psychedelic videos are produced and disseminated each year. When you combine this with the ongoing assimilation of psychedelic aesthetics into mainstream media you get a year which was full of delicious psychedelic treats. Below are some of the videos we liked best in 2012 followed by personal selections made by the contributors of the DPV.
Psychedelic Music Clips
In 2012 psychedelic aesthetics kept penetrating into mainstream music videos and more specifically into hip hop. The most prominent example was of course Psy’s gargantuan hit “Gangnam Style” which featured highly psychedelic glowing colors and style (and hardly needs being presented to anybody on the planet after becoming the first video on YouTube to pass the 1 billion views count).
The psychedelic style was even more explicit in Azyla Banks’s music video for the track Atlantis in which the singer explores a trippy underwater world, riding dolphins and hugging seahorses.
Baltimore rapper Rye Rye released a hyper-psychedelic version to the Vengaboys’ “Boom, Boom, Boom” with electronic mushrooms and flying carpets.
In this video, created for the Seattle experimental hip hop group Kingdom Crumbs, Toor further explores the unique animation style he presented in his earlier video “Lion in a Coma”.
Hip hop wasn’t the only place where things were happening, psychedelically speaking.
Bjork who seems always willing to incorporate psychedelic elements into her enchanting clips released a music clip to the track “Mutual Core”, Directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, an extremely talented psychedelic video artist which we will encounter again on the “Psychedelic Video Art” segment of this list.
Another psychedelic music video we liked a lot was this dreamy and hallucinated clip to the song “Even Though” by Giraffage. Created by Brendan Canty, the video takes the viewer on a trip through the Italian countryside. This is probably how Toscana looks after taking 500 micrograms…
Psychedelic Television
2012 also produced some cool psychedelic television. Perhaps the most spectacular psychedelic TV show of the year was Noel Fieldings’ hilariously psychedelic comedy show which ran on the British E4 channel. Described on the Channel 4 website as “a psychedelic character based comedy show”, the series produced some of the most amusing psychedelic comedy that we’ve seen. Below you can watch the second episode of the first season. The rest of them are also available on YouTube.
Another 2012 television gem that you wouldn’t want to miss is the Mad Men scene in which account man Roger Sterling goes on an acid trip. This was a first acid scene in a series which is considered by many to be the most impressive portrait of the sixties ever produced on film, and which now in its fifth season has finally reached 1966/1967, the height of the 1960s psychedelic era. Mad Men creator Matthew Wiener gives the acid experience a beautiful and nuanced cinematic interpretation.
Psychedelic Film
There were a bunch of very psychedelic films released in 2012. Among them Ang Lee’s deeply religious “The life of Pi” and the Disney’s deliciously colorful blockbuster “Wreck it Ralph” and the French “Holy Motors”. Meanwhile, on the DPV we were particularly impressed by two psychedelic trailers for two non-existing films.
One of these was an animation video done in the style Huichol art for an Huichol animation film which will be based on Huichol folk stories. The result was a unique and inspiring mixture of the new and the old.
The second trailer we really liked was “Jihad of Muddaib”, a fabricated trailer for a film which was never even in the making. Based on Frank Hebrert’s Dune mythology the video mixes an electronic psy track by Silver Strain with sci-fi imagery, desert mysticism, action scenes and even some 9/11 references.
Independent studio psychedelia
Some of the most psychedelic videos of 2012 were coming from independent studios which devoted their after-work hours to bombarding us with breathtaking visuals.
One of these was “I, pet goat II”, a dark apocalyptic short film created by the Canadian Independent Studio Heliofant, which is “focused on creating experimental and challenging content”. Featuring the Bush and Obama dancing around as marionettes, and Filled with references to the Illuminati, free masons and of course the 9/11, the film evoked myriad complex interpretations which sought to decipher its symbolism.
On the lighter side of things, the Argentinian art direction and motion graphics design group 2viente produced “Psychic Land” a spectacular and cheerful video that truly deserves to be called a psychedelic treat.
Psychedelic video art
Andrew Thomas Huang who also created the Bjork music clip featured above, produced a number of dazzling psychedelic videos of the past couple of years, among them Avi Buffalo’s spectacular “What’s it in for” video. However it was the Solipsist video which impressed us the most. The video which contains some of the most gripping psychedelic images we’ve seen in a long time, exhibits Huang’s unique psychedelic style to a full extent.
Amateur Mash-Up Psychedelia
Fitting to the age of web 2.0 and user created content, some of the best stuff out there in 2012 was created by web amateurs who created psychedelic video by mixing and mashing up pre-existing images and sounds into new and exciting combinations.
The psychedelic qualities which can be seen in Disney movies such as Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Fantasia or Alice in Wonderland was already discussed here on the DPV, however the cheerful way in which this video connects these Disney sequences with the track “Contact High” by Architecture in Helsinki takes them to a whole new psychedelic level.
Another mash-up video which we found highly enjoyable is this one which mixes Daft Punk, X Jay and Silent Bob.
