Cooking the Cosmic Soup: Vincent Moon's Altered States of Live Cinema

Vincent Moon's films and live cinema performances are described as 'psychedelic' because they open perception to invisible realms of percepts, affects, and durations beyond ordinary human experience. Drawing on Paul Schrader's concept of the transcendental style in film and Gilles Deleuze's time-image, Moon, an audiovisual ethnographer of world religions influenced by shamanic and animistic traditions, brings the transcendental style back to its plane of immanence. His live cinema has a ritualistic and ecstatic aspect recalling the esoteric history of haunted media, inducing altered states of mind, tapping into spiritual realities, and immersing audiences in magic.

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Abstract

The films and live cinema of Vincent Moon are considered in this chapter as ‘psychedelic’: a form of filmmaking and film performances that can open the doors of perception to invisible realms of percepts, affects and durations that are beyond or below ordinary human perception. According to Paul Schrader, films can evoke such spiritual dimensions, in particular through what he called the transcendental style of film, and what Gilles Deleuze termed the time-image. As an audio-visual ethnographer of world religions who is distinctly influenced by shamanic and animistic traditions, Moon brings the transcendental style back to its plane of immanence. His live cinema performances have a ritualistic and ecstatic aspect that recalls the esoteric history of haunted media. Moon's enthralling film performances induce altered states of mind, tap into spiritual realities and immerse the audience in magic.