Series Site
March 1–May 10, 2026
Organized with the support of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Psychedelia & Cinema presents a kaleidoscopic array of movies that explore expanded or enhanced consciousness, psychedelic experiences, and numinous encounters. Realized through psychoactive substances, meditation, deprivation, or other means, these experiences have been an important element of many cultures for millennia and have more recently become the object of scientific study, as well as being used for both therapy and recreation. Cinema, the “Seventh Art,” is uniquely suited to explore altered and non-ordinary states of consciousness. From cinema’s earliest flickers to the present day, filmmakers have used techniques from montage to multiple exposures, lens distortion to animation and CGI, to create mystical visions and ecstatic journeys into inner and outer space.
Psychedelia & Cinema includes Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967), in which a television director tries LSD to make sense of his life. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021) explores the blurred boundaries between the natural world and the spirit realm, collective traumas, memories, and dreams. Also included in the series are documentarian Christine Turner’s chronicle of the quest of composer/philosopher Sun Ra to use music to tap into cosmic consciousness as a means for liberation, and Nathaniel Dorsky’s cinematic trip into the universe of 16mm film emulsion. The series kicks off with Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s portrait of scientist and psychonaut John Lilly, whose lifelong pursuit to understand the mysteries of the mind—via dolphins, isolation tanks, and LSD—is inextricably woven into the culture and counterculture of the twentieth century and beyond.
—Kate MacKay, Film Curator