


Within the context of the ERC Advanced Grant Filmcolors I investigate subjectivity, affect and aesthetics from an historical perspective, drawing on ideas developed within the field of the history of emotions. However, while most of this research is of a synchronic nature, my work contains a strong diachronic component, based on Fernand Braudel’s concept of the ‘pluralité des durées’ (La Méditerranée, 1966). Following Braudel, I distinguish three layers: 1. the layer of slowly changing affects and connected ‘topoi’; 2. the foundational layer of culture and discourse; and 3. the film under investigation. In this essay, I lay out my theoretical and methodological reflections by focusing on colour patterns used in films that represent hallucinations. I will lay out several examples of hallucinatory scenes (level 1) and explain their common (biological) grounds. Further, I will zoom in on 1960s psychedelic culture characterized by hallucinating drug use as entertainment and as therapeutic tool (level 2). The film of interest (level 3) is The Trip (Roger Corman, 1967), which precisely represents this culture. A combination of the analyses of the three levels brings interesting new perspectives on the 1960s, its psychedelic film culture, and how this relates to the topos of colourful hallucinations.



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Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film, Technology, Aesthetics and Affect
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Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film, Technology,
Aesthetics and Affect
Bregt Lameris, University of Zurich




                       Words [...] are static, whereas the psychedelic experience is fluid
                       and ever-changing.
                                               (Timothy Leary, The Psychedelic Experience)


Abstract

   Within the context of the ERC Advanced Grant Filmcolors I investigate
   subjectivity, affect and aesthetics from an historical perspective, drawing on
   ideas developed within the field of the history of emotions. However, while most
   of this research is of a synchronic nature, my work contains a strong diachronic
   component, based on Fernand Braudel’s concept of the ‘pluralité des durées’
   (La Méditerranée, 1966). Following Braudel, I distinguish three layers: 1. the
   layer of slowly changing affects and connected ‘topoi’; 2. the foundational
   layer of culture and discourse; and 3. the film under investigation. In this
   essay, I lay out my theoretical and methodological reflections by focusing on
   colour patterns used in films that represent hallucinations. I will lay out several
   examples of hallucinatory scenes (level 1) and explain their common (biological)
   grounds. Further, I will zoom in on 1960s psychedelic culture characterized by
   hallucinating drug use as entertainment and as therapeutic tool (level 2). The film
   of interest (level 3) is The Trip (Roger Corman, 1967), which precisely represents
   this culture. A combination of the analyses of the three levels brings interesting
   new perspectives on the 1960s, its psychedelic film culture, and how this relates
   to the topos of colourful hallucinations.


   A flowery pink cloth drops to the floor, unveiling the back of a dark-haired
woman as she walks towards a man lying on a bed. Coloured patterns dance over
their bodies as they start kissing. The camera moves to the right, panning across
the room to a fireplace covered in multicoloured projections of moiré patterns. It
then moves back to the bed where we suddenly see a blonde woman sitting next
to the couple, watching them make love. The film cuts to a series of shots of the
embracing couple from various angles, focusing on different parts of their bodies
that are covered in shifting psychedelic colours and patterns, accompanied all

                                                Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 32, Spring 2019
                                        Bregt Lameris


the while by pulsing music. Throughout, the two women repeatedly alternate,
taking one another’s place. Towards the end, the frame is split into several parts
that circle around each other, giving the impression of a kaleidoscopic insect-eye
view of the scene.
   This three-minute sequence, which I will call the ‘rainbow love scene’, comes
from Roger Corman’s film The Trip (1967). It shows the film’s main character Paul
Groves in the grip of an LSD hallucination in which he appears to be making
love to his ex-wife (the dark-haired woman) who is repeatedly replaced by the
blonde woman. The sequence is simultaneously sensual, erotic and abstract. Its
colours are also hallucinatory, in a way that is characteristic of the 1960s. Yet,
the idea of creating a surreal atmosphere with the help of disconcerting colour
sequences is a cinematic tactic that has frequently been used throughout film
history to represent hallucinatory experiences on screen. As such, what gives this
fragment such a strong 1960s look while at the same time remaining effective as a
representation of a hallucinatory, dream-like event? In other words, in what ways
does the representation of hallucinations in film follow more general aesthetic
strategies, and which of its elements are specifically characteristic of a certain
time period?
   This question is part of a larger research project on the history of colour in film,
with a focus on technology, aesthetics and subjectivities that I am conducting in
the context of the ERC Advanced Grant project FilmColors.11 The research
team first analysed a large number of films to discover if distinct patterns could
be discerned in their colours, surfaces, texture and lighting. My own research
interest lies in how this relates to the representation of affect, emotion and
subjectivities in film, and one area that I examine closely is the depiction of
hallucinations.
   One of the first problems I encountered in this research was the question of
whether I could historicise affect and subjectivities. Over the past twenty-five
years, media studies has witnessed the development of a variety of methodologies
to examine affect and emotion in film and other moving images with the help
of theoretical perspectives adopted from phenomenology, cognitive psychology
and branches of philosophy concerned with the concept of ‘affect’. Scholars
engaging in this work include Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, Jennifer Barker,
Carl Plantinga, Julian Hanich, Raymond Bellour, Eugenie Brinkema, Scott
Bukatman, and Steven Shaviro. However, most of these studies tend to investigate
affect ahistorically.22 This is problematic because, like every other element of
culture, the visual representation of affect and emotion is historically determined.

