"A real trip," read one of the promotional taglines for Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, 2001 was just one of a long lineage in psychedelic films that intentionally or unintentionally were a joy to watch under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. The genre also includes acid westerns, stroboscopic cut-ups, and a wide array of mainstream flicks like Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland. To celebrate that heady history, Haden Guest, director of Harvard University's Film Archive, has curated a Psychedelic Cinema film series featuring, yep, 2001, but also lesser-known greats films for real heads. From Jane Hu's interview with Guest in UC Berkeley's The Microdose:
What was your vision for this series?
This idea of looking at cinema through the lens of psychedelics — historically, culturally, and in terms of film form and language — is a really rich topic. My co-curator Alex Vasile and I wanted to think and look at different so-called genres within psychedelic cinema. There are films that deal with psychedelics as a topic; ones that explore the counterculture role of psychedelics. And then there are films that work within an avant garde mode, making more abstract films, where the avant garde film itself is a kind of drug; these films have a cosmic quality to them, which creates a lush, immersive experience, a rush of images with powerful music – its rhythms and repetitions create a kind of hallucinatory effect[…]
One of the genres you include in this series is the acid western — what is an acid western?
The western is fascinating as an American film genre. Its end is constantly being announced; some of the first western films represent the so-called end of the "frontier," which is a charged thing. And as a genre, the western is creatively reinterpreted throughout history. The subgenre acid Western is a great example of that, where you have a reinterpretation in which the Western world enters into strange, unreal landscapes that might lend itself to a psychedelic or hallucinatory experience. The film El Topo is the most extreme; it's just full-out surrealist. The narrative itself is completely freeform and its images are just so bizarre, over-the-top. Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director, liked the occult, so there's a kind of dark ritual that governs his films.
He was a Chilean working in Mexico to shoot that film, so we also included an American acid western, a great film called The Shooting, by the late, great Monte Hellman and written by Carole Eastman under a pseudonym. She also wrote Five Easy Pieces, among other great, great films. It's a much more leaned down film, and yet it has the same dark tone; as the film goes on, the characters are going into a bleaker and bleaker landscape, a punishing desert. It's as if they're entering into this whole different state of mind, with no coordinates or horizon lines that make any sense.
Previously:
• LSD: new scientific study shows microdosing elevates mood and cognition
• American LSD use up 56% since 2017
• Psychedelics are 'anti-distressants'with benefits beyond treating depression
• Ancient psychedelic wisdom for modern medicine
