Altered States: Psychedelic Experimental Cinema as Border Crossing in Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS
Johanna Gosse
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 arg… Show more
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