In this time of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, it is “mind-revealing” to rediscover the work on LSD therapy by Stanislav Grof. As researcher of the transformative potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness, his observations from over fifty years of LSD research offer a holistic and philosophical approach towards the realms of the human unconscious. I will argue that many of the experiences described by Grof, have found another way of expression in cinema, especially in the genres that explore non-ordinary states of consciousness, beyond the limits of normal perception – horror, science fiction and experimental or expanded cinema. While in the mid-twentieth century film theory developed from and in relation to psychoanalytic conceptions of the unconscious, this lecture proposes to look at the lessons from research in psychedelics, to propose a psychedelic re-orientation of the cinematographic unconsciousness. I will suggest that our media culture itself belongs to the vast realms of the 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 a film professor at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She is one of the founding editors of the Open Access journal Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies and co-editor of the series Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam University Press) and thinking I media (Bloomsbury Academic). Publications include The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012) and New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). She is the editor of a special journal issue on Deleuze and Guattari and the psychedelic revival (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She writes about the role of film and media in respect to (collective) consciousness. Her current teaching and research focus are on aesthetics of altered states and on elemental media theory. See for her blog, videos and articles www.patriciapisters.com .
