Psychedelic Crystals in Cinema: Opening Virtual Dimensions and Potential Healing

The article proposes a new concept called the 'psychedelic crystal', building on Gilles Deleuze's idea of the crystal-image. This concept links the crystalline regime of cinema with current scientific research into the healing potential of hallucinogenic drugs. The psychedelic crystal emerges from the intersection of Deleuze's crystals of time, the therapeutic use of psychedelics, and Siegfried Kracauer's idea of cinematic redemption. Both films and drugs are seen as media with curative power, capable of restoring belief in the world and renewing life's affirmative potential. Analyzing Jan Kounen's film Blueberry (2004), the article argues that cinema can reanimate mental and physical reality, particularly in cases of traumatic, repressed, or dissociated memories. This positions certain film aesthetics as a mind-revealing, mind-expanding, and mind-healing technology, entangled with the revival of psychedelic therapy.

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Abstract

This article proposes a different aesthetic state of Gilles Deleuze’s crystal-image defined as ‘psychedelic crystal’, a formation of the crystalline regime in light of the contemporary revival of scientific research exploring the healing potentialities of hallucinogenic drugs. The proposition of the psychedelic crystal occurs between Deleuze’s crystals of time, the therapeutic dimension of psychedelics, and Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of redemption (as salvation) through the cinematic medium. What lies in the middle of this encounter is a shared understanding of media – films as media; drugs as media – as holding a curative influence: to resume an affirmative potentiality for life and to restore a belief in the (physical and psychical) world. The film-philosophical dimension of the psychedelic crystal, developed specifically through an engagement with Jan Kounen’s Blueberry (2004) as case study, sees cinema with the potential to reanimate our mental and physical reality, especially when in relation to traumatically repressed, dissociated or repeated memory formations – thus looking at certain film aesthetics as a mind-revealing, mind-expanding and mind-healing technology which can be considered as intrinsically entangled with the current revival of therapeutic practices of psychoactive substances. As a proposition, the psychedelic crystal discloses a potential dimension of the psychedelic frontier of healing which transversally embraces the transdisciplinary gamut of film-philosophy, film theory and psychedelic research.