11
   This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No.
670446, FilmColors. Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Aesthetics. Primary Investigator:
Professor Barbara Flueckiger: <http://www.research-projects.uzh.ch/p21207.htm> [accessed 25
January 2019].
22
   Eugenie Brinkema does give general historical overviews at the beginning of her chapters of
the concept under investigation. However, in my opinion, the film analyses as such remain rather

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         Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film, Technology, Aesthetics and Affect


Fortunately, this issue has been addressed through the framework of ‘media
archaeology’. In his book What Is Media Archaeology, Jussi Parikka explains that
what distinguishes the approach from other methodologies in affect studies is its
historical account of embodiment and its focus on technological conditions.3
As such, media archaeology combines formal film analysis, technological and
material history and the history of ideas.
   Another approach is that of E. Deidre Pribram, a film and television studies
scholar who focuses on media and emotion in a historical context.4 Her work
is part of a relatively recent movement in cultural history known as the ‘history
of emotions’. Jan Plamper lays out the ground principles of this approach in
his book The History of Emotions.5 As Plamper notes, various theories and
methodologies have been introduced into the domain to analyse in particular the
socially constructed nature of emotions.6 Another problem Plamper approaches
in his book is the question if affects and emotions are culturally or biologically
determined. However, even though the question of ‘nature vs. nurture’ is
constantly brought up in the debate, it seems that the questions whether emotions
and affects can also be biological, relatively stable entities remain unanswered.
In fact, the entire nature vs. nurture — or cultural vs. universal — discussion is
mentioned and discussed, but not structurally taken into account when analysing
the history of emotions and affects.
   In order to address this problem of nature vs. nurture, I draw from the
concept of the ‘pluralité des durées’ in historical time introduced by Fernand
Braudel. Braudel’s study consists of three parts. Each part describes and analyses
a specific temporal layer in the history of the Mediterranean. He distinguishes
a history that is ‘quasi-immobile’ meaning that it hardly changes over time, the
history of groups and groupings that manifest a slow rhythm of change and a
rapidly changing history, that of individuals and individual events.7 I use these
ideas as a template for my study of affect and emotion in film, introducing a
similar but slightly modified distinction in layers of historical temporalities.
   Braudel’s layer that covers the quasi-immobile milieu, is related to nature


ahistorical in their nature. See: Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014).
3
  Jussi Parikka, ‘Media Archaeology of the Senses. Audiovisual, Affective, Algorithmic’, in What
is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), pp. 19–40.
4
  Deidre Pribram, Emotions, Genre, Justice in Film and Television: Detecting Feeling (New York:
Routledge, 2011).
5
  Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2017), p. 68.
6
  Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions? (Malden, MA:
Polity, 2018); Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them
Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51
(2012), 193–220; Anna Parkinson, An Emotional State. The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West
German Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).
7
  Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II 9th edn, 3
vols (Paris: Armand Colin Éditeur, 1949), i, 16–17.

