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FLicKeR tells the story of Brion Gysin (the “only man” William S. Burroughs “ever respected”) and his unique contributions to the Arts. Well, indeed, the film cannot completely tell the story, relying more generally on interviews with authors, philosophers, neuroscientists, artists, and other prominent individual from various fields. As a Parisian curator said of Gysin’s most arguably famous work, “It’s a very peculiar piece to classify”; and so is the film itself, following Gysin’s life and work around the loose construct of his “Dreamachine”—a “provoked accident” that related to his own poetry and painting, but also touches upon instances of neurobiology and the anarchic principles of the 1960’s anti-control movements.
In short, FLicKeR is a biography of a person told not about the individual himself, really, but by the recollections of others on the influences of his works — a sort of verbal, artistic Gedenkschrift, in a way.
Beginning with the filmmaker’s attempt to recreate the Dreamachine, the audience is shown that, during a 1950’s train ride, Gysin experienced, basically, a sort of drug trip, caused by sunlight’s interaction with the moving vehicle. The resulting strobe effect was not “grace,” Gysin found, but a physio-neurological effect that stimulated alpha waves in the brain, evincing dreams, hallucinations, and—filmed researchers tell us—epileptic seizures in one out of every 4000 people. The archival images and sound as well as interviews with famous artists (such as Marianne Faithfull, Leila Luce, D.J. Spooky, Kenneth Anger, Iggy Pop) and authors produce a description of Gysin via a description of the machine, and proof of the evolution of the machine out of Gysin’s worldview and artistic standpoint.
There is much talk, as expected, of the similarities of the effects of the Dreamachine to drug use; and the various interviewees express different, though certainly generally uniformly “psychedelic,” visions they experience.
But more than a recitation of subjective emotions is the rich foundation that this machine, and individuals’ thoughts on it, develop for biographical information and, essentially, Gysin’s place within the art world and his true impact upon it.
For instance, we are told that Gysin was obsessed with “unraveling control”—as evidenced by a recording of his spoken poetry repeating “control” over and over again. Via the interviews it becomes clear to the audience how Gysin and his work sought to accomplish this. The artist’s physical art—the graphic, grid-based anagrams; the calligraphic images; the innovative use of “Cut Ups” were, we are told, a manner for the artist to express himself. But the Dreamachine was the “end of art.” The machine provided individual and individualized images to each viewer. No longer was art imposed on audiences by the medium of paint or text; the Dreamachine gave everyone a sort of self-generated, unconscious art show of their own.
It is only toward the end of the film that anything like a more “traditional” biography is presented, but Gysin’s time in Morocco, his belief that he was the reincarnation of the 10th century leader of the Assassins, and other potentially fascinating biographical facts are, as elsewhere, glossed over in deference to more subjective and “artistic” interpretations of the subject himself.
Naturally, given the principle player in the film and the times and ethos from which most of Gysin’s work sprung, there are often reference to drugs and the machine’s (and Gysin’s other art) similarity therein, thereby restricting the film’s audience. So too, the experimental, hyper-visual and –audio “weird” quality of the film itself will necessarily restrict some viewers.
All of the above is fairly heavy intellectual “stuff,” but the film benefits from its high-profile and energetic speakers as well as the real art of the filmmaker. While the visual track can be utterly confusing, the repetitious spoken poetry can be somewhat irritating, the constant flickering scenes of the Dreamachine can be annoying, the insights of the speakers can be truly fascinating and the bridge expressed between kinetics and art is surely educational.
Naturally, the speakers themselves are often quite plain in their admiration or explanation of Gysin, which makes the narrative much more accessible to viewers. Too, the discussions of the utterly failed marketing campaign of the Dreamachine provide levity—but also interesting food for thought as to the commercialization and accessibility of all types of art.
Of course, audiences that are not terribly interested in or adept at Beat and drug cultures, Futurist and post-Dada-type movements (with their textual and individual deconstruction as well as the integration of humans into machines), and anarchic punk movements will almost certainly be divorced from any sense that the film is trying to convey.
Gysin is called “a conjuror swallowed up by his own spell,” and this statement is certainly telling in that the artist is little remembered today; but FLicKeR installs him neatly in his own times while proving that his constructions formed a bedrock for much of the avant-garde and anti-control elements that followed. Our culture has been shaped by his and similar artists’ spell, but this particular magician is, perhaps, less and less in his own creation, hidden by myth, reinterpretation, and the general ignorance of his seminal work.
