Altered States: Psychedelic Experimental Cinema as Border Crossing in Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS
Journal of cinema and media studies – January 01, 2021
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
Bruce Conner's *LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS* (1959–1967), a key work in Art history, reveals a colonialist logic underpinning its psychedelic counterculture. Through ethnographic views of Mexican village life, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and atomic bomb symbolism, the film, experienced in a Movie theater, frames self-discovery as racial "expansion." This Sociology and Aesthetics analysis, drawing from Psychedelics and Drug Studies, critiques how the Symbolic projections of Indigeneity, despite diverse academic themes, reflect Cold War discourses of Race, challenging its perceived liberation.
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.