Sense-Destructive Cinema
Assaulting the eyeballs and assassinating the normative consciousness of the viewer
NOTE: This is an English version of an article that I wrote for the Spanish magazine Détour. I’ve changed some details because I’ve discovered new films since then, but the text is similar. Here you can find the Spanish version.
In Stan Brakhage's writings on film—Metaphors of Vision (1963)—there’s a passage in which he uses the term “sense-destructive” in reference to a loss of visual solidity in favour of a more liquid, or even gaseous, perception. This would be an altered state of consciousness, closer to hallucination, psychotropic intoxication or out-of-body perception than to “reality”. Due to the multiple meanings of “sense”, the term alludes to the destruction of reason as well as the destruction of consciousness and the senses.
Three years after the publication of Metaphors of Vision, Tony Conrad released The Flicker (1966), a 30-minute film consisting only of black and white frames flickering at different speeds. The film opens with a warning.
Though we might suspect that this warning has more to do with William Castle's self-promotional gimmicks than with any real danger, while Castle's strategies—such as stationing nurses in the theatre lobby—were stunts, it’s true that the stroboscopic effects generated by a rapid succession of black and white frames can cause migraines, nausea, hallucinations, and even epileptic seizures.
Conrad had a friend who had drowned during an epileptic seizure and he was aware that flashing lights can cause such problems. He wasn’t sure if it was ok to screen his film without a warning, so he decide to obtain an expert medical opinion. A neurologist confirmed that the danger was real and explained to him that putting up a warning sign could provoke imaginary seizures in people who weren’t epileptic. Conrad decided to add the warning anyway to inform the viewers and to allow time—3 minutes of credits and music—for them to leave the theatre if they felt it necessary.
According to the filmmaker Jonas Mekas, The Flicker causes an epileptic seizure in every 15,000 spectators. He himself saw someone vomiting at one of the screenings: “It’s a favourable reaction. The man must have had something bad in his stomach and the film cleaned it out”. Mekas' anecdote is not an isolated curiosity. In some countries, there are guidance notes limiting the number of flashes of light per second on television.
In 1993, a commercial on British television triggered three epileptic seizures. A better-known case is the Pokémon episode that caused headaches, vomiting, and convulsions to almost 700 Japanese children.
However, The Flicker's destructive potential lies not in the likelihood of an epileptic seizure, but in its hallucinatory power. As the speed of the changes from black to white increases, the film is paced with brainwaves, generating optical illusions on the retina. Some viewers see colours and geometric patterns, others see letters, numbers, and even animals. As it’s a mental experience, it’s impossible to document.
The Flicker is from the 60s, heir to hippie psychedelia—Conrad cites among its influences a text by William S. Burroughs entitled Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness-expanding Drugs (1964). However, the first films that used such effects didn’t arise from any countercultural movement, or even from an interest in drugs, but from the search for the pure.
As deep and fundamental as a heartbeat
Some of the characteristics of sense-destructive cinema can be traced back to Sergey Eisenstein's montage theory, which seeks a psychological and sensory response, and to the subtle entoptic phenomena generated by the abstract animations created in the 20s by Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggelin, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, and others. The oldest flicker film that I know of is from a bit later.
An Expression (1935) by Shigeji Ogino is a silent abstract animation, but unlike its predecessors from the 1920s, it’s also a narrative film. It tells the encounter between a city man and a countrywoman, represented by a triangle and a circle. Ogino shot in black and white using red and green filters. One frame is red and the next is green—complementary colours—which generates entoptic phenomena.
I don’t know if he was trying to generate hallucinations, searching for purity or anything else. My theory is that he was just using complementary colours to insist on the idea of contrast: city/country, man/woman, triangle/circle, red/green. Whatever his intention, he was probably the first person to make a sense-destructive film, albeit unintentionally.
The first intentional one that I know of is Color Sequence (1943) by Dwinell Grant.
Color Sequence is a study in rhythm and perception inspired by non-objectivism, consisting exclusively of flat colours. The concept was to generate a rhythm as deep and essential as a heartbeat, a storm or the sequence of day and night. “Nature is not something to be commented on, it is something to be”, said Grant.
Grant's words recall Brakhage's writings and films—that came later—but also live cinema proto-experiments such as Thomas Wilfred's Clavilux (1921), a light organ whose abstract images conveyed, according to its inventor, the glory of the sunset and the spirit of the rose, rather than their physical appearance.