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                                     Bregt Lameris


and the way the environment influences human behaviour. This layer partly
corresponds to Plantinga’s idea of ‘direct affect’. In his book Moving Viewers,
Plantinga argues that ‘[s]pectator responses to movements, sounds, colours,
textures, and manifestations of space are in large part automatic and pre-
reflective’, and that their reactions to what happens on screen are partly rooted
in ‘natural perceptual responses that have developed over long periods of human
history’.8 In other words, these more physiological reactions change at a very
slow (quasi-immobile) pace. In my opinion, the physical component of colour
perception and the way it affects the body is such a constant factor. This provides
a good starting point from which to investigate the quasi-immobile history of
colour perception and how it relates to film and affect. In a study on affect and
colour, this gradual pace of change corresponds to the slow evolution of human
perception and the human visual system — the eye and optical nerves.
   However, the concept of ‘direct affect’ as a direct bodily response to the
filmic representation is not exclusively governed by these ‘natural perceptual
responses’. Plantinga explains that films can also affect spectators according to
social conventions and cultural constraints. This brings us to another temporal
layer — that of cultural and social discourses relating to colour and affect in film.
This layer is determined by the aesthetic and cultural context in combination
with the technological possibilities and constraints of the period. Finally, my
proposal is that a last temporal layer should cover the filmic events and structures
that propel them in the direction of affect. The attempt to address this problem
needs to be grounded in the close reading, formal analysis and interpretation of
individual films and their colours.
   In my opinion, one of the main problems in studying affect and emotion in
film is that the implicit durées show relatively large variations depending on the
elements under scrutiny. This is precisely why it is necessary to investigate all
three layers in order to gain a clearer understanding of how colour and affect in
film function at different moments of history. To explore this, it is worth returning
to the representation of hallucinations in film and specifically to the psychedelic
visual culture of the 1960s, taking Roger Corman’s 1967 film as a starting point.
This brings me back to the questions I formulated in the beginning of the essay:
in what way does The Trip fit 1960s colour and psychedelic visual culture and
what are the characteristics that also speak to more longue durée characteristics
of hallucinatory imagery?
   I started my investigation of hallucination in colour films by searching our
analysis database and indeed found a large number of hallucinatory scenes where
the distortion of perception was represented by colours that deviate from those
that humans ‘normally’ perceive. Some of the examples include Nerves (Nerven,
Robert Reinert, 1919); Warning Shadows (Schatten eine Nächtliche Halluzination,
Arthur Robinson, 1923), Blanche Fury (Marc Allégret, 1948), Vertigo (Alfred

8
 Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009), p. 117.

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         Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film, Technology, Aesthetics and Affect


Hitchcock, 1958), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), The Man
Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola,
1979), and of course The Trip.
   The correlation between the use of colour and hallucinatory scenes is clearly
discernible in each of these films. In Nerves, for example, the scenes that show
hallucinations are tinted pink, and in Blanche Fury the hallucination is represented
through the image turning red, while Hitchcock’s Vertigo presents a close-up
of the main character of Scottie as he breaks down and hallucinates while the
image turns monochrome red, purple and blue. This technique is also used in
The Trip where the image of the main character Paul Groves as he hallucinates
turns monochrome yellow, red, green, blue and purple. The correlation between
hallucinations and the transformation of everyday colours into uncanny
and unexpected hues is an aspect often remarked on in the literature on the
subject. In his book Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks gives multiple examples of
testimonies of hallucinatory experiences that mention strange, bright, saturated
colours.9 For example, Sacks quotes Daniel Breslaw, a subject in the LSD
experiments undertaken at Columbia University in the 1960s, who claimed to
have experienced colours that he had never seen before in real life.10 The use
of colours that deviate from the common experiential norm to represent the
hallucinatory and imaginary is something we encountered over the entire corpus
of films studied from 1895–1995 in our research and is corroborated by many
of the testimonies recorded in the literature beyond film history. Therefore, it is
plausible that this combination is similar to a topos, which can be loosely defined
as a reoccurring theme in cultural utterances.11 At the same time, this topos
moreover shows strong connections to the quasi-immobile or slowly-changing
pace of the physical experience of hallucinations.
   Even though hallucinations occurred over the entire period we investigated,
the 1960s showed an extra-colourful interest in this type of imagery. Films
such as Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski,
1968), Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968), Psych Out (Richard Rush, 1968)
are films from the decade that particularly stood out. We also encounter a
more indirect reference to hallucinations, tripping and drug use in 2001: A
Space Odyssey. The film ends famously with a colourful sequence in which
we witness the astronaut Dave Bowman’s experience of dying and rebirthing
in an astral form.12 Whereas this final scene is not narratively embedded as
relating to a psychedelic hallucination, it was perceived as representing one,
quickly drawing large numbers of pot-smoking ‘hippies’ into the cinema in

9
  Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (London: Picador/Pan Macmillan, 2012).
10
   Ivi, p. 143
11
   Erkki Huhtamo, ‘Dismantling the Fairy Engine. Media Archaeology as Topos Study’, in Media
Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, ed. by Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 29.
12
    Douglas Trumbull, ‘Creating Special Effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey’, American
Cinematographer, 49.6 (1968), 416–19 and 451–53 (p. 452).

