Psychedelia & Cinema

Organized with the support of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Psychedelia & Cinema presents a kaleidoscopic array of movies that explore expanded or enhanced consciousness, psychedelic experiences, and numinous encounters. Realized through psychoactive substances, meditation, deprivation, or other means, these experiences have been an important element of many cultures for millennia and have more recently become the object of scientific study, as well as being used for both therapy and recreation. Cinema, the "Seventh Art," is uniquely suited to explore altered and non-ordinary states of consciousness. From cinema's earliest flickers to the present day, filmmakers have used techniques from montage to multiple exposures, lens distortion to animation and CGI, to create mystical visions and ecstatic journeys into inner and outer space.


Image Credits: top photo from Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Memoria, 2021 -- second photo from Bruce Baillie: Quick Billy, 1970 -- third photo from Grains of Perception, Nathaniel Dorsky: Pneuma, 1983