Although in 1943, when Color Sequence was screened for the first time, non-objectivism was already accepted in both intellectual and artistic circles, in terms of cinema it was bizarre. In the first screening, Grant himself found it disturbing. In fact, it was considered so strange that it was never screened again until the 70s. It may sound excessive, but in the 40s, it was really radical to show a film that was more related to shamanic trances than to Hollywood.
The Dreamachine
In the 1950s, the interest in the destruction of meaning was inherited by the beat generation. On 21 December 1958, the writer Brion Gysin wrote in his diary that he had experienced kaleidoscopic visions when he closed his eyes during a bus ride along a tree-lined avenue. He described his experience as a transcendental vision out of time. He thought that it was some kind of spiritual epiphany. However, when he explained the story to William S. Burroughs, he gave him a scientific explanation: a flashing light—like the sun glinting through the trees—can cause perceptual disturbances similar to those produced by hallucinogenic drugs.
Gysin became so obsessed with the experience that he build a machine—with the help of Ian Sommerville, a maths student who at the time was Burroughs’ lover—to provoke the same kind of hallucinations. The result was the Dream Machine, a device consisting of a 78rpm record player, a light bulb, and a cylinder with holes in it. This generates a flickering light that vibrates at a regular frequency of 8-13 Hz—the same as alpha waves, generated by the brain during relaxation and meditation.
Although from today's perspective we might see the Dream Machine as expanded cinema or multimedia installation, Gysin saw it as a visionary appliance that would put an end to television. After Philips refused to mass-produce it as “Dreamachine”, fearing that it would provoke epileptic seizures, it was relegated for years to mere curiosity, until in the late 2000s it was given more attention by some museums and the documentary FlicKeR (2008).
Light, darkness, sound, and silence
As you can see, flickering lights are one of the main sources of sense-destruction, and the film that’s usually cited as the mother of all flickering audiovisual experiences is Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer (1960).
Arnulf Rainer is a short film that, like The Flicker, consists exclusively of white (transparent) and black (opaque) frames. Kubelka's intention was to reduce cinema to its basic elements: light, darkness, sound, and silence.
At first glance, it might seem that Arnulf Rainer and The Flicker are similar films, but they’re radically different. The Flicker is a surrealist film—a label used by Conrad himself—with scientific concerns. Its intention is to activate the unconscious. Kubelka was not concerned with the unconscious, but with pureness. Arnulf Rainer is the epitome of structuralist, formal, and metric cinema, both visually and sonically, since the sound isn’t just a soundtrack, but an object in its own right.
Arnulf Rainer's sound is not musical, like that of The Flicker, it’s noise, but it’s not shapeless, nor unwanted. It’s white noise, which, like white light, contains all the frequencies of the spectrum at the same level. What emerges from these two basic elements combined with their opposites is not a psychedelic experience, it’s ecstasy, the Sublime according to Kant, that which overwhelms us by its excessive dimension or intensity. The film breaks us, annihilates us in order to discover a supra-organic spirit, as Deleuze explained about the Sublime.
When the film opened in Vienna in May 1960, all 300 seats in the cinema were filled. When it ended 6 minutes later, there were only 12 people left in the auditorium.
The potential of noise as a destroyer of sense has been explored also in the context of noise music. When the sound pressure is extreme—as in Merzbow or Zbigniew Karkowski—, we’re forced to listen, there’s no escape. The high volume turns the invisibility of sound into visibility, as the flicker effect turns the visibility of images into listening—even if you close your eyes, you can't stop seeing because the light is so powerful that it penetrates your eyelids. Ears have no eyelids, so we can never stop hearing, hence the image becomes listening. Noise fans are well aware of this effect and seek its intoxicating properties. In the context of cinema, Arnulf Rainer is the film that has come closest to that vibratory intoxication.
Assassinating the normative conscience of the viewer
Another prominent figure in the field of flicker film is Paul Sharits, who made several flicker films in the 60s and 70s. One of my favourites is Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976), in which he mixes flickering colours with real images of epileptic seizures. Although Sharits, like Kubelka, is interested in the materiality of film, his goal is also political—to assault the eyeballs and assassinate the normative consciousness of the viewer—and sensual—to experience the majestic potential of an epileptic seizure. This last statement may sound strange, but Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who suffered from epilepsy, explained that before suffering an episode he would go through a few minutes of rapture in which he felt a glorious pleasure and harmony, a sensation so sweet and intense that he would have given ten years of his life, or his whole life, to enjoy it for a few seconds.