                                                                                         89
                                       Bregt Lameris


1968. A year later, the aforementioned scene became known in these circles by
the epithet ‘the trip’.13
   The special effects for this sequence were the work of Douglas Trumbull, who
used the slit-scan technique to produce the impression of fast forward movement
through a corridor of abstract coloured images. He was inspired to use slit-scan
technology by the work of experimental filmmaker John Whitney. However,
whereas Whitney moved the slit across the frame to produce abstract coloured
images, Trumbull made it travel in depth by moving the camera towards the slit
while photographing moving images behind it.14 The result is a sequence with
extremely coloured movement giving the impression of flying with great speed
through a space corridor. This sequence is intercut with still images of Dave
Bowman’s face.
   In addition, and maybe more importantly, Kubrick (and Trumbull) seem to
have been inspired by experimental film in a more aesthetic way. Especially the
abstract images and sounds after the corridor show great similarities to the work
by Jordan Belson so much so that Pauline Kael did not hesitate to call it theft.15
Since Belson is known for having used peyote and other hallucinogens for his
visions, this might explain why spectators interpreted the 2001-scene as a trip.16
This level of our investigation relates to the second layer, which is that of the
cultural context.
   In order to delve deeper into 1960s psychedelic culture, hallucinations in film
and their relationship to colour, I will take the film The Trip as the individual
level of the event. The analysis as such will move through the temporal layers,
from the ‘event’ or, in this case, the film, to the layer of cultural and technological
context, to that of the quasi-immobile perception of colours, and back. The Trip
centres on Peter Fonda in the role of Paul Groves, a director of advertising films,
who is going through a painful divorce. In an attempt to heal himself, he decides
to take LSD in a therapeutic setting. The film mainly shows the actual trip
Groves experiences. Another actor involved in the film was Jack Nicholson, who
presumably wrote the scenario, although Chuck Griffith is also mentioned as
the author of the ‘original’ script.17 Both Nicholson and Griffith had taken LSD
and were writing from experience. Dennis Hopper, another actor who dabbled
in LSD, appears in the film as a hippy passenger in Groves’ reality and in his
hallucinatory trip.18


13
   Trumbull, ‘The “Slit-Scan” Process as used in 2001: A Space Odyssey and beyond’, American
Cinematographer, 50.10 (1969), 998–1001, 1012–13, 1016–17, 1020–22 and 1024–26 (p. 998).
14
   Ivi, pp. 998–99; Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970), pp. 151–56.
15
   Pauline Kael, ‘Trash, Art and the Movies’, in Going Steady. Film Writings, 1968–1969 (New
York: Bantam, 1970), p. 124.
16
   Youngblood, p. 159.
17
    Beverly Gray, Roger Corman: Blood-sucking Vampires, Flesh-eating Cockroaches, and Driller
Killers (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), pp. 87–88.
18
   Nickolson, Fonda and Hopper are also known for their appearance together in the film Easy
Rider (Dennis Hopper) that was released two years later, in 1969.

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          Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film, Technology, Aesthetics and Affect


   According to Corman, everyone involved in the production had taken
LSD, including Corman himself, who tried it specifically for the film.19
Apparently Corman had travelled to a picturesque seaside cliff in Big Sur,
California, with his assistant Frances Doel as a ‘guide’. Whereas Corman
took the drugs his assistant did not, and was merely present to witness and
assist with the ‘exercise’. It appears that Corman had a magical experience,
seeing spellbinding images; however, because he felt he owed his audience an
obligation of truth, he also talked to those who had experienced ‘bad trips’
and included their testimonies in the film.20 To transmit these experiences
and testimonies through the medium of film, Corman ‘relied on hallucinatory
visual images in dazzling color’.21
   Indeed, a brief investigation of Dutch newspapers from 1968 and 1969 resulted
in a number of interesting critiques of The Trip. Most of them mentioned the
colours of the film as extraordinarily beautiful and ‘crazy’, and claimed they
represented the LSD experience quite faithfully.22 One critic even praised the
film laboratories for their work in creating such colours.23 The film’s intense
colours were also referred to on its poster as ‘psychedelic’, directly connecting
colour to LSD-induced hallucinations.24
   In the narrative exposition at the start of The Trip we are introduced to
the main character, Paul, his wife Sally (Susan Strasberg) and John (Bruce
Dern), who is there to guide Paul through his LSD experience. In passing, we
encounter (mostly stoned) figures who re-appear in Paul’s hallucination, such as
the archetypical hippy, Max (Hopper), and the beautiful blonde, Glenn (Salli
Sachse). Towards the end of the film’s opening sequence, Paul and John enter an
apartment decorated in psychedelic colours. It is here that John gives Paul the
LSD and makes him lie down on a couch, where he covers his eyes to help induce
the psychedelic mode of perception. After a moment of darkness, we start to hear
music over the sound of Paul’s beating heart. At the same time, multi-coloured
abstract shapes follow each other in rapid succession. The ‘rainbow love scene’

