Changing Your Head: A Short Trip Through Psychedelic Cinema
“I can not know if the infinite jungle has begun in me the process that drove so many others to incurable madness. If this is the case, I can only ask for your forgiveness and understanding, for I cannot find the words to express the beauty and splendour to which I bore witness during those magical hours. I know only that I returned a different man.”- Theodore of Martius, Amazon, 1909.
Psychedelic (literally, “mind-manifesting”) is a term that refers to the agents of psychedelia, be it drugs, music, clothes, art, literature or philosophy. According to Wikipedia, “psychedelics tend to qualitatively alter ordinary conscious experience. Whereas stimulants cause energised feelings and opioids and barbiturates drugs produce a relaxed euphoric state, the psychedelic experience is often compared to non-ordinary forms of consciousness such as trance, meditation, yoga, religious ecstasy, dreaming and even near-death experiences.” From these experiences a vast amount of psychedelic culture has been created and shared by people all over the world. Included in this cultural movement from the 20th century is cinema and the moving image of film.
I divide psychedelic film into two conceptual modes: visual and narrative. The visual is composed of films that alter ordinary conscious experience through images. Narrative psychedelic films do the same but through the progression of time and events as stories. A visual psychedelic film would be one that shows images, tones or lights that alter perception, emotions or awareness in some way. It could even be argued that the great non-narrative films by Godfrey Reggio; Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), along with Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1993) are psychedelic films, even though the imagery they present is hyperrealistic. Perspective, colour and point of view are all challenged in these beautiful films. Narrative psychedelic cinema are the films that convey stories or articulate change in time and space according to various forms of narrative arc and through the use of specific narrative devices (e.g. characters, action, travel, quest, crisis etc.) and conceits.
The dominant image of psychedelic film comes from those works made in the time of the first mass western psychedelic culture, during the 1960s and early 1970s. These include Anglo-American films like Daisies (1966), The Trip (1967), Point Blank (1967), The Flicker (1965), Peyote Queen, (1965), Ray Gun Virus, (1966), Acid Mantra (1968), Lapis (1966), Psych-Out (1968), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968), Head (1968), Easy Rider (1969) and Zabriskie Point (1970). Some of these films do not feature actual references to psychedelic drugs, but the sense of spatiotemporal perception they create from the visual image, including perspective and point of view, replicate the psychedelic experience, or in other words, these films show “a mediatized reversibility between cinema and psychedelic drugs that was not just rhetorical, but also had a real-world influence upon the contextual effects these drugs might produce in the user.” (David Church, The Doors of Reception: Notes Toward a Psychedelic Film Investigation)
Prior to the watershed decade of the 1960s, the first films that could be called psychedelic showed visual abstraction, images that often had no basis in realism, and that challenged how we thought about space and time. Films such as The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) and Louis Brunel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) or Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) broke through established barriers that confined cinema to within the depiction of reality. This visual challenge to ordinary consciousness of course continued, with film makers such as Ira Cohen (1935–2011) creating lush visual fields of difference in films such as Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968) and onward to the present day in some of the films as I discuss below.
Even as fantasy, earlier films such as A Trip to the Moon/Le Voyage dans la Lune of 1902 attempted to show something possible. With psychedelic films the visual plane becomes a malleable medium and the perceptual categories of the viewer are challenged. The physically possible is not a criteria for the images created. Photomontage and double exposure were some of the early techniques for such challenging of visual perception through cinema. But the term ‘psychedelia’ was not coined until 1956 by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, some 13 years after the discovery of the hallucinatory properties of LSD-25 by Dr. Albert Hoffman in 1943.
Then came the 1960s and a psychedelic world of individual pleasure opened up. Prophets such as Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Richard Alpert and Michael Hollingshead spread a particular form of psychedelia to anyone who would listen. Central to the message was the idea of truth as a reward at the end of the drug experience or trip, which went on to define psychedelic cinema. The truth of psychedelics was becoming the perfect being you really are. Within this vision the Earth was subservient to the human, in a trope that had been powerful since Biblical times. This idea moved back and forward across the Atlantic Ocean as a major component of the 1960s counter culture.
