Psychedelia & Cinema: Film Screening Series @ BAMPFA
Organized with the support of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Psychedelia & Cinema presents a kaleidoscopic array of movies that explore expanded or enhanced consciousness, psychedelic experiences, and numinous encounters. Realized through psychoactive substances, meditation, deprivation, or other means, these experiences have been an important element of many cultures for millennia and have more recently become the object of scientific study, as well as being used for both therapy and recreation. Cinema, the “Seventh Art,” is uniquely suited to explore altered and non-ordinary states of consciousness. From cinema’s earliest flickers to the present day, filmmakers have used techniques from montage to multiple exposures, lens distortion to animation and CGI, to create mystical visions and ecstatic journeys into inner and outer space.
Psychedelia & Cinema includes Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967), in which a television director tries LSD to make sense of his life. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021) explores the blurred boundaries between the natural world and the spirit realm, collective traumas, memories, and dreams. Also included in the series are documentarian Christine Turner’s chronicle of the quest of composer/philosopher Sun Ra to use music to tap into cosmic consciousness as a means for liberation, and Nathaniel Dorsky’s cinematic trip into the universe of 16mm film emulsion. The series kicks off with Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s portrait of scientist and psychonaut John Lilly, whose lifelong pursuit to understand the mysteries of the mind—via dolphins, isolation tanks, and LSD—is inextricably woven into the culture and counterculture of the twentieth century and beyond.
—Kate MacKay, Film Curator
Upcoming Films
Roger Corman
United States, 1967
New 35mm Archival Print
Thursday, March 5, 7 PM
Introduced by Michael Silver
From a screenplay by Jack Nicholson, with psychedelic montages by Dennis Jakob, The Trip features Peter Fonda as a television commercial director who tries LSD to make sense of his life. New 35mm made by the Academy Film Archive with support from Roger Corman, Julie Corman and Jon Davison. With The Psychedelic Experience.
Ciro Guerra
Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, 2015
Saturday, March 7, 7 PM
Introduced by Dr. Sylvestre Quevedo
Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last of his people, assists two scientists, forty years apart, in their quest to find the elusive psychedelic yakruna plant. “A lament for all the lost plants and peoples of the world” (Jessica Kiang, The Playlist).
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Luminous Procuress
Saturday, March 14, 3 PM
Introduced by Maria Silk
With performances by the glamorous guests of a 1953 Hollywood “come as your madness” party, Kenneth Anger’s film is a trippy ritualistic bacchanal. With Steven Arnold’s delirious vision of consciousness unbounded by gender or desire, featuring The Cockettes.
Stanley Kubrick
United States, United Kingdom, 1968
Thursday, March 19, 7 PM
The film 2001 employs a widescreen, epic format for metaphysical use. It was conceived less as a science fiction narrative than as an experience in space and time, re-creating the dimensions of outer space by taking us beyond deep focus into infinite focus. With Jordan Belson’s Allures.
SOLD OUT
Christine Turner
United States, 2025
Saturday, March 21, 4 PM
Introduced by Ayize Jama-Everett
Christine Turner’s portrait of an artist as a cultural astronaut, boldly going where no one has gone before or since, explores the lasting legacy of Sun Ra’s mind-blowing music and philosophy.
John Coney
United States, 1974
Saturday, March 21, 7 PM
Introduced by Ayize Jama-Everett
Inspired by Sun Ra’s 1971 UC Berkeley course The Black Man in the Cosmosand filmed around the Bay Area, Space Is the Place “takes to heart Sun Ra’s cosmic philosophy of music as a liberating force” (Steve Seid).
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Mexico, 1973
Also screens on Sunday, May 10 (without an introduction).
Wednesday, March 25, 7 PM
Introduced by Jen Holmberg
One man’s trip toward enlightened consciousness, The Holy Mountain’s deeply sacrilegious and antimilitaristic imagery remains as beautiful and intriguing today as when it first scandalized audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973. With Bruce Conner’s Looking for Mushrooms.
Saturday, March 28, 4 PM
Nathaniel Dorsky in Person
Nathaniel Dorsky reveals a world alive with the organic deterioration of film itself, in outdated, unexposed, processed 16mm film stock, the essence of cinema in its before-image, preconceptual purity. Bruce Baillie explores cinema and consciousness in the episodic self-portrait Quick Billy.
Richard Linklater
United States, 2006
Friday, April 3, 7 PM
Introduced by Erik Davis
Richard Linklater’s woozy rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel is a cop story infused with metaphysical questions about addiction, the nature of the mind and the self, and their destruction, embedded in a corporate surveillance thriller. With Coffee (1977) by Dorothy Wiley.
Sunday, April 5, 1 PM
Annie MacDonell in Person
Annie MacDonell and Maïder Fortuné bring a feminist perspective to the consideration of consciousness-expanding practices through drugs and/or art, work, and life. With works by Lillian Schwartz, Ben Russell, and Gunvor Nelson.
Jessica Beshir
Ethiopia, United States, Qatar, 2021
Wednesday, April 8, 7 PM
Jessica Beshir and shah noor hussein in Conversation
“A nonfiction work of sensory immersion that’s part anthropology, part poetry” (Hollywood Reporter), the stunning Faya dayi explores the khat trade that dominates rural Ethiopia, circling between youths with little hope and their elders, who are dependent on the dream state the leaf creates.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Colombia, Mexico, France, UK, Thailand, Germany, China, Switzerland, 2021
Thursday, May 7, 7 PM
Set in Colombia and starring Tilda Swinton, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first feature film made outside of Thailand explores the blurred boundaries between the natural world and the spirit realm, and the way that collective traumas reemerge as memories and dreams.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Mexico, 1973
Also screens on Wednesday, March 25 (with an introduction by Jen Holmberg).
Sunday, May 10, 7 PM
One man’s trip toward enlightened consciousness, The Holy Mountain’s deeply sacrilegious and antimilitaristic imagery remains as beautiful and intriguing today as when it first scandalized audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973. With Bruce Conner’s Looking for Mushrooms.