Of course, for viewers interested in Gysin, Burroughs, these eras and movements as well as the ramifications of poetic movements and the influence of past artistic schools upon today’s “progressive” art movements, FLicKeR is a fine and useful film. It is surely recommended for collections that specialize in specific areas of art, literature, poetry, pop culture, and writing.
-Educational Media Reviews Online
Full Reviews
Video Librarian Review May-June 2009 on FLicKeR
Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars - Recommended!
Brion Gysin (1916-1986)—painter, writer, performance artist, and countercultural guru—is hardly a household name, but Nik Sheehan’s documentary clearly demonstrates that Gysin was influential on some better-known authors, musicians, and filmmakers. FLicKeR opens with a conventional biographical sketch that is primarily dependent on photographic stills and overlaid narration, but fairly quickly expands to incorporate a collage of newly-filmed interviews (featuring acolytes such as Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, and Kenneth Anger, as well as friends and acquaintances), archival footage, and artwork, while covering topics that include Gysin’s collaboration with William S. Burroughs (which resulted in the “cut-up” composition technique of scrambling images and words) and Gysin’s belief that he was “channeling” the 10th-century Persian Old Man of the Mountain, also known as the King of the Assassins. But the central thread running throughout the film concerns Gysin’s construction of the so-called “dream machine,” a contraption (using a light bulb, turntable, and cardboard cylinder) designed to create a hypnotic strobe effect that, according to Gysin (who collaborated with British mathematician Ian Sommerville), could bring a person—if they stared intently enough—into a higher state of consciousness without using drugs. An insightful look at a figure perhaps more notable for his oddity and effect on others than his individual accomplishments, this intriguing profile is recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
FLicKeR Review
By Graham Rae
Featured on Reality Studio
Published: 8.25.08
Dreams. Let’s face it, nobody truly fully knows what they really are. We spend a third of our lives asleep, inscrutable calcium fortress skulls encasing reality-drained mammalian brains in energy-conservation-mode lockdown, being carried along a constant unintelligible river of tattered neon headswimages, safely drowning in cryptic riptides of brief-flare neuronic-and-synaptic mosaics of our daily lives.
Historically, dreams have been charged with everything from curing health problems to prophesying upcoming world events, bearing the weightless weight of would-could-should-be future human evolution and revelation. Musings on our nocturnal cranial emissions moved from prophetic to psychological study mode with Freud’s 1900 volume The Interpretation of Dreams. This book spawned a pop-pseudoscience-fiction literary subgenre about the supposed “meaning” behind various symbols and subjects encountered in dreams, and what they “meant” for the dreamer. More recently, however, hard science has tackled our sleeping dreaming wondering selves with excellent volumes like An Evolutionary Psychology of Sleep And Dreams, which attempt to unravel the evolutionary physiological reasoning behind our everynight internal flickershows.
One man, however, who was not so much interested in what dreams “meant” as with recreating them at will by means of electronic stimulus was artist Brion Gysin, the only man William S. Burroughs ever respected (always wondered what that meant with regards to Allen Ginsberg, who basically got WSB his literary career, but that’s beside the point). The far-traveled secret agent provocateur agenda artist was in France in December 1958, when he experienced a lightshow-and-tell that would change his life forever. As he put it in a diary entry for 12/21/58:
Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseilles. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling through space. I was swept out of time. I was out in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me?
New documentary FLicKeR, based on the John Geiger book Chapel of Extreme Experience, attempts to explain this very question. The puzzled man’s bemused musings on his tripping-the-light-fantastic experience were only sort-of solved when the ever-cutting-edge reader Burroughs passed him the then-new neuroscience volume The Living Brain by W. Grey Walter, the man widely credited with inventing artificial intelligence. Gysin was fascinated to learn of the hypnotic stereopticon stroboscopic effects of certain light-and-dark alternating patterns on stimulating the brain’s alpha waves, and how the headspinspiration produced could synthetically generate something pretty much akin to dreams or visions.
Gysin wanted to harness the prophetic power of lightwaves for visionary fun and for profit. Pondering synthetic vision-inducing methods, the nomadic artistic-truth-seeker came up with the idea for a dream machine, an eccentric device basically incorporating a 100-watt bulb, a turntable, and a cut-up cylinder of cardboard, to create a strobelight effect on the viewer’s closed eyelids. This in turn approximated the effect Gysin had experienced on his revelationary French bus trip, and the awed viewer could sit and experience a drugless high to his or her heart’s content.
