Turn on, tune in, drop out—the reverberating words of Timothy Leary, symbolic leader of the US counterculture movement and the most influential spokesperson of the Sixties psychedelic scene. He popularized the use of mind-altering substances both medically and recreationally—ironically undermining their scientific investigation for decades to come.

In 1960, Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as guru Baba Ram Dass) began to explore the effects of psychotropic substances on the human mind within the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Their endeavor became known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project and involved administering drugs such as psilocybin—a hallucinogen which naturally exists in specific types of mushrooms—to volunteer subjects. Leary and Alpert would record the hallucinogen’s effects on the subjects and often participate in the experimentations themselves, believing they would gain a deeper understanding of the subject’s experience. By 1962 Harvard faculty and administrators were growing critical of Leary and Alpert’s unconventional research methods, and they were soon fired from the university. Nevertheless, they both continued their investigations into psychotropic substances and moved toward a deeper focus on LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), relocating their experimentations to a sixty-four-room mansion in Millbrook, New York—an idyllic location in a small, wealthy community—owned by Mellon heirs and siblings Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock. The Hitchcocks were familiar with Leary both professionally and personally and arranged for him to work and live in the mansion with a group of his supporters from 1963 to 1968. Within these years, the activities inside the estate devolved from semi-scholarly research into a party-oriented environment with a revolving door of eclectic visitors. Their work with LSD and other psychotropic drugs became loose and informal sessions shunned by scientists and fellow researchers.

Though LSD is now synonymous with Sixties’ drug culture, it was first synthesized in the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland by chemist Albert Hoffman in 1938. By 1947, Sandoz was manufacturing LSD for research use under the name of Delysid. Throughout the Fifties, studies surrounding LSD’s effects were performed within the US in a broad range of experiments, from alcoholism treatment to mind control. In a plot out of dystopian science fiction, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Project MKUltra—created by the infamous Sidney Gottlieb—studied the effects of high doses of LSD and other psychoactive drugs on both consenting and non-consenting human subjects in universities, hospitals, the military and prisons from 1953 through 1973. MKUltra succeeded the CIA’s Project Artichoke—also known as Project Bluebird—which officially began in 1951 and examined the use of hypnosis and chemicals including LSD to create vulnerable states in subjects with a focus on whether a person could be involuntarily made to perform assassinations. Even more disturbingly, these government-funded “Manchurian Candidate” type of projects can be seen as a continuation of earlier Nazi tests of chemical and natural substances on concentration camp prisoners with the aim of developing a truth serum. 

Along with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, writer and countercultural icon Ken Kesey happened to be one of the volunteer subjects of the MKUltra experimentations in 1959 and loosely based his 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on some of these experiences. Inspired by the mind-expanding possibilities, Kesey and his group of Merry Pranksters traveled around the US by school bus throughout 1964 and organized parties where they distributed LSD, popularizing recreational psychedelic drug use and setting the stage for the psychedelic era.

From politics, music, fashion and design to the sexual revolution, psychedelics shifted the aesthetics and the consciousness of US youth culture of the Sixties. The movement peaked with 1967’s “Summer of Love” in San Francisco. Around 100,000 hippies, beatniks, drifters and figures of the counterculture descended upon Haight-Ashbury, advocating antimaterialism, free love, spiritual enlightenment, hallucinogenic drug use, government questioning and anti-war initiatives. Their brief utopian experiment fueled myriad parties, protests, theatrical performances and, of course, historic music concerts. By the fall, area resources became overwhelmed and the gathering disbanded with a mock funeral titled Death of Hippie, striking at a now commercialized hippie culture. And by the start of the next decade, the US government declared LSD an illegal “Schedule I” substance, deeming the drug’s potential for abuse too high to allow even medical or scientific exceptions and sending it underground to thrive. Only recently have researchers been able to re-examine the medical potential of LSD in mental health and other therapies.  

This film series opens a portal onto the lasting cinematic effects of LSD and its natural counterparts. Among the many areas of society they impacted, hallucinogens also instigated a groundbreaking, vibrant period in both underground and mainstream cinema. With an aim of boosting earnings and maintaining relevance, even Hollywood films grew more radical in content and style than in previous decades. As the studio system bottomed out, psychedelics helped usher in New Hollywood and wilder methods of film production.

This film series considers not only perspective-bending cult classics of the Sixties that celebrated drugs as windows of introspection, such as Roger Corman’s hallucinogenic romp The Trip and Bob Rafelson’s Monkees musical Head—both written by Jack Nicholson—but also "acid Westerns" such as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s symbolic and subliminal work El Topo, Monte Hellman’s existential odyssey The Shooting and Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie—a metafictional follow-up to Easy Rider and critique of drug-addled utopian dreams. Italian Michelangelo Antonioni chimed in with his US-produced Zabriskie Point, focusing on the incongruous elements of the counterculture movement, while documentarians Ed Pincus and David Neuman poignantly critique the drug-induced side of hippie culture in One Step Away. Robert Altman’s 3 Women explores the blurring of reality and fiction through a hallucinatory storyline and dreamlike imagery that serve to disrupt narrative—and perhaps colonial—cohesion, giving rise to a sense of magical unknowing. Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome along with Lucifer Rising trace the decadent, occult aspects into which LSD tapped and expanded.

Though nearly all of the films in the series could be classified as “head films”—movies to watch while stoned—this selection also features films promoted as such, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was strategically marketed as “the ultimate trip,” and Alice in Wonderland (1951),  suddenly seen in an uncannily intoxicated light and re-released by Disney in 1974 with trippy ad campaigns aimed at college campuses.

Psychedelic Cinema also highlights the “film as drug” immersive approach to filmmaking in which experimental films present mesmerizing forms and sounds on screen that plunge audiences into hypnotic states of mind. James Whitney, Jordan Belson and Storm de Hirsch recreate the kaleidoscopic sensations produced by psychedelics or meditation, and Godfrey Reggio’s non-narrative opus Koyaanisqatsi activates a sense of sublime awe through the melding of repetitive and rhythmic sounds to stunning time-lapse imagery.

Rather than solely focusing on the niche genre of LSD films that more directly depict or allude to drug use and psychedelic culture, this series aims to expand the notion of psychedelic cinema through the hallucinogenic lens. With magnified sounds and visuals, the films seek to bring viewers to an altered state of mind in which the impossible becomes possible and the unexpected becomes reality. Psychedelic Cinema foregrounds legendary film scholar Tom Gunning’s concept of a “cinema of attractions” in which fantastic imagery and perspective take precedence over narrative structure, yet head films reactivate these avant garde practices and provide possibilities to bend, expand and contract perceptions in ways that earlier cinema spectators rarely experienced.  – Alexandra Vasile