19
   Constantine Nasr, Roger Corman: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), p.
88.
20
   Pawel Aleksandrowicz, The Cinematography of Roger Corman: Exploitation Filmmaker or
Auteur? (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016).
21
   Gray, pp. 87–88.
22
   Bob Bertina, ‘Cinemanifestatie Utrecht 68. LSD-trip’, Volkskrant, 7 February 1968, p. 9; Henk
van der Meyden, ‘Ontkleed meisje op VPRO-scherm/Start nieuwe stijl maar: Wat gebeurt er met
“De Trip” in Nederland’, Telegraaf, 10 October 1967, p. 15; C.B. Doolaard, ‘Corman proeft aan
LSD’, Parool, 1 March 1968, p. 17; ‘TRIP met LSD. ’t blijft bij een poging’, Vrije Volk, 8 November
1968, p. 21; A. van O., ‘The trip. LSD-reis als te mager thema’, Nieuwsblad van het Noorden,
31 January 1969, p. 14; Henk ten Berge, ‘Veel filmgeweld op de Cinemanifestatie. Peter Fonda
werd “high”’, Telegraaf, 7 February 1968, p. 13. All clippings were found in the amazingly rich
digital newspaper archive from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Netherlands called Delpher.
See: <https://www.delpher.nl/> [accessed 25 January 2019].
23
   Doolaard, p. 17.
24
   For poster see IMDB: <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062395/mediaviewer/rm3665102336>
[accessed 15 October 2018].

                                                                                                91
                                        Bregt Lameris


that occurs soon after this first experience also uses such kaleidoscopic patterns.
First, the coloured light projections contain patterns that are similar to abstract
kaleidoscopic images. Then, towards the end of the scene, the frame splits into
four or more different parts, resulting in a multiplication of moving images,
giving the perception of the kaleidoscopic effect of seeing the world through an
insect’s compound eyes.
   In 1960s cinema, such kaleidoscopic abstract imagery to stand in for
hallucinatory and altered states was not specific to The Trip. For example, Eric
Duvivier, who made medical films for pharmaceutical companies, also used
kaleidoscopic images in some of his films of hallucinations such as Images du
monde visionnaire (co-directed with Henri Michaux, 1963).25 Other examples
are Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966) in which kaleidoscopic images
appear on television sets, hypnotising their viewers. The British film Curse of
the Crimson Altar (Vernon Sewell, 1968) also shows kaleidoscopic images to
simulate the experience of hypnosis.26
   These colourful, abstract shapes are what Sacks calls ‘simple hallucinations’.27
Psychologist Heinrich Klüver observed that these types of hallucinations
are common in a variety of pathological and situational phenomena such as
migraine (the migraine’s ‘aura’), sensory deprivation (the ‘prisoner’s cinema’),
hypoglycaemia, fever, delirium, and the hypnagogic state directly before and
after sleep. Of course, psychedelic drug use can also bring about these types
of hallucinations. Albert Hofmann, who was the first to synthesize LSD in
1938 and who accidently tested it on himself, testified to what he saw as ‘an
uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness
and accompanied by an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors’.28
   The persistent recurrence of descriptions of multi-coloured, abstract,
kaleidoscopic images over a larger time frame permits us to categorize them as
examples of the ‘quasi-immobile’ of visual hallucinations. Some psychologists
and researchers suggest that these visions have a universal biological origin.29
For example, Klüver, in his book, Mechanisms of Hallucination (1942), suggests
that ‘such constants must reflect something about the organization, the functional
architecture, of the visual cortex’.30 In other words, he claims that what we
are witnessing in such an experience are our own nerves and synapses firing
off electricity. Following Klüver, mathematicians and neuroscientists continued


25
   This film is based on Henri Michaux writings on his experiences with mescaline and hashish.
Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), Michaux, L’infini turbulent, 1968th
ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1957), Michaux, Connaissance par les Gouffres (Paris: NRF, Le
point du jour, 1961)
26
   <https://eastmancolor.info/2018/10/11/hypnosis-as-spectacle-in-british-horror/> [accessed 15
October 2018].
27
   Sacks, p. 26.
28
   Hofmann in Sacks, p. 136.
29
   Ivi, p. 190.
30
   Klüver in ivi, pp. 141–42.