In theory, if not in practice. Gysin took his baby to brilliant English mathematician Ian Sommerville and got him to construct a prototype, realizing that mass manufacturing of this device could lift him from his shabby garret-dwelling existence and into far richer realms than he inhabited. He tried to sell his invention to electrical company Phillips, but noted ruefully that they wanted a device to put people to sleep whereas he wanted quite the reverse. Nobody quite knew what to make of the dream machine, whether it was an art piece or a toy or an entertainment. Or was it the End of Art (to be looked at with the eyes closed, as was sagely noted) and something that would make artists outdated? This contradictory classification conundrum was never solved and Gysin died broke in 1986 in Paris, to sleep eternally perchance to machine-dream of a mainstream artistic breakthrough he never achieved during his lifetime.
This sad, fascinating, quixotic quest is comprehensively covered in this excellent documentary, running parallel with a brief, tantalizing discussion of Gysin’s artwork and his undervalued place in the art world in general. This whole aspect of the man could be doing with a whole movie itself, because by necessity the filmmakers are concentrating on Gysin’s lightflight invention. What is contained, however, is as illuminating as the machine whose evolution it documents, and when a contemporary dream machine is constructed and used by various artists and musicians past and present, it certainly made me want to build one of my own.
Various surviving 60s countercultural heroes like Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull and Kenneth Anger are interviewed about their meetings with the artist, and it makes for entertaining stuff, especially as most of the old crew in the doc seem a bit drugfried; Terry Wilson, Gysin’s one-time sorcerer’s apprentice, seems particularly, eh, short of a reality check or two. But that’s fine. When you’re dealing with dabblers in drugs and the occult you have to expect a braincrash or two. Special passing mention here must go to Psychic TV singer / all-round far-out artistic malcontent Genesis P-Orridge, who gives off an unpleasant and unsettling aura of pain and depression and deep mental imbalance as he discusses at length his friendship with the film’s subject.
With a set of implanted breasts (he believes he is the male-female incarnation of himself and his now-deceased wife) and blonde wig he looks uncannily like Andy Warhol after bad plastic surgery, and I felt a mixture of pity and revulsion and boredom watching him and his bad 60s-psychedelia-meets-Joy-Division band playing along to dream machine-like strobelights. Much better and more interesting footage is stuff like a British Channel 4 interview with Gysin and Wilson from 1983, or footage of the artist’s “soulmate” Burroughs shooting up, or the mad experimental films they made together during the 50s and 60s. There’s some great animation explaining who Hassan I Sabbah (Gysin believed he was channeling the 10th century King of The Assassins) is, and, in a rare moment or two of levity, some hilarious footage of a tortoise-robot from the 1950s when W. Grey Walter and his pioneering cybernetic work is being discussed.
Gysin was obsessed with writing and rewriting his signature graphomaniac-style-after-different-new-style, changing and arranging and rearranging and deranging the letters of it into every configuration possible to see which would look better, obviously obsessed with, and confused by, identity. He believed by eliminating the name you could eliminate the body; his art was magical in basis, with a lot of this gleaned from living in Tangier in the 50s, where he met Burroughs in 1954. The two men’s thinking was an odd admixture of scientific and magical, with them seemingly able to believe in utterly worthless garbage sometimes and do stuff like try to put spells on astronauts in space. This pathological paralogic surrounding Burroughs is never something I’ve been able to understand or accept, except as a consequence of rampant hardcore drug abuse and constantly-altered realities, and I guess linear logical thinking (which the two artists would probably have said was overrated anyway) was always going to be a casualty of the eternal internal drug war in these two fascinating individuals.
It’s funny though. Musing on how Gysin (described as “the conjuror swallowed up by his own spell”), who was penniless and mostly unknown (even today) when he died, Marcus Boon, author of The Road to Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, says of Gysin in the film:
He somehow disappeared as the agent of the forces he was setting in motion, and that in some sense was actually a success, it actually proved that he was able to do something or other. And again, that’s why we’re talking about him 20 years after his death. Some kind of force was unleashed and made its way into all these different channels of culture. But he himself seems to have disappeared in the process.