Some authors think that flicker films could be interpreted as pornographic because there’s a theory that claims that an orgasm is a form of reflexive epilepsy initiated in a moment of extreme excitement, which is what most of these filmmakers seek. As with a hallucinogen, the trip can be good or bad, because it doesn’t depend entirely on the film. The consequences are unpredictable because no two perceptions are the same. Watching any of these films, you may feel anguish or euphoria, or even both at the same time.
Also in the 70s, Lillian F. Schwartz released UFOs, a computer-generated animation that one viewer described as “LSD without drugs”. A neurologist who watched the film asked for a copy of it with the intention of inducing controlled seizures in his epilepsy patients. The idea was to help them identify the sensations of the instant immediately preceding seizures so that they could eventually avoid them.
The description of such films as “LSD without drugs” is usual even today. In 2016, at a screening of Richard Tuohy's Dot Matrix (2013), a spectator made exactly the same comment. Tuohy's film is a double projection overlay—two 16mm films projected one on top of the other. The film consists exclusively of flickering dot patterns and the sound is generated by the dots themselves as they pass through the projector's optical sound reader. The result is a bombardment of noise and entoptic phenomena that assaults your body and mind.
Tuhoy explains that he wants to provoke physical and neurological experiences, not sentimental, dialectical, narrative or instructive discourses because that’s literature, not film.
Optical invocations
In the 60s, with the hippie's growing interest in drugs and Eastern religions, filmmakers like Jordan Belson and James Whitney created film mantras. Belson's Allures (1961) and Whitney's Lapis (1966) use abstract animations similar to mandalas and new age music with the intention of provoking meditative states or mystical enlightenment. The theorist William Moritz described Allures as an optical invocation intended to open the chakras—energy centres of the human body, according to Hinduism. Belson later made a film entitled Chakra (1972) based on the order of the chakras and the type of sounds that are heard in states of deep meditation.
Also in the 60s, laser shows seeking similar effects became fashionable in the USA. The most popular laser shows were performed in the context of psychedelic rock, but they were also usual in planetariums and theatres using electronic soundtracks.
Today, if there’s an artist capable of provoking mystical ecstasy, it’s none other than Bill Viola. Viola doesn’t use mandalas nor flashing lights. He provokes ecstasy through stasis—seemingly still or contemplative images—drawing as much from Christian mysticism as from Buddhism. He’s also acutely aware of the power of sound, the only entity that can cross between the physical and the non-physical world. Sound is the element that passes between one thing and another. The element that goes through us.
Viola's work it’s not the only case of altered states of consciousness through figurative images. In the 70s, filmmakers such as Ernie Gehr and Michael Snow directed films with minimal or continuous camera movements that generate a sense of time-space dislocation. Serene Velocity (1970) and La Région Centrale (1971) use real images to provoke hypnotic effects. Serene Velocity is particularly paradoxical because all we see is an empty corridor. Nothing moves, not even the camera, and yet it moves, because the focal length of the lens is not the same throughout the film. This mechanical change generates a violent effect that has earned the film nicknames such as “Vertigo” and “Serene Vertigo”. The filmmaker Ken Jacobs went so far as to say that Serene Velocity is erotic because it seems to ram you like a phallus.
Like a rainy day or a vertigo attack
In the context of current experimental cinema, we find more cases than the aforementioned Tuohy, such as Bruce McClure, who uses 16mm projectors and distortion pedals to generate a voluntary torture based on noise and intermittent images. For McClure, this is a natural experience, like a rainy day or an attack of vertigo, but it’s also a show, and part of the show is your fear of having your eardrums perforated and your eyeballs popped out.
Another contemporary filmmaker working along these lines is Peter Tscherkassky. Pieces such as Outer Space (1999) or Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) use shots from commercial films to turn them into penetration. Images and sound flicker, collide, and explode in a violent struggle against our senses.
The scientific basis for all these shocks is that, as Burroughs pointed out, there’re certain visual rhythms that affect neural transmission to such an extent that we can become aware of the electrochemical workings of our nervous system. Many of the colours, shapes, images, and sounds that appear in these films are not in them. Sense-destructive cinema isn’t on the screen, it’s in our neurons.
In any case, even if the experience doesn’t arise from the frame, it does depend on the size of the frame and the power of the sound system, among other things, so it’s unlikely to suffer hallucinations watching a copy of any of these films on a TV set or computer screen. Some of these filmmakers have repeatedly refused to allow their films to be marketed on DVD because they only make sense shown in their original format under controlled conditions.