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          Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film, Technology, Aesthetics and Affect


to investigate and confirmed potential connections between primary visual
hallucinations and the way the visual cortex is shaped and functions.31
   As such, it should be of no surprise that kaleidoscopic images were a popular
staple of visual culture (a topos) for a longer period. One example is the well-
known nineteenth-century kaleidoscopic lantern slides that were manually
cranked to make the colours swirl around and over each other. Interestingly,
as film historian Joshua Yumibe explains, these nineteenth-century toys were a
form of entertainment ‘to shape the viewer’s subjective perception to an orderly
system that rationalized space, time, and color’.32 In other words, they were the
result of scientific investigation of optics and perception and were partly meant
to test hypotheses on the senses and perception, and partly to re-educate and
discipline the observer into a modern one.33
   The fact that the kaleidoscopic, multi-coloured images in The Trip were
part of a strategy to show the inner perception of a hallucination turns this
rationalizing function upside down. Instead of ordering and rationalizing,
these images unleashed colours that were out of control, challenging chromatic
vision. As such, they fit perfectly with Kirsten Moana Thompson’s description
of the psychedelic counterculture’s use of colour in the 1960s: ‘Whereas in
Western culture we tried to control colour with the help of colour-cards, colour
harmonies, colour consultants, and colour psychology, in the 1960s colour was
being unleashed especially in the psychedelic culture.’34 However, placing these
insights in a wider perspective entails diving a little deeper into the second level of
the ‘milieu’ formed by the psychedelic culture and the use of LSD, characteristic
of the 1960s.
   The aforementioned poster of The Trip not only refers to its colours as
‘psychedelic’, it also announces the film as ‘A Lovely Sort of Death’ (‘LSD’).
This slogan refers to The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan
Book of Dead (1964) by Timothy Leary, which Corman read before making The
Trip.35 In his book, Leary follows the structure and logic of The Tibetan Book of


31
   G. B. Ermentrout and J. D. Cowan, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Visual Hallucination Patterns’,
Biological Cybernetics, 34.3 (1 October 1979), 137–50, <https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00336965>
[accessed 25 January 2019]; Jennifer Ouellette, ‘A Math Theory for Why People Hallucinate’,
Quanta Magazine, 30 July 2018, <https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-
hallucinate-20180730/> [accessed 25 January 2019]; Eric Tkaczyk, ‘Pressure Hallucinations and
Patterns in the Brain’, Morehead Electronic Journal of Applicable Mathematics, 1 (2001), 1–26; Paul
C. Bressloff and others, ‘What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us about the Visual Cortex’,
Neural Computation, 14.3 (March 2002), 473–91, <https://doi.org/10.1162/089976602317250861>
[accessed 25 January 2019].
32
   Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2012), p. 141.
33
   Ivi, p. 24.
34
   Kirsten Moana Thompson, ‘Falling in(to) Color. Chromophilia and Tom Ford’s A Single Man
(2009)’, The Moving Image, 15.1 (2015), 62–84.
35
   The Movie World of Roger Corman, ed. by J. Philip Di Franco (New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1979), pp. 48–49.