Which, judging by what he was trying to do with eradicating his name, is more than a little ironic. This superb documentary (to which there is much more than I have discussed here) is wholeheartedly recommended to both Burroughs / Gysin aficionados or newcomers to Gysin’s oeuvre, like myself. I personally learned a lot, and realized how much I had devalued Gysin’s role in Burroughs’ life and work and worldview. A fundamentally stupid error, of course, as is Gysin’s still relatively unknown status, but hopefully this educational and inspirational work will go some way to rectifying that. That would be a magical act indeed.
PS: Feel like making a dream machine for fun and no profit? Go have at it!
FLicKeR Review
By Kamal Al-Solaylee
Featured in The Globe and Mail
Published: November 27, 2008
Part literary biography, part science fiction, and part and parcel counterculture certifiable lunacy, Nik Sheehan’s FLicKeR is a documentary with mood-altering aspirations. For those who like their escapist entertainment raunchier than Twilight but less violent than Quantum of Solace, this Canadian doc will keep the economic news in the papers and the Christmas music in the malls out of your mind for all of its 72-minute running time.
On second thought, escapist may be underselling the ideology that inspired Flicker. Try the chance to achieve transcendence. Travel through the time-space continuum. Soar on a drugless high. After all, these were some of the claims Brion Gysin — sound poet, calligrapher, part-time Canadian and full-time beat-generation Svengali — made when he unveiled his dream machine in the 1960s.
The machine was based on the “flicker effect” theory proposed by W. Grey Walter in his book The Living Brain (1953). By replicating the exact frequency of alpha waves in the brain through the manipulation of light inside a rotating cylinder with patterned cutouts, the machine induces the perception of shapes and images in the user’s mind. Anyone sitting close to the machine with eyes closed can then create “their own spiritual movies” and experience parallel existences (that’s Sixties-speak for hallucinations).
Instead of replacing television sets in every household, as Gysin had hoped, dream machines became a symbol of what’s revolutionary about the counterculture and what’s so boneheaded about it.
Based on John Geiger’s well-received book Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine, Sheehan’s compelling documentary delivers a culturally incisive job of unmasking Gysin. That’s no small feat, considering the mercurial and spectre-like nature of a man who believed himself to be the reincarnation of the 10th-century King of Assassins and who counted writer William S. Burroughs, singer Marianne Faithfull and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones among his friends and lovers.
Sheehan goes out of his way to prove that, for a man who lived in infamy and died (in 1986) in obscurity, Gysin’s influence on today’s culture extends beyond rap and dub poetry and into the emergence of audiences as creators of their own computer-made and distributed entertainment. Experts from stuffy neurosurgeons to hip DJs are interviewed in an attempt to shed light on Gysin as a visionary and the dream machine as a precursor to anything Apple Inc. puts an “i” in front of and sells to the creative masses: iPhones, iPods, iMovies.
Where’s the escapism I promised, you must be wondering by now? It’s there in the journeys that Sheehan and a replica of the dream machine make to New York, Paris and Tangier, among other destinations, tracing Gysin’s wandering existence and giving substantial camera time to counterculture dinosaurs who talk, dress and look as if the Sixties never ended. They may espouse different views but all agree on one thing: A decent haircut is clearly still a sign of selling out.
More importantly, escapism comes through in the open-ended tone of the film. Sheehan recreates Gysin’s world with a skeptic’s belief. Despite the scientific basis of the “flicker effect,” the doc leaves open the possibility that it may all be a load of hogwash. There’s just enough distance between filmmaker and subject to filter in a layer of bemusement, befuddlement even. Guest appearances by the likes of Iggy Pop and Faithfull confirm their reputations as kings and queens of rock — but also its court jesters. Some of the visual tricks to simulate the flicker effect or suggest mind-bending consequences are delightfully tacky without being maliciously ironic.
It all adds up, somehow. Flicker may not deliver the drugless high of the dream machine, but it does its bit to elevate the discussion of Gysin’s legacy while putting down, gently and lovingly, its wackier side. In the hands of the right director, escapism can be a balanced act.
FLicKeR Review
Reviewed by Dan DiLandro, E.H. Butler Library, State University of New York College at Buffalo
Recommended
November 21, 2008
FLicKeR tells the story of Brion Gysin (the “only man” William S. Burroughs “ever respected”) and his unique contributions to the Arts. Well, indeed, the film cannot completely tell the story, relying more generally on interviews with authors, philosophers, neuroscientists, artists, and other prominent individual from various fields. As a Parisian curator said of Gysin’s most arguably famous work, “It’s a very peculiar piece to classify”; and so is the film itself, following Gysin’s life and work around the loose construct of his “Dreamachine”—a “provoked accident” that related to his own poetry and painting, but also touches upon instances of neurobiology and the anarchic principles of the 1960’s anti-control movements.