Collective nausea
Sense-destructive cinema is also present in mainstream films. In the early 1970s, Warner Bros showed a group of viewers a trailer for The Exorcist with flickering images and music by Lalo Schifrin. The reaction was so negative, to the point of vomiting, that the production company pulled the trailer and banned William Friedkin from using such “non-music”. Whether the music, which was too strange for the average spectator of the time, had anything to do with the vomiting or whether the strobe effect was entirely to blame is unclear, but what is clear is the potential of film to affect us beyond the purely intellectual and emotional.
The urban legend of sounds capable of causing vomiting and other scatological stuff comes from the industrial music of the 70s. Presumably, there are inaudible frequencies whose resonance can affect the stomach and intestines, but so far no one has been able to prove it. However, it has been proven that some people feel discomfort, pain, disorientation or even nausea when listening to certain frequencies, a fact that has been exploited to manufacture sound weapons.
Four years after The Exorcist incident, Richard Brooks' Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) was released, a controversial film with one of the most disturbing crime scenes ever seen. The extreme stylisation of the scene—a murder by strobe light—is far more chilling than any realistic crime scene; it quickens your pulse, raises your blood pressure, excites you, and sickens you. Brooks plays with the contrast between dark and light, noise—screams and a mechanical click—, and silence. The scene seems to follow the phases of the human sexual response: as the screams fade, the clicking and flashing light lose their rhythm, become choppy and slow down. The last part, almost abstract, ends in absolute emptiness. La petite mort.
There are many other examples of commercial films and TV shows that have used these effects to convey states of mental alienation, such as the episode “Takiawase” of Hannibal (2014) and the film A Field in England (2013), both of which are headed by a warning along the lines of The Flicker. These scenes have a narrative function, they’re not intended to destroy meaning, but simply to communicate the state of mind of the characters. In the context of non-experimental films, it’s rare to find examples as visceral as Brooks’.
Blurring space and time
Sense-destructive cinema has also influenced new media art. In 2007, the Sónar festival brought to Barcelona an installation by Kurt Hentschläger entitled Feed that could be understood as an expanded version of flicker films.
Feed begins, after signing a document releasing the artist and the organisation from any liability in case of damage, with a film of featureless 3D bodies floating in the void. As in Conrad's film, there are a few opening minutes of apparent calm, but if after the storm comes the calm, after the calm comes the storm. The room fills with smoke, strobe lights, and sub-bass. The quantity and density of the smoke combined with the vibration of sound and light blurs space and time and provides a psychotropic experience.
A few years later, Hentschläger created a similar installation entitled Zee, in this case without seats and without an introductory film. The experience was much more radical. By allowing free movement through a seemingly infinite space—the smoke didn’t allow to see more than a couple of inches away—, the entoptic visions and the sensation of loss of consciousness reached heights impossible to explain in words. To paraphrase Grant: it’s not something to comment on, it’s something to be.
Although this may sound a bit like a fairground attraction, Hentschläger's work is rooted in structuralist cinema. One of Hentschläger's most striking pieces is a film/installation entitled MODELL 5, made with Ulf Langheinrich, in which we see the face of the Japanese performer Akemi Takeya subjected to a series of repetitions in space and time that turn her into a cyborg. The exaggerated size of the screen (10 x 3.5 m), its mechanical rhythm and the subwoofers—special speakers for the lower frequencies—create the sensation of being penetrated by the electronic ether.
There are other destructions of meaning characteristic of the new technologies that are much more prosaic than these. A small percentage of viewers suffer dizziness and migraines when watching 3D films. In this case, the reason has nothing to do with the intentions of the filmmaker, but with the fact that 3D requires forced eye movements that some people are unable to cope with. To my knowledge, there has not yet been an experimental filmmaker who has exploited this to generate extreme perceptual experiences, probably because 3D is too expensive.
Perhaps we could say that sense-destructive cinema is that which seeks extreme perceptual experiences, appealing to the physiological, sensorial, and neurological rather than to the intellectual, emotional, and psychological. It’s not about films that provoke a physical response through images that might be uncomfortable or pornographic. It’s about taking advantage of the liquidity of perception to induce altered states of consciousness. Sense-destructive cinema is neither logic-narrative nor poetry-emotion, it’s spasmodic epiphany.
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