Psychoactive Cinema: Spiritual Medium
Psychoactive Cinema is an exploration of experimental film, guided by the twin lights of entheogenic awakening and yogic-meditative transformation. In this installment, we appreciate the work of cinematic necromancer Bill Morrison.
Bill Morrison (born 1965) is one of the best-known and most-acclaimed experimental filmmakers of the twenty-first century, so far. The MoMa has added eight of his films to their permanent collection, and in 2013 the Library of Congress selected his breakout masterwork, Decasia (2002), for the National Film Registry, making it the first film of this century (and the newest film at the time) to make this list of cultural significance. Morrison is his own subgenre: montages assembled from archival and ephemeral films in the process of decomposition, with soundtracks (even a live performance, if you’re lucky) by top composers and virtuosos (Michael Gordon, Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas, Michael Harrison, Maya Beiser). The primary source material for these montages is nitrate film stock, with which all movies were shot until about seventy years ago. What we call “celluloid” is technically nitrocellulose, and nitrocellulose is a close cousin to nitroglycerin, AKA gunpowder. Nitrate film is highly flammable and unstable, which is why it was replaced by acetate-based “safety film” in the early 1950s. Unless stored in ideal conditions, at low temperatures, it deteriorates quickly: the images fade as the film turns amber in color; the film strip distorts in shape as the celluloid turns gooey; the emulsion separates from the nitrocellulose base, and the surface erupts into fissures and bubbles. Rather than attempting to restore these moldering images—most of which are beyond saving, anyway—Morrison presents them untreated, and gives them a second life (or perhaps an afterlife) by assembling fragmented narratives of eerie and poignant beauty.
Light Is Calling (2004)
In The Films of Bill Morrison: Aesthetics of the Archive, Bernd Herzogenrath names Morrison as the culmination of a current within American experimental cinema which sought to make “visible and fruitful” the filmic material itself—the materiality of film as medium, which is invisible or repressed under conventional circumstances. For example, since at least the late ‘50s, filmmakers such as Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs, among many others, have been composing entire works from found, appropriated footage. Their films highlight this fact, drawing attention to the pre-existing source footage as a concrete yet pliable form of collective memory. And around the same time, Stan Brakhage experimented with film as a literal canvas, as a surface to be painted or scratched, frame by frame. He even made “collage” films, completely without a camera, by affixing various, often organic materials to Mylar filmstrips. Morrison takes this tradition a step or two further, by making time itself his collaborator, and by asking us to consider not only film’s materiality, but the temporality of the medium itself: “Film’s mythical power to ‘capture time’ merges with the tragedy that the medium film itself—as materiality—is also subjected to the vicissitudes of time” (Herzogenrath, p. 87).
Now, this idea of “making visible” must ring a bell with any psychedelic enthusiasts reading this: from the Greek, psyche + dēloun (“to make visible”), psychedelics are substances which “manifest” the mind or make it visible. It’s debatable what Humphry Osmond—who coined the term “psychedelic” in 1956—intended precisely by “mind-manifesting.” It was suggested as a more apt replacement for “psychotomimetics,” the accepted terminology at the time; Osmond recognized that these drugs had more to offer than the simple mimicry of mental illness. Other, also-ran candidates included: psychelytic (“mind-releasing”); psycherhexic (“mind bursting forth”); psychezymic (“mind-fermenting”); psychephoric (“mind-moving”); psychehormic (“mind-rousing”); and psycheplastic (“mind-molding”). Mainly, Osmond chose the term psychedelic because “it is clear, euphonious, and uncontaminated by other associations.” So perhaps it’s best not to dwell on the etymology when attempting to pinpoint what makes psychedelics special. However, it’s a good place to start, and I would like to suggest that this manifestation may be analogous to the cinematic experiments of Bill Morrison and his predecessors: psychedelics make visible the materiality of the mind, the mind as the contingent and impermanent medium of our experience. Of course, I’m not the first to suggest this. For instance, in “The Paisley Gate,” Erik Davis proposes that psychedelic experience may be just as effective as meditation, if not more so, for revealing the contingency (emptiness) and impermanence of our mental states:
There is no revelation but your own experience. And what is this experience? Submission to change, and the absolute truth of impermanence. After all, the altered states pass, obvious products of changing causes and conditions—in this case, eminently material ones [...] One of the lessons dealt by psychedelics, at least for mature aficionados, is that they disenchant the very exalted states they introduce to the psyche. Not only do drugs demostrate that such states can be generated by swallowing a pill or insufflating some noxious powder, but they invariably snatch those states away as they are metabolized and flushed from the body. Drugs are always and evidently upaya, or “means.” In contrast, the material or contingent aspect of purely “spiritual” altered states of consciousness, such as those that arise naturally in meditation, are not always so obvious, making the temptation to hold onto those states and experiences all the greater. Indeed, drugs may also have something to say to these apparently nontechnological states of consciousness that play such a profound role in deep meditation, reminding us that they too arise from causes and conditions that are material as well as karmic.
Decasia (2002)
This analogy between cinematic and psychedelic materialism, when extended to Buddhist thought and practice, has important spiritual implications: if our minds are material and contingent like film stock, nitrate or otherwise, then perhaps they are just as malleable, just as open to creative manipulation. Although it never caught on, maybe “psycheplastic” is just as apropos as “psychedelic,” after all. This much has been asserted by numerous Buddhist thinkers, that the upshot of the interrelated truths of impermanence, non-self, and conditionality or conditioned arising is a freedom to shape our minds and our characters as we see fit. We are the raw material of our own creation, as artists and artisans of the dharma. Just as the rediscovery of the materiality of film helped to usher in a golden era of experimental cinema, perhaps the pursuit of meditative insight augmented by psychedelic, entheogenic revelation will help catalyze a creative explosion of enlightened mind.
ψ संघ