The key ideas of the 1960s trans-Atlantic psychedelia can be summarised as; All things are within the human. The psychedelic was a project of the self, a ‘new’ human resulted that was ‘turned on’ and aware of the depth that exists within. In the words of poet Alan Ginsberg;
That a new kind of man has come to his bliss
to end the cold war he has borne
against his own kind flesh
since the days of the snake. — Who Be Kind To, June 8, 1965
Poem by Allen Ginsberg
Eastern mysticism mixed with psychology and the self-awareness. These classic references combined with a hotchpotch of groovy people doing groovy things via the kaleidoscope of self, and making their own insights into themselves. Much of this work on the self is heavily couched in the larger currents of human culture and sciences active at the time. Desire lay at the centre of this venture. A more full explanation of this structure can be found in the 2002 documentary series, Century of the Self, in Episode 3, “There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads; He Must Be Destroyed":
But psychedelic cinema did not stop in 1970. The ‘altered states’ of psychedelics were soon challenged as escapist artificial paradises by a material culture focused more and more on the rights of the individual to own, produce, consume and prosper as the means of expressing self identity. The end of a more deeply connected psychedelic consciousness is referenced in the final scene of the Lionsgate series MadMen, set in November 1970, where a new day promises “new ideas, a new you”.
The abandonment of transcendence in favour of refinement can be understood as a part of a larger attack by state and legal institutions on the legitimacy of psychedelic experience to provide insight into mental and spiritual states of being. A telling example of this war on consciousness was US President Richard Nixon describing LSD evangelist Timothy Leary as “the most dangerous man in America,” because “Nixon needed a poster child — someone to vilify in his burgeoning war on drugs. But it really was a matter of misdirection” to obtain a Good Guy/Bad Guy narrative for Nixon. At this time, in the period roughly from 1965–1972, commercial films were produced that depicted the journey into self and the overthrow of conditioning with the installing of a new and “better” self.
The Trip (1967) by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper is a classic example of the psychedelic as individual experience. It is a mirroring experience, whereby the person ‘tripping’ encounters dimensions of their own awareness, often in abstract forms. This basic formula is repeated many times throughout all these films, as means for questioning the nature of self. This is summarised in The Trip as “you’re one with and part of an ever expanding, loving, joyful, glorious and harmonious universe” (said by Denise Hopper’s character). This approach can be traced back to the The Psychedelic Experience ~ A manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert from 1964. Leary explains “that awareness can expand beyond the range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences that separate people”. However within this endless expansion, the “You” remains central to the psychedelic experience at all times. It is not difficult to see the cultural linkages between the words of Leary, Metzner and Alpert and the self-improvement movement that flourished in the 1970s.
In the projections of the first mass wave of psychedelic cinema there still remains a ‘you’ amidst the endless expanse of the universe. An alternative to this fixed central point did however begin to emerge in film, only coinciding with the first human space flights, and with a corresponding understanding that humanity is nothing in the cosmic scope of things. Of course, the fixed central point of supreme human awareness continued in psychedelic cinema, but the shift away from it was only first pre-empted by the genius of Stanley Kubrick.
In 1968 Stanley Kubrick made 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film has very little dialogue but is a visual extravaganza, reminiscent in some ways of the experiments of the first non-realist films. But by moving from narrative to montage, the visual image externalised and became the primary point of meaning production. The individual was thus no longer the central point of observation and awareness in a psychedelic film.
Coincidentally, psychedelic music, perhaps the most interior of art forms, faded from the popular imagination with the start of the 1970s. The focus shifted to the electronic experiments and exotic forms that can be found in the so-called Krautrock groups and the stadium extravaganzas by Pink Floyd. However, film remained a major site of experimentation throughout the 1970s, with psychedelic imagery and themes — representing or even provoking non-ordinary forms of consciousness. Films such as Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973) are psychedelic classics of the period.
Following the 1970s something changed with the depiction of the psychedelic state on film. The dichotomy that created the self according to psychedelic cinema; a truth principle of a self in what is ultimately a benevolent universe versus material consciousness and social expectations, gave way to a form of sacred psychology in the 1980s and 90s. This new image of the person having a psychedelic experience is no longer in conflict with particular dimensions of their own self. Rather they cease being just a self or an interior that can be explored, and instead join with something greater that is located outside their own personal sense of awareness. In this way, personality ceases and larger concerns or entities take the foreground. Along the way the society, with its laws, expectations, and norms gives way to a larger consciousness which in some ways can be traced back to the same forces that produced the first wave of mass psychedelic culture. Contemporary psychedelic films that feature this erasure of self include Enter the Void (2009), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), A Field in England (2013) and The Embrace of the Serpent (2015).
