Altered States: Psychedelic Experimental Cinema as Border Crossing in Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS

The article examines Bruce Conner's film LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–1967), a key work of experimental cinema linked to psychedelic counterculture. It analyzes motifs such as Mexican village life, hallucinogenic mushrooms, appearances by Timothy Leary, and allusions to the atomic bomb. Contextualizing the film within Cold War discourses of race and nationhood, the author argues that its engagement with psychedelia is shaped by a colonialist logic of expansion and self-discovery, where primitivist projections of Indigeneity play a constitutive role.

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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.