Note on Hallucinatory Film

Comparisons between hallucinatory films of the 1960s and 2000s show a conversion earlier utopian signifiers from benign fields intoxicating color that celebrate induce psychic bliss, into high-definition alarm bells for world imploding accelerated hyperconsumption. Paranoid, conspiracy-driven 70s commercial cinema, which appropriates editing techniques experimental films, marks threshold disenchantment. The entropic model 60s works by Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, others, where film material abstract imagery are modified analagous to intensification bodily pleasures, is digitally exacerbated in videos Heather Phillipson, Ed Atkins, Benedict Drew as if collapsing under environmental degradation. This later work maximizes HD properties through relentlessly overlaying interpenetrating, deflating, exploding bodies avatars overindulgence, nightmarish uncanny descendants intoxications. (MH)