Trance Cinema

The history of avant-garde cinema teaches us that there are countless ways to expand the possibilities of the medium of film. One of these is to use camera and film to, for example, evoke ancestral spirits and mythical experiences.

Ecstatic sensations

To get to grips with the ritual processes of trance-cinema, in her lecture Biolchini will first look back to the past, to the tradition of anthropological-ethnographic (documentary) film and surrealist cinema. She will show clips from works including Trance and Dance in Bali (Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, 1952) and Divine Horseman (1954) by Maya Deren.

We see dancers in trance, possessed by spirits, who bring the audience into direct contact with ecstatic sensations, making the camera itself into a ‘magical object’ in the recording of the ritual carried out. After all, this has the ability to speed up or slow down images, film from different angles and even become part of an experience that can hardly be fathomed by the rational mind.

Breaking with the dominant visual culture

The second part of the lecture brings us into the present, and in particular the aesthetic practice of the Colectivo Los Ingrávidos from Mexico, an audiovisual collective from Tehuacán, founded in 2012 during a turbulent period of protest against the policies of the governing PRI party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).

The members of the collective work with digital and analogue resources (16mm, Super8) and are inspired by historical avant-garde movements. With their films, the members wish to break with the audiovisual grammar and ideology of the dominant, western visual culture.

Act of resistance

Biolchini will show how the Collective combines the scope of the spiritual and political in short films such as Coyolxauhqui (2017), Copalli (2022) and Xiuhtecuhtl (2023), in which ancestral goddesses and gods are evoked from the spirit world as an act of resistance against the violence of current patriarchal-colonial systems of oppression. The lecture also includes Tierra en Trance (Los Ingrávidos, 2022, 38’), a filmic-ritualistic invitation to observe the environment differently.

Erica Biolchini is a lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. In her research, she investigates how relational art in her experiential rituals activates 'psychedelic' ways of perceiving.