In Only Lovers Left Alive the character Eve notices a few small Fly Agaric, or amanita muscaria mushrooms growing in the back yard of Adam’s factory loft (the biblical analogy is obvious). The mushrooms have been used in religious practices for their hallucinogenic properties, especially in Siberia, according to Peter T. Furst’s book “Hallucinogens and Culture” (Chandler & Sharp, 1976). Eve is quite surprised and excited by their presence and asks “Have you seen these?!” A long shot of the mushrooms follows as the two discuss why they are popping up out of season. Adam speculates that, like the energy-generating antennae he had built for his house, the mushrooms were receiving some kind of signals from the environment. This reference to ‘the environment’ can be tied to a central motif of the film; the flight from America, back to the old world (Morocco). Eve asks “How could you have lived for so long and still not get it”. This is a question for us all. At this point in psychedelic cinema we are shown what ‘It’ is.
At first Enter the Void (2009) appears to be a POV account of the short life of the main protagonist, Oscar. But actually Oscar barely features and we only see his face twice in a mirror. The film uses the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structuring device, like Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience. The other strong narrative device in Enter the Void are the colourful visual abstractions, which often resemble magnified anatomical structures; nerve cells, a cervix and uterus during sexual reproduction and blood vessels are examples, filling the screen or with the camera moving through them. The main assumption drawn from this structure is that the character of Oscar is not a complete autonomous self, but is the product of the meetings, places, processes, relationships, chemicals and actions that he experiences in the film. We are not, according to this rationale, autonomous selves, capable of free will, but we are a multitude brought into time and space only by contexts and choices. William Brown and David Fleming argue that
“Enter the Void suggests a cinema that emphasises the related nature of all things, a related nature that we can see by being ‘beside oneself’, a process that cinema itself helps us to achieve. That is, cinema allows to become ‘spaced out’ and to ‘unbecome’ (to challenge our fixity of being)” (p124).
Enter the Void is a part of a larger discourse, in which a concept of the Self exists that challenges the notions of western individual identity that have been dominant since the Enlightenment. The next contemporary psychedelic film discussed here does this too, but with a narrative set in a time before the rise of such individuality.
A Field in England is an allegorical film set in during the mid-17th century English Civil War. Four deserters; 3 soldiers and an assistant to a commander, escape a battle through a hedge and flee into a field where they decide to go to a nearby alehouse. In the field they find mushrooms, eating them to alleviate their hunger, except for the assistant to the commander for he is fasting. What then follows is a hallucinatory series of events premised on the idea there is a treasure in the field. It is easy to see the allegory between a life of service, and the irrelevancy of duty in a world of infinite magical potential. But Power intrudes often, as the four are soon joined by the magician O’Neil.
As they attempt to find the treasure, Cutler (the Everyman character) repeats over and over again as he digs; “I am my own man!”. The irony is that he digs in the service of the demonic O’Neil and as he and the other protagonists cut into the landscape it swallows them, and the violence increases. “If you do not cease, we may be blasted by an ill planet.” says Whitehead to O’Neil at a point of building narrative tensions. The field is the star of this film, with its own voice played by Sara Dee. The field becomes a universe of psychedelic awareness. This universe is completed when Whitehead (possibly a reference Alfred North Whitehead 1861–1947) to consumes mushrooms and the power of nature seems to open up through the field . But the power and new awareness of it do not make the characters more themselves in understanding or in action. Instead, the terrifying insights destroy who they believe themselves to be as they lie prone and filthy in a field in England.
The landscape of A Field in England is one of human crisis. The characters are neither bettered nor shown truth in their encounter with the psychedelic mushrooms. From their ingestion come terrifying and confusing images and bodily experiences (constipation, vomiting, cramps, fits, visions and uncontrollable dance). The resulting crisis and violence seem to contradict something the icon of the first wave of psychedelia Ken Kesey said;
“These drugs were opening a door to new landscapes. Once you through that door and you look out into to this vast room with all these windows onto new vistas your become tremendously excited so you do what you can do and explore it because you look around and you see there were not human footprints on this new landscape” — Ken Kesey
Human footprints are irrelevant in the 21st Century psychedelic landscape. No film captures this better than Ciro Guerra’s The Embrace of the Serpent (2015), which on the surface presents the hell on earth that is colonial occupation (with comparisons to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now). But Guerra’s film also proposes a revised relationship with the earth via the psychedelic. The central motif of The Embrace of the Serpent is a journey taken by two different characters (the ethnobotanists Theo and Evan, both based on actual people — ethnobotanist Theodor von Martius and scientist Richard Evans Schultes) through the Amazonian jungle at different times searching for a mythical sacred plant called Yakruna that can heal by giving dreams or visions.
