Filmriss – Experimentalfilm als neuroaktives Trancemedium
Lecture by Ilka Becker
Media Materialities, annual conference of the Society of Media Studies (GfM), University of Cologne
27/09/2019
The German term "Filmriss" literally means "film tear," but it also serves as a metaphor for a suspension of consciousness in intoxication. The lecture takes this double meaning as a starting point for an investigation of experimental films by Henri Michaux/Eric Duvivier, Storm de Hirsch, and Bruce Conner as a neuroactive trance medium.
In the 1950s and 1960s, filmmakers, artists and psychedelics searched for anti-modern forms of knowledge in the mushroom rituals of indigenous cultures in order to develop politics of resistance and ecstasy in the footsteps of ethnomycology. Experiences with psychotropic substances, which were already attempted to be captured with media metaphors in the drug protocols of the 19th and early 20th centuries, also transformed the visual and acoustic methods of experimental film: nervous flickering and rapid cuts, kaleidoscopic effects, overwhelming color explosions and superimpositions, plus vibrating, repetitive soundtracks. Psychedelic films, however, were intended not so much to represent hallucinatory perceptions as to be neuroactive trance media themselves, leading to a transformation of everyday consciousness. The screening situation in a darkened room or in the context of a multimedia installation can thus be understood as an aesthetic experimental arrangement that is subject to only limited control. If hallucinatory perceptions were localized as neurological effects in the brain and thus in the materiality of the body, in psychedelic experimental film the materiality of the medial procedures came to the fore. Against this background, the medially induced trance is thematized as a liminal figure of artistic knowledge that escapes everyday thinking.