In short, FLicKeR is a biography of a person told not about the individual himself, really, but by the recollections of others on the influences of his works — a sort of verbal, artistic Gedenkschrift, in a way.
Beginning with the filmmaker’s attempt to recreate the Dreamachine, the audience is shown that, during a 1950’s train ride, Gysin experienced, basically, a sort of drug trip, caused by sunlight’s interaction with the moving vehicle. The resulting strobe effect was not “grace,” Gysin found, but a physio-neurological effect that stimulated alpha waves in the brain, evincing dreams, hallucinations, and—filmed researchers tell us—epileptic seizures in one out of every 4000 people. The archival images and sound as well as interviews with famous artists (such as Marianne Faithfull, Leila Luce, D.J. Spooky, Kenneth Anger, Iggy Pop) and authors produce a description of Gysin via a description of the machine, and proof of the evolution of the machine out of Gysin’s worldview and artistic standpoint.
There is much talk, as expected, of the similarities of the effects of the Dreamachine to drug use; and the various interviewees express different, though certainly generally uniformly “psychedelic,” visions they experience.
But more than a recitation of subjective emotions is the rich foundation that this machine, and individuals’ thoughts on it, develop for biographical information and, essentially, Gysin’s place within the art world and his true impact upon it.
For instance, we are told that Gysin was obsessed with “unraveling control”—as evidenced by a recording of his spoken poetry repeating “control” over and over again. Via the interviews it becomes clear to the audience how Gysin and his work sought to accomplish this. The artist’s physical art—the graphic, grid-based anagrams; the calligraphic images; the innovative use of “Cut Ups” were, we are told, a manner for the artist to express himself. But the Dreamachine was the “end of art.” The machine provided individual and individualized images to each viewer. No longer was art imposed on audiences by the medium of paint or text; the Dreamachine gave everyone a sort of self-generated, unconscious art show of their own.
It is only toward the end of the film that anything like a more “traditional” biography is presented, but Gysin’s time in Morocco, his belief that he was the reincarnation of the 10th century leader of the Assassins, and other potentially fascinating biographical facts are, as elsewhere, glossed over in deference to more subjective and “artistic” interpretations of the subject himself.
Naturally, given the principle player in the film and the times and ethos from which most of Gysin’s work sprung, there are often reference to drugs and the machine’s (and Gysin’s other art) similarity therein, thereby restricting the film’s audience. So too, the experimental, hyper-visual and –audio “weird” quality of the film itself will necessarily restrict some viewers.
All of the above is fairly heavy intellectual “stuff,” but the film benefits from its high-profile and energetic speakers as well as the real art of the filmmaker. While the visual track can be utterly confusing, the repetitious spoken poetry can be somewhat irritating, the constant flickering scenes of the Dreamachine can be annoying, the insights of the speakers can be truly fascinating and the bridge expressed between kinetics and art is surely educational.
Naturally, the speakers themselves are often quite plain in their admiration or explanation of Gysin, which makes the narrative much more accessible to viewers. Too, the discussions of the utterly failed marketing campaign of the Dreamachine provide levity—but also interesting food for thought as to the commercialization and accessibility of all types of art.
Of course, audiences that are not terribly interested in or adept at Beat and drug cultures, Futurist and post-Dada-type movements (with their textual and individual deconstruction as well as the integration of humans into machines), and anarchic punk movements will almost certainly be divorced from any sense that the film is trying to convey.
Gysin is called “a conjuror swallowed up by his own spell,” and this statement is certainly telling in that the artist is little remembered today; but FLicKeR installs him neatly in his own times while proving that his constructions formed a bedrock for much of the avant-garde and anti-control elements that followed. Our culture has been shaped by his and similar artists’ spell, but this particular magician is, perhaps, less and less in his own creation, hidden by myth, reinterpretation, and the general ignorance of his seminal work.
Of course, for viewers interested in Gysin, Burroughs, these eras and movements as well as the ramifications of poetic movements and the influence of past artistic schools upon today’s “progressive” art movements, FLicKeR is a fine and useful film. It is surely recommended for collections that specialize in specific areas of art, literature, poetry, pop culture, and writing.