Upon arrival the European anthropologist Theo is told by the shaman Karamakate, “The jungle is fragile and if you strike her, she will strike back,” and thus begins his teaching. The lessons begin with the failings of the colonialists and their culture, in the words of Karamakate, “Ants like money”. The whites do not dream in the sense of it being a gateway to the spirit world and thus a guide. The shaman is concerned and pitying of the whites, who he understands from a dream; “I had a dream once of a white spirit. he was sick, and the only way he could heal was by learning to dream. but he couldn’t”. Both Theo and Evan are sick, physically, mentally and spiritually. Neither of them dream. In order to restore Theo enough for the journey the younger Karamakate administers a snuff through a tube up the nose. It maintains Theo and he must follow a strict diet and actions while receiving the medicine.
The younger Karamakate is defiant to the point of arrogance, but he is acutely aware of the colonial war that surrounds him. His own people have been wiped out and he spent a part of his childhood in a cruel Catholic mission, assigned to raise the orphans of those murdered by the rubber barons. Karamakate is known as The World Mover, he is recognised as a powerful shaman, but is also feared and avoided. The subsequent story, of the two interwoven periods and vulnerable but corrupting white intruders is an account that rests upon pictures, memories, reality and objects — what are they and what do they mean? Through the film a number of rationalist conceptions of the self are inverted according to the psychedelic shamanism of Karamakate and the jungle which is his home.
The older Karamakate believes himself to be a chullachaki or chullachaqui (Spanish form), a Quechua word for “one-footed”, from chulla or ch’ulla = single, odd, unpaired, asymmetric, chaki = foot. He tells Evan that we all have a chullachaqui, a double who follows us through life, but it is an empty and hollow figure and has no memory. As a chullachaqui he has lost his power, and is uncertain as a cosmological twin of the forest. He is retouching a large rock painting when Evan meets him, but he says he is not sure what the diagrams mean anymore. Evan tells him what one means after consulting Theo’s book which he carries with him, as it shows the location of The God’s Workshop, a large mountain, and where the Yakruna grows. Intellect as embodied by Evan has thus returned to the source, and seeks its wisdom again.
Karamakate travels with Theo and Evan along the river and in these journeys they learn of each other. Karamakate believes the white men are crazy, living only in images and their intellects. He instead believes “Knowledge belongs to all” and that emotions should not be so controlled or selective; for example when Karamakate jokes about the words Theo writes home to his wife it suggests there is a stunted side to western concepts of love, asking “when you go back will you express your affection to me too”. To move along the river is to become one with it, and paddling the canoe “the river can tell you where to row”. For the shaman every plant, every flower and every tree is full of wisdom. The knowledge like feelings are not to be corralled off, but they are for everyone who is willing to listen.
The dualistic mind (a perceived separation between self and other, drawn from the idea that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical) is challenged by the visions and stories of Karamakate. The old shaman tells Evan, “Your things will only lead to madness and death” spurred by the realisation that the canoe they are traveling in is overloaded with what he considers useless objects. For the scientists Karamakate is a primitive but authentic person living in the jungle who is in touch with all things around him through his dreams and the knowledge he has of shamanizing and medicinal plants, which communicate with people. He asks us, himself and Theo, “Where are the chants that mothers used to sing to their babies?” He knows his world is dying, and unless something changes it will be lost. The only chance there seems to be for him is with the sacred plants and their psychedelic properties. “This is the last yakruna plant in the world. We have to become one with it” he tells Evan. This potential union with the plant is the union with the world.
But there is a warning in The Embrace of the Serpent. The dangers of the dualistic and ego based reality are first suggested by the presence of photography in the research of Theo and Evan. The photo is described by Evan to Karamakate as “a memory, a moment that passed,” the implications of which are far reaching. By living within images, and seeing the world through the knowledge they represent, time becomes linear and finite, as the past recedes from us we struggle to maintain a relationship with the future through the present, and at the same time are forced to work, building for a ‘better’ state of being. The fissure that is opened by the photograph, as a remnant, a moment that has passed, separates off whatever is in the image (in the above example, Karamakate himself) and sends it backwards into a receding, almost dying world. The cycle of renewal, that has defined the life of the shaman, and of his relationship to the jungle, is thus destroyed by the creation of material memories in the form of photographs.