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the Dead, which describes the travels/experiences of the soul between dying and
reincarnation.36
   Leary was a psychologist with a doctorate from the University of California,
Berkeley. After spending time working at universities in various countries, he
started lecturing at Harvard in 1959, where he founded the Harvard Psilocybin
Project with Richard Alpert. The project’s aim was to research the effects of
LSD and psilocybin on human consciousness.37 In 1963, however, the project
was halted by the university management, and Alpert and Leary were both fired.
Although the Harvard Psilocybin Project might seem a strange and dangerous
experiment today, the use of LSD in psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry
was well established at the time.38 However, as the 1960s progressed, attitudes
changed, and the use of LSD became increasingly less accepted, until the drug
was finally declared illegal in 1968 in the United States, except for medical
research.
   After his dismissal, Leary became renowned as a public countercultural figure.
He continued his experiments and defended the use of drugs as a mind-opening
therapeutic method. His catch-phrase, ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’, encouraged
‘turning on’ the psychedelic experience (like a TV set), ‘tuning in’ to the right
experiential wave length, and then ‘dropping out’ from the experience itself and
back into ‘normal life’, integrating this so-called ‘psychedelic perception’ into
everyday experience. Leary even claimed that it was media philosopher Marshall
McLuhan, whom he knew and admired, who inspired him to use a catch phrase
to promote his ideas.39
   McLuhan was convinced that the ways in which media influences, shapes and
perceives the world needed more thorough investigation. As such he considered
media to be the message, the source of information for his research, more than
the content they distributed.40 The premise that external factors had such strong
effects on the human mind, dovetails very well with Leary’s ideas on LSD. Leary
propagated the notion that LSD inspired people to question social norms,
and it consequently had the power to transform society: ‘LSD rearranged the
“imprinting process” in the human mind and allowed people to rethink things
they had previously taken for granted.’41 This discourse was part of the 1960s
counterculture, a movement that was defined by its rejection of the establishment

36
   The reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead in relation to hallucinations and drugs is also made
in Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009).
37
   <https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/timothy-leary>[accessed 16 October 2018].
38
   The Wikipedia page on LSD is a good starting point for those who want to know more about
the history of LSD, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide#>
[accessed 16 October 2018].
39
   See Lisa Rein and Michael Horowitz, ‘Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan, turned on and
tuned in’, Boing Boing, 2014, <https://boingboing.net/2014/06/03/timothy-leary-and-marshall-
mcl.html> [accessed 17 October 2018].
40
   Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 5th edn (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1964); Rein and Horowitz.
41
   Scott Stephenson, ‘LSD and the American Counterculture: Comrades in the Psychedelic Quest’,

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— LSD use was prevalent amongst those who identified with the movement. The
idea was that LSD would help to loosen the grip of existing rules and regulations
that limit perception and imprison the body and mind, and to set perception
free.42
   These beliefs seem to come together in the ‘rainbow love scene’ in which
Paul makes love to Sally and Glenn. First of all, the scene represents the
1960s ‘summer-of-love’ theme of free sex, which relates to freedom of mind,
imagination and choice of partners. Second, through its edited close-ups on the
sensuous movements of Sally’s feet, the sound-track of her moaning and the
excessive colours, the scene strongly implies female orgasm, which could be seen
as the liberation of the female body and sexuality.43 Especially interesting here
is the connection between the female orgasm and colour, which occurs in other
films. For example, when Janet Weiss from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim
Sharman, 1975) experiences an orgasm during the song ‘Toucha, toucha, toucha,
touch me’ she is covered in rainbow coloured light, or the scene in Barbarella
when Durand Durand tries to kill Barbarella with a colour organ causing deadly
orgasms. Third, the scene shows fluctuating colours in constant movement,
ceaselessly shifting camera angles and positions, people and shapes, making the
‘psychedelic vision as a burst of freedom and mobility’ visible in a sensuous way,
challenging ‘normative modes of perception’ and ‘calling into question the rigid
and repressive conceptions of reality and consciousness’.44
   Not only were society rules and regulations challenged by The Trip, but the
film also pushed the possibilities of the colour technology. The film’s special
effects technician, Bob Beck, wrote an article in 1968 on the making of the film
in The American Cinematographer. He dwells extensively on the multi-coloured
love scene, discussing the technological problems they had in shooting it. The
light sensitivity of the film material available at the time was too low to film the
gloomy atmosphere created by the projection of the coloured lights onto the
moving bodies; there was a risk that when creating the ‘general mood effect’
there would not be enough light to also create the ‘projected psychedelic effect’:
‘Even with extensive modifications, the amount of light on the subjects was only
around 24-foot candles, which meant that our film, Eastman Color Negative,
had to be processed to an ASA rating of 200 by the Pathé Laboratories.’45 The
Eastmancolor 5251 negative stock that was available in 1967 had a light sensitivity


Burgmann Journal, III (2014), <https://www.academia.edu/11558803/LSD_and_the_American_
Counterculture_Comrades_in_the_Psychedelic_Quest> [accessed 16 October 2018].
42
   Andrew Syder, ‘“Shaken out of the Ruts of Ordinary Perception”: Vision, Culture and Technology
in the Psychedelic Sixties’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Southern California, 2009),
p. 30.
43
   Anna Powell, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012),
pp. 67–68.
44
   Syder, p. 30.
45
   Bob Beck, ‘Creating “Psychedelic” Visual Effects for “The Trip”’, American Cinematographer,
151.3 (1968), 176–79.

