FLicKeR review from DVDCorner.net
Written by Bob Ham
January 5, 2009

This quickly paced but nonetheless fascinating documentary takes a look at the life and career of theorist/artist/philosopher Brion Gysin, particularly his work trying to tap into higher states of consciousness through the creation of something called a dream machine.

The device uses a spinning cylinder through which light is projected. According to the film, by sitting close to the light with your eyes closed, it can produce hallucinations and visions. Throughout the film you get to see several people - including Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Iggy Pop and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ guitarist Nick Zinner - trying it out, all of whom vouch for the power of its visionary abilities.

As much as the film concentrates on this device, it is also a love letter to the anarchic spirit of Gysin and his writings and life - particularly his relationship with Beat writer William S. Burroughs - and the spirit of people trying to tap into other realms of their own mind. For the viewer unfamiliar with this kind of work, it can be a daunting world to dive into but director Nik Sheehan does an incredible job of making it accessible and involving for everyone.

Dreamachines: “FLicKeR” Stares Into the Light
Featured on SF360
By Matt Sussman
Published: 8.5.08

In our popular imagination—and especially in film— the request to “stare into the light” is often an invitation to let our waking life fall into submission. The words— often spoken by hypnotists, anesthesiologists, and mystics— also describe the act of watching movies, and speak to film’s implicit promise of taking us to some other scene accessed through the flickers on the screen.

The transportive and conscious altering qualities of light were not lost on William S. Burroughs and his compatriot and frequent collaborator Brion Gysin. “We must storm the citadels of enlightenment,” Burroughs wrote to Gysin, “the means are at hand.” The means at hand were Gysin’s revelation about the hallucinatory qualities of flickering light and the device he invented in 1957 to harness its potential: the dreamachine. Nik Sheenan’s hypnotic documentary FLicKeR— which makes its U.S. premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts– looks into the dreamachine’s pulsating brilliance while also sketching a portrait of its troubled and brilliant creator.

Simple in design and resembling a rotating Ikea lamp, the cylindrical dream machine emits a stroboscopic light pattern that pulses at the same frequency as the brain’s alpha waves, allowing the user to enter into an intense state of near lucid dreaming when they “gaze” long enough through closed eyes. Gysin and Burroughs called the dreamachine “the drugless eye.” Like his earlier visual experiments in cutting up written texts, Gysin envisioned his creation as an experiential means to circumvent the dominant channels of thought he and Burroughs termed “Control.” And with every household practically glued to their television sets throughout the 1950s, such paranoia certainly seemed warranted.

Sheenan weaves in a fair amount of this historical background early on—with plenty of wonderful archival footage of Burroughs and Gysin— but the meat of his film consists of the testimonials of former associates of Gysin and newer dreamachine fans who sing the hallucinatory praises of the device, often in situ. The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s guitarist Nick Zinner describes tranquil fields, Marianne Faithful encounters friendly shadows, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Renaldo waxes about devolving, multicolored chessboards, Iggy Pop praises it as a meditative aid and Sheenan himself describes an early experience as characterized by a host of angels swarming towards him.

Although their testimonials might require a suspension of disbelief, the impressive parade of counter cultural talking heads put forth a cumulative defense of Gysin as a creative force in his own right, whose talents and insights extend far beyond Burroughs’ long shadow. (At one point, Faithful interestingly claims it was Burroughs’ intense neediness that made him and Gysin so close). Having been dismissed as a serious artist by the New York scene, and unable to fall back on the kind of privilege that largely funded Burroughs’ nomadic lifestyle, Gysin saw the dreamachine as the next Lava Lamp— a possible ticket out of his transitory, garret-hopping existence. Unsurprisingly, given the device’s esoteric intent, no toy manufacturers ever bit.

But as Throbbing Gristle member and Gysin friend Genesis P. Orridge dryly suggests, maybe the cosseted masses didn’t deserve access to the dreamachine—or rather, they wouldn’t know how to deal with what it can access. At the film’s close, we see a dreamachine wheeled on stage during a recent Stooges concert just as the band sinks into the opening chords of “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The stage lights go off and the machine whirs to life. Perhaps this is the dreamachine’s ideal audience. Prostrating himself before the flickering tower as if to act out his lyrics, Iggy smiles, his eyes closed, enjoining the crowd to follow him into the light.
 

THE GYSIN FILE: FLicKeR looks through the dreamachine in search of Brion Gysin
Featured in The San Francisco Bay Guardian
By Johnny Ray Huston
Published: 8.6.08

I associate the dreamachine with Christmas. The first and only time I’ve directly encountered a version of the device was a holiday five or six years ago. My friend Julien used a turntable to set up a homemade dreamachine in a corner room of his family’s cabin. I took a turn sitting with my eyes closed in front of its stroboscopic play of light and darkness. I didn’t have an epileptic fit; nor did I go into a hypnagogic state. It wasn’t a drugless high, but it was a mind’s eye stimulus. I’d try the dreamachine again.

