Tripping on Film

Pisters will talk about the differences between American East Coast and West Coast Avantgarde Cinema in the 1960s, and how this resulted in differing forms of expanded consciousness and ‘expanded cinema’: film that transcends the (material) boundaries and limitations of the dramaturgical/linear narrative and embraces new forms of and techniques for presentation.

Expanded consciousness

She will refer in this to the standard work ‘Expanded Cinema’ (1970) by Gene Youngblood, in which ‘expanded’ refers principally to the state of expanded consciousness that this form of cinema, video and mixed media is able to evoke. Youngblood, a respected theoretician and scholar in the field of experimental film and video art, was one of the first to recognise the power of images and sound to explore new areas of human consciousness.

The desire to free yourself from regular, profit-oriented commercial media and give free reign to the imagination was also found in the rebellious counterculture movement of the sixties, within which the use of psychedelics was a means of disrupting the established order.

Illustrated by clips from experimental films from the sixties, Pisters will show how film can be experienced as a liberating trip; her selection includes examples of Jordan Belson’s ‘abstract cosmic cinema’ (Allure, 1961) as well as work from female experimental filmmakers such as Shirley Clarke and Carolee Schneemann.

Renewed interest

The second part of the lecture deals with the renewed interest in psychedelics among the present generation of artists, academics and proponents of alternative lifestyles.

For example, in psychiatry we are seeing renewed interest in the beneficial effects of psychotropic substances, and in contemporary art and culture, Pisters argues, we can see an explosion of both popular and experimental expressions through film and art that draw us into the experience of the trip. Examples include Ben Russell’s Trypps (2005-2020), Sean Price William’s The Sweet East (2023) and the short experimental film Surviving You, Always (2020) by Morgan Quaintance.

Patricia Pisters is professor of film at the Media Studies department of the University of Amsterdam. She recently edited a special issue for Deleuze and Guattarie Studies and the psychedelic revival. She is the author of New Blood in Contemporary Cinema on female directors of the horror genre. And of Filming for the Future on the films of Louis van Gasteren.