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of 50 ASA, which meant that the amount of pushing needed for exposure was
not extreme but significant enough to potentially increase the visibility of the
grain in the photographic image. The result is a sombre, relatively dark though
still colourful image, full of movement and fluidity. Because of the increased
graininess, the images may have become even more abstract than was originally
intended.46
   Andrew Derek Syder argues that attempts to simulate acid trips on screen in
psychedelic films such as The Trip also challenged the visual codes and spectator
positions associated with classical cinema. Unfortunately, he does not give any
direct examples to illustrate this claim.47 However, the ‘rainbow love scene’,
with its coloured light projections, does come close to challenging what was
technically possible. The scene’s colour projections are directly connected to
the counterculture party scene of the 1960s. Beck himself was a self-made light
engineer, developing and renting out equipment for light shows that were held
with the help of overhead projectors, liquids and sometimes film.48 The 1960s was
the decade of psychedelic music, immersive ‘happenings’, ‘expanded cinema’ and
‘LSD art’, which was not only exhibited in discotheques, night clubs, and other
music venues but also in museums and art galleries.49 One of the aims of LSD art
was to reproduce the sort of psychedelic perceptions that occurred when taking
mind-expanding drugs.50 For example, the media art collective USCO, which
presented so-called ‘psychedelic theatre’, claimed that their art had the potential
to function in a similar way to LSD. The group explicitly took as its philosophical
basis the theories of Marshall McLuhan who, as I mentioned before, argued
that the way media influence how we shape and perceive the world needs more
thorough investigation. USCO tried to put McLuhan’s injunction into effect by
reproducing the experience of an LSD hallucination in an immersive multimedia
event: they employed projection techniques that used the entire space as a screen,
including the bodies of the spectators in order to experiment with and study the
very ways in which these techniques shape perception.
   With its colourful patterns projected on walls, furniture and bodies, the


46
   This might explain why people seem to miss the fact that Paul is making love to two women
instead of one. For example: Bertina, and Powell.
47
   Syder, p. 7.
48
   He even wrote a manual for do-it-yourself light shows. See Robert C. Beck, Color Games Light
Show Manual 3rd edn (Los Angeles: Pericles Press, 1966).
49
   One of the best-known examples of this practice is the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a sort of
Gesamtkunstwerk installation art by Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and Nico. In 1967
Ronald Nameth made the film Exploding Plastic Inevitable based on registrations made during
the shows. He filmed on Ektachrome and had the same problems with the light sensitivity as Bob
Beck. He also had the material pushed, which resulted in an increased graininess of the images
(source: email exchange with Ronald Nameth, 2017).
50
   Howard Junker, ‘LSD: “The Contact High”’, Nation, 5 July 1965, <https://www.thenation.
com/article/lsd-contact-high/> [accessed 5 March 2018]; ‘New Experience that Bombards the
Senses. LSD Art’, LIFE Magazine, 9 September 1966, pp. 60–69; ‘Wild New Flashy Bedlam of the
Discothèque’, LIFE Magazine, 27 May 1966, pp. 72–76.

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        Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film, Technology, Aesthetics and Affect


rainbow love scene mirrors this practice. However, whereas in The Trip the
viewer watched the LSD experience in a more classical way (that is, seated in
a cinema, their experience was strongly dependent on their identification and
engagement with the character Paul onscreen), USCO tried to replicate the
experience by immersing the spectator in the performance itself, ‘bombing their
senses’ with light and sound.
   Recapping, the close-reading of the film The Trip (layer of event) showed
several connections and relations to both the layer of culture and discourses,
and that of colour perception and hallucinations. As a result, it is clear that
the film is strongly rooted in the cultural context of psychedelic culture and
its accompanying colour performance culture, which explains why the film has
such a strong 1960s ‘look’. At the same time, the film uses reoccurring patterns
such as kaleidoscopic images, saturated colours, and moving colours to visually
represent hallucinations. These are elements that are part of the ‘quasi-immobile’
way the human body and mind produce internal imageries when hallucination
occurs, and which entered our visual culture as topoi as well.
   The analysis here of hallucinations from the perspective of ‘pluralité des
durées’ has proven to be very productive. The possibility to jump from one layer
to the other, and to be aware of it, allows for interesting comparisons which bring
about deeper understandings of colour films and colour cultures.




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