There are two stark images in the film that indicate the madness of this never ending work for the future that never arrives. The first is when Theo can no longer tolerate the hold Karamakate has over him through the treatment he provides and the rules it entails. Theo breaks down and decides to eat fish, spearing one whilst in a near hysterical state. He screams at Karamakate, “The river is full of fishes. We cannot possibly end them!”. But Theo fails to understand the interrelationships between the river and the fishes. He eats the fish raw and collapses soon afterwards into a catatonic seizure. By eating the fish he asserts himself over nature, not as a stand of logic against the chaos, but simply as a person who wants something. This violent action encapsulates that which our own society has failed to recognized, with the produce of the earth separated from the systems that provide it.
Secondly, when Evan and Karamakate return to the mission station they find a world gone mad. In the earlier journey there had been disagreement and violence between Theo and Karamakate and the mission over the treatment of the orphans there by the ageing Catholic monk. When Evan and Karamakate arrive the mission is now the site of a cult, where Christian ideals have mutated into a violent hallucinatory experience of flesh, desire and punishment. The leader of the cult, the self-deified Jesus-figure screams at his visitors “The only thing sacred in this jungle is me!” and they subsequently conclude they have arrived at “the worst of both worlds”. The church, the flogging block and the stocks of the earlier visit have mutated into an entire philosophy and a way of organising a large group of people. This horror is the new society born of colonialism and ideology.
The Embrace of the Serpent ends with a hallucinogenic vision of the forest and the river that runs through it. Evan takes the medicine of the yakruna and from a first person point of view we hear the chant and rattles and the sky becomes our blanket. We fly high over the jungle and are returned to the youth of the shaman Karamakate as he explodes into the starry sky and the endless universe. The geometric patterns return, the circles, spirals, stars and lines that are so often associates with early art. “This is the Medora caapi,” Karamakate tells Eva prior to ingestion, “The most powerful of all. It existed before creation, before the snake descended. It will take you to see her. She is enormous, fearsome. But you must not fear it. You must let her embrace you. Her embrace will take you to ancient places, where life doesn’t exist, not even its embryo.” Without life there can only be awareness and the union with all things. This return to ‘ancient places’ destroys linear time, and returns the subject to Alan Ginsberg’s ‘days of the snake’ quoted above, an Adam and Eve state referenced also in Only Lovers Left Alive.
The scientist Evan awakes from his trip atop the mountain called The Workshop of the Gods and Karamakate is gone. He paddles out and the final scene is of him in a shimmering butterfly cloud by the river. It is thus suggested that he has become one with the spirit of the forest.
In Amazonian mythology, extraterrestrial beings descended from the Milky Way, journeying to the earth on a gigantic anaconda snake. They landed in the ocean and traveled into the Amazon, stopping at communities where people existed, leaving these pilots behind who would explain to each community the rules of how to live on earth: how to harvest, fish, and hunt. Then they regrouped and went back to the Milky Way, leaving behind the anaconda, which became the river. The wrinkled skin of the serpent became the waterfalls.
They also left behind a few presents, including coca, the sacred plant; tobacco, which is also another kind of sacred plant; and yagé, the equivalent of ayahuasca, which is what you use to communicate with them in case you have a question or a doubt about how to exist in the world. When you use yagé, the serpent descends again from the Milky Way and embraces you. That embrace takes you to faraway places; to the beginning where life doesn’t even exist; to a place where you can see the world in a different way. I hope that’s what the film means to the audience. — Ciro Guerra
The moon landing of 1969 happened 50 years ago and 5 years after Ken Kesey led his Merry Pranksters across the country on their acid-filled odyssey. The moon landing delivered a “new landscape’, but it also provided a new window to the old one — with the famous ‘Earth Rise’ shot we are looking back to planet Earth from the barren moon, and Tellus suddenly appears as it is; alone and beautiful. From this visual breakthrough a new awareness of ourselves as a species was born. Earth is us. It is all we are. There is nothing else. It is everything. This is what psychedelics can teach us. Cinema is an important part of this developing culture.
