Altered States: Psychedelic Experimental Cinema as Border Crossing in Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS
Journal of cinema and media studies 2021 DOI: 10.1353/cj.2021.a922657 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Psilocybin |
| Keywords | Counterculture Movie theater The symbolic Ethnography Race biology Aesthetics Art history Gender studies Anthropology Psychoanalysis |
| Citations | 2 |
| Key points | Argues that Conner's film's engagement with psychedelia is shaped by a colonialist logic of expansion and self-discovery, with primitivist projections of Indigeneity playing a constitutive role. |
Abstract
ABSTRACT: This article offers a close examination of Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–1967), which is considered an archetypal instance of experimental cinema’s engagement with psychedelic counterculture. By analyzing the film’s most prominent motifs—including ethnographic views of Mexican village life, hallucinogenic mushrooms, appearances from Timothy Leary, and multiple allusions, both symbolic and literal, to the atomic bomb—and contextualizing them within Cold War discourses of race and nationhood, it argues that the film’s engagement with psychedelia is shaped by a colonialist logic of “expansion” and (self-)discovery, in which primitivist projections of Indigeneity play a constitutive role.