DPV Contributors selections
DPV contributors were asked to choose their two favorite 2012 videos from the ones they featured during the past year. Here are their selections:
Boaz Yaniv
Phadroid at Black Rock City & Fatty Fatty Boom Boom:
The two videos I chose from the videos I featured on the DPV in 2012 are of Phadroid (Android Jones and his wife Phaedrana Jones) and Die Antwoord (Ninja and Yolanda). The reason I chose these videos from all the mind blowing colorful videos is that for me they represent a lot of the things I look for when I search for interesting videos to feature on the site. For me it’s not only about colors, spirals and high-tech visualization (though I do love all of that) but it’s about finding new cutting edge contemporary visionary artists. The DPV creates an archive for contemporary psychedelic art and as such it serves as a platform where the psy community worldwide can find out about psy-artists that work today. Android and Phaedrana’s shows can at last be seen by people that just cannot make it to the burning-man or to their other shows. Together they form a symbiosis of dance and visual effects that take the viewer on an exciting journey.
If Phaedrana stems from the hippie-trippy side of the psy world, Die Antwoord is a grass-root hood-psy group. Ninja and Yolanda create their unique ZEF world that includes music, fashion, dance and video. Their pop style might be misleading as they have quite a subversive message that they convey about the pop world we live in (check out their interview on YouTube to understand more of what I’m talking about). Some people challenged Die Antwoord’s authenticity as a band. I say it doesn’t matter if they even exist as a band. Die Antwoord are performance artists more than anything else. They submit themselves totally and wholeheartedly towards the ZEF salvation!
7eit
Orphic Oxtra – Skeletons Having Sex on a Tin Roof
2012 is the year that brought us the epic “Skeletons Having Sex on a Tin Roof” by the Icelandic group Orphic Oxtra. When I first posted the video it was lots of silly fun, but now at the end of the year another thing became clear: with its meme-friendly ever dancing, ever smiling plastic tiara princess (and let’s not forget its slightly curious donkey and much more curious white cat) “Skeletons Having Sex on a Tin Roof” moved a step beyond your everyday “exploding clouds of million colors”-clip and showed us what a psychedelic video in the meme-bubble bursting YouTube galaxy of 2012 had to look like.
YouTube user starwarsnerd94 suggested: “This should be a mandatory introduction video to the internet. It would let everyone know what they’re getting into.” And while you still might not be certain what you just witnessed, don’t forget to enjoy that beautiful music.
New Tokyo Ondo
Misaki Uwabo’s animation New Tokyo Ondo needs more exposure. Its style is both refined and bold, the imagery at the same time well-informed and fresh. I especially enjoyed its skillful merging of functions of cultural signs with psychedelic anti-tropes (like dissolution of boundaries or stream of consciousness non-progression) without dismissing one for the other. This non-exclusive attitude is very characteristic for the development of psychedelic aesthetics in 2012.
According to little background information I was able to gather (this side of the language barrier), New Tokyo Ondo is a “nonsense animation conceived and made from the idiom ‘it reaches’.” The way a whole swirling world is set free from the worn off detail of
an idiom expresses a lot of what could be called “psychedelic spirit”.
Babasamas
Hyperspace Visuals
As a Vj, I consider this excerpt as an good example of what telling a story should be during a show. Here is a great variation of psychedelic vjaying around “borderless” space!
Ayahusqueros
In their visions, ayahuasca shamans say they see the essences that animate living beings, the first property of which is to emit melodies. These essences are considered powerful beings, and ayahuasqueros learn their melodies by singing along. Singing like powerful beings, they learn to see like them, and this gives them knowledge. The melodies that shamans bring back from their visions are called “icaros”; they help navigate the space of ayahuasca consciousness, and can also serve as lifelines when overwhelmed by visions. A film by Stephan Crasneanscki.
Holographic Elf
Jack Fried – Sick Leave
Jake Fried put out two amazing animations in 2012 and I felt like I could have chosen either one of them (Waiting Room being the other). With Sick Leave he added color to his intense stream of consciousness style. This audiovisual outpouring is certainly not your everyday mental chatter, but fluctuates between mundane situations and archetypal visionary experiences. The visual content might be taken from myths and stories read from books, but I believe an artist can just as well base them on direct experience. Animation can act as shamanic language – there is no need to point out or name anything.
X by Max Hattler
Max Hattler has become a favorite here at DPV. X has him as director and animator with five other animators, including Tony Comley of Verse fame.
I would actually suggest watching Verse along with X and comparing the execution. The aesthetic of X is minimal wireframe, computer-generated to the extreme, but if you look at the choreography; it is practically indistinguishable from human thought particles zipping inside the mind. While being completely different from the raw technique of Jake Fried, the production does not feel at all artificial or automatic.
Clearfield
Continuum Infinitum
To me, this video materializes the enfolded dimensions which are accessed with the assistance of tryptamine hallucinogens. As if falling forward through a tunnel which turns back on itself, this looping animation is a cogent representation of altered state perception. The imagery is somewhere between ancient Mayan and Tibetan iconography, with an added biological feel; almost like an organic mandala. I look forward to seeing more from this motion-graphics artist.
Daedelus “Righteous Fists of Harmony”
This video presents elements of astral travel and lucid dreaming. The imagery which starts around the 1 minute mark is beautifully psychedelic and relays a sense of cosmic union and wonder. This is the kind of bubbling life of the universe that springs up all around us when our consciousness expands. The swirling and soaring orchestral music perfectly complements the transcendent imagery.
The Daily Psychedelic Video 