How can films alter our perception? Find out in this lecture from Patricia Pisters who explores the psychedelic realms of subconscious in film.
A key part of this lecture focuses on the ideas of Czech-American psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. Based on more than fifty years of psychedelic research, his work explores how extraordinary states of consciousness can open up new ways of understanding the human mind, the unconscious and our inner world.
Patricia Pisters argues that many experiences described by Grof found a new form in cinema. Films can act as trip reports, but also as trip inducers. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, for example, became linked to psychedelic audiences and helped spark New York’s midnight movie scene. Its collective, often drug-infused reception helped secure its place in film history as an “acid western”: cinema as a shared, mind-altering experience.
Patricia Pisters suggests that media culture has become a modern expression of the collective unconscious where we have strange encounters, good and bad trips, that lead to profound questions about what it means to be human in a transforming world in crisis.
Patricia Pisters is professor of film at the Department of Media Studiesof the University of Amsterdam. She is board member of the OPEN Foundation for Research in Psychedelic Science. Her publications include The Neuro-Image, on film-philosophy for digital screen culture and a special issue on Deleuze and Guattari and the Psychedelic Revival. Her book Cosmic Camera on the psychedelic realms of the unconscious in cinema will appear beginning 2027 at EdinburghUniversity Press.
This program is co-organized with the student film & photography association Dekate Mousa.
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