“I don’t think [the dreamachine] really works unless you’ve smoked a pipe of hash,” Kenneth Anger declares during FLicKeR, Nik Sheehan’s documentary about the device and its chief creator, the writer, painter, and mystic Brion Gysin. “I think it’s too dangerous if you’ve taken acid,” he adds. You get the feeling Anger is speaking from experience, even if he doesn’t face a dreamachine in front of Sheehan’s camera. Such a meeting isn’t necessary, because FLicKeR’s first 15 minutes serves up a Who’s Who of dreamachine enthusiasts in action: Marianne Faithfull, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, and Genesis P. Orridge of Psychic TV are among those Sheehan captures sitting and staring — with eyes closed — before the contraption’s oscillating light.

The dreamachine makes for potent visual imagery, but distilling or truly conveying its effect is a tougher task for a filmmaker, even if Sheehan’s camera briefly stares directly into one (and later, incorporates Tony Conrad’s 1965 film The Flicker, a potent projector-based dreamachine corollary). For Sheehan, the mechanism provides a kinetic introduction to or threshold into, a portrait of the late Gysin. Though Gysin — who invented the Cut-Up literary methods popularized by best friend William S. Burroughs — is a shadowy figure to hang a feature-length film portrait on, FLicKeR’s hopping, skipping, and jumping approach to his life at least energizes his enigma.

In Victor Bockris’ 1981 interview collection With William S. Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker (Seaver), Burroughs — who also says, typically, “[Gysin] taught me everything I know about painting” — relates Gysin’s description of a milk bar just after a terrorist blast: “People were lying around with their legs cut off, spattered with maraschino cherries, passion fruit, ice cream, brains, pieces of mirror and blood.” Without a living subject, Sheehan must turn to various vivid Gysin acquaintances — mirror man Ira Cohen and a spry John Giorno, for example — to bring across similar illustrations of anarchic spirit. In the process, offhand observations come to mind: Genesis P. Orridge has transformed herself into a sisterly peer of rad auntie Faithfull (who praises Gysin’s warmth in her autobiography, where she’s largely disdainful of all men), for one. It’s easy to lose sight of Gysin amid such colorful characters, but FLicKeR is steadfast in its belief that Gysin is influential; a variety of academics use Gysin as a gateway to discussions of everything from the changing nature of terrorism to iPods.

He may not be the center of 20th-century history, but Gysin’s influence on the present is undeniable. This is partly due to another wave of ’60s resurgence. FLicKeR kicks off “Stoned Apocalypse,” a Joel Shepard–curated Yerba Buena Center for the Arts series that includes a program devoted to the legendary light shows that overtook late-’60s music concerts. While most people associate such light shows with rock music, the new collection, The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (University of California Press, 322 pages, $27.50), explores its links to avant-garde cinema and music in the Bay Area.

The dreamachine-like notion and practice of live cinema is building momentum in recent years, thanks to practitioners such as Bruce Fletcher, a new surge of interest in Conrad, and a 2007 San Francisco Cinematheque series that inspired an anthology of writing on the subject. Last year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Anthony McCall’s installation You and I, Horizontal filtered Conrad’s and Gysin’s ideas about pure light into a communal rather than individual experience so potent it was akin to near-death or first-moments-of-life. That which flickers still illuminates, and it may soon turn into a piercing beam of light.
 

Altered States
Featured in SF Weekly
By Michael Fox
Published on 7.30.08

The groundbreaking painter, writer, and performance artist Brion Gysin was, above all, a seeker. A close friend of William Burroughs, Gysin explored the outer edge of human consciousness, with and without “artificial” stimulants. (His last words, in 1986, were, “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”) Nik Sheehan’s fascinating film FLicKeR , the first hit of the month-long series “The Stoned Apocalypse,” revives Gysin’s spark and spirit and, centrally, the all-natural trip launcher he co-invented and dubbed the Dreamachine. This simple piece of machinery, consisting of a silver cylinder with bits cut out spinning around an incandescent bulb, triggers eyes-closed, color-laden visions through the magic of light stimulation. Or so attests a thoughtful cadre of veteran trippers, including Marianne Faithfull, Iggy Pop, and DJ Spooky. The rare documentary that jumps beyond informative and entertaining into the realm of mind-expanding, FLicKeR blends revelatory biography, energizing philosophy, and seductive traces. Accompanying his film’s U.S. premiere, the Canadian director plans to show off a newly designed dream machine. Captain Nik will get you high tonight — if he gets it through Customs.
 

FLicKeR
Featured in Flavorpill (Issue 327)
By Matt Sussman

“We must storm the citadels of enlightenment. The means are at hand,” William S. Burroughs wrote to his compatriot, polymath Brion Gysin. Burroughs was referring to Gysin’s dream machine — a rotating, lamp-like device whose strobe effect sent its user into an intense state similar to lucid dreaming. Nik Sheehan’s hypnotic documentary FLicKeR looks at the machine’s long half-life in underground culture since Gysin and Burroughs first stared into “the drugless high” in the late ’50s. Iggy Pop, Lee Ranaldo, and Marianne Faithfull all praise the machine, though their hosannas further underscore the fact that Gysin was unable to successfully capitalize on his invention. Storming the citadels would have to wait.

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!