Looking for good psychedelia

September 15, 2008 12:55 PM

I love psychedelia, but good stuff is impossible to find. Recommend!

I saw Fantastic Planet a number of years ago, and it's still one of my all-time favorites. (This scene alone is worth the price of the DVD.) Don't care for Laloux's other work, though.

This short is another example of what I'm looking for. (Don't mind the silly narration; it's all about the visuals.) (I already own the VHS tape from whence this comes.)

Another.

Thing is, most of what passes for psychedelia these days is shiny, polished, digital stuff (the sort of thing you'd see at a techno club), and it just doesn't have the same feel as hand-painted animation and old 70s video computers. It's pretty, I suppose, but it doesn't make me think "OMG I CAN SEE TIME".

I'm familiar with Švankmajer, Brakhage, Cocteau, and all the other guys in the "experimental film" textbooks; that stuff is cool for what it is, but not quite as overtly psychedelic as I'd like.

People have told me that the stuff linked above is "shroomy". I've never tried shrooms, but it's the fluid, earthy, organic character of this stuff that I like. It captures the actual experience of visual hallucinations on film—like someone hooked a VCR up to a tripper's brain—rather than just being cool to look at while on drugs.

So, given my needlessly picky and yet uselessly vague criteria, what should I be looking at?

posted by greenie2600 to media & arts (11 comments total)

Not 100% sure trancevisuals is what you're after, but it's close and I feel I should take the chance to pimp a friend's work...

He VJ's at various psytrance clubs and festivals, using his own graphics. He did have a whole set on his site for free a while back but that seems to have gone now.
posted by opsin at 1:13 PM on September 15, 2008

If Brakhage isn't what you're looking for, then Jordan Belson or John and James Whitney may not be either, but if you liked the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite section of 2001, you'll like Belson.
posted by jessenoonan at 3:55 PM on September 15, 2008

YouTube has a lot of clips from The Electric Company (70s PBS kid show) and old Sesame Street animations that are pretty darn lysergic. The original intro to Electric Company and this clip from Sesame Street are good starters.
posted by mundy at 4:32 PM on September 15, 2008

Check out some of Chris Marker's work - specifically SANS SOLEIL - there is a dvd available trough the Criterion Collection. The film has plenty of seventies video filter goodness - but it less organic/shroom-ish and more like a strychnine laced acid test. (Incidentally, many of his other films are available on dvd exculsively through the Wexner Center store.)
posted by cinemafiend at 4:45 PM on September 15, 2008

this?
posted by juv3nal at 8:38 PM on September 15, 2008

How about some trippy, wacky animation from Sally Cruikshank?
posted by Scram at 10:13 PM on September 15, 2008

How about Walt Disney's Fantasia? (Multiple YouTube links available)






posted by wv kay in ga at 10:45 PM on September 15, 2008

If you haven't seen it already, Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (entire movie in pieces on YouTube) definitely fits with your examples, and was the first thing I thought of when I read the question. This movie is really strange and delightful, with some really subversive content and visuals. Some choice tidbits:

Raggedy Ann and Andy Meet the Greedy: A visual feast (heh), with very trippy stuff going on throughout.

Tour of Looney Land: I had the music from this segment stuck in my mind for decades after watching, and the vaguely menacing visuals match it perfectly.
posted by Shecky at 9:41 AM on September 16, 2008

Thanks for the suggestions so far. All of this is cool stuff, but none of it is quite what I'm looking for. (I hate to sound picky, but...well, I'm really just looking for something that blew my mind the way Fantastic Planet did.)

It occurred to me that Samorost (and Samorost 2) are also good examples of what I want.

I thought about this a little more after posting, and here's a somewhat refined explanation:

I'm not looking for pure abstraction or video mandalas—I like that stuff, but for the purposes at hand, I'm looking for depictions of surreal/hallucinogenic realities (surrealities?), with some element (however disjointed) of narrative, and (more likely than not) animated—but not kiddie or cartoonish.

Music seems to be a common theme, too—all of the stuff I've mentioned has a languid, spacey, semi-atonal soundtrack. Not sure if that's a critical component, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Is Fantastic Planet just utterly unique? That'd be a shame...but perhaps not surprising.
posted by greenie2600 at 2:03 PM on September 16, 2008

Not so much a visual trippiness, but the narrative in the maxx can do your head in. Barry Stigler's voice work (he does Mr. Gone) is amazing.
posted by juv3nal at 2:27 AM on September 20, 2008

The Wall, obviously.

All the Tool videos would be up your alley. The earlier ones are very much Svankmajer by way of the Quays, but the later live action ones are pretty spectacular too.

Other music videos of note: All of Chad VanGaalen's.

Blu's MUTO video is pretty great.

Finally, a classic: Norman McLaren.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:01 AM on October 16, 2008