Head movies and acid westerns: 5 Questions for film historian and archivist Haden Guest

Guest discusses the films selected for Harvard Film Archive's Psychedelic Cinema series and their lasting legacy.

Haden Guest has always had a soft spot for the avant garde. The writings of Aldous Huxley captivated him in his youth; after receiving a PhD in film history at the University of California at Los Angeles, he learned that Huxley actually had worked on an early screenplay for the 1951 film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, but was never credited. Now director of the Harvard Film Archive, Guest is co-curator of Harvard’s new psychedelic cinema series, which explores the influence of psychedelics and psychedelic-like experiences in film. The Microdose spoke with him about the films in the series and their lasting legacy.

What was your vision for this series?

This idea of looking at cinema through the lens of psychedelics — historically, culturally, and in terms of film form and language — is a really rich topic. My co-curator Alex Vasile and I wanted to think and look at different so-called genres within psychedelic cinema. There are films that deal with psychedelics as a topic; ones that explore the counterculture role of psychedelics. And then there are films that work within an avant garde mode, making more abstract films, where the avant garde film itself is a kind of drug; these films have a cosmic quality to them, which creates a lush, immersive experience, a rush of images with powerful music – its rhythms and repetitions create a kind of hallucinatory effect. 

And there are so-called “head movies”: mainstream films that were understood at the time of their release as being ideal for watching while under the influence, like Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland, which were rediscovered on college campuses. There’s also Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which confused a lot of audiences at the time and wasn’t as well-received as one would expect, but then someone came up with the idea to market it as “the ultimate trip” — it was subtly, or not-so-subtly, promoted as a head movie.

And finally there are films made by filmmakers who were on drugs. Robert Altman has talked about how his film Three Women, starring the great Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek, was inspired by a dream he had. It has a dreamy quality and it’s very hallucinatory; it’s also well-known that there were substances being consumed on that set. With some films, it helps you understand the film if you understand the particular influence of the drugs that helped inspire it. 

I imagine that ends up being a lot of movies! How did you choose which films to include?

We started with everything on the table first, and then started reducing. We tried to think about what would make for a compelling program? What films haven't been seen for a while? What would be popular? 

Another criteria that we have here at the Harvard Film Archives is to screen films in their original format. We knew we wanted to screen 2001: A Space Odyssey, but only if we could find a really beautiful copy. Fortunately, we had a very rare 35 millimeter print of this film, which has an extraordinary color palette. With many 35 millimeter prints, the colors have faded, but this one actually has the original color, so that was quite a treat. With a few exceptions, we found 35 millimeter prints or new digital restorations to screen.

One of the genres you include in this series is the acid western — what is an acid western?

The western is fascinating as an American film genre. Its end is constantly being announced; some of the first western films represent the so-called end of the “frontier,” which is a charged thing. And as a genre, the western is creatively reinterpreted throughout history. The subgenre acid Western is a great example of that, where you have a reinterpretation in which the Western world enters into strange, unreal landscapes that might lend itself to a psychedelic or hallucinatory experience. The film El Topo is the most extreme; it’s just full-out surrealist. The narrative itself is completely freeform and its images are just so bizarre, over-the-top. Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director, liked the occult, so there's a kind of dark ritual that governs his films. 

He was a Chilean working in Mexico to shoot that film, so we also included an American acid western, a great film called The Shooting, by the late, great Monte Hellman and written by Carole Eastman under a pseudonym. She also wrote Five Easy Pieces, among other great, great films. It's a much more leaned down film, and yet it has the same dark tone; as the film goes on, the characters are going into a bleaker and bleaker landscape, a punishing desert. It’s as if they’re entering into this whole different state of mind, with no coordinates or horizon lines that make any sense. 

Unlike more classic westerns, which often have a pretty clear narrative, like a tale of revenge, there’s this different form of Western, which were called acid westerns because they’re another kind of head film. 

What didn’t make the cut?

Some of the films that came out in the heyday of postwar psychedelics were about the counterculture; they were oriented towards youth, and a lot of those are not that good. For instance, we right away decided not to include Easy Rider because it seemed too obvious. It has one of the great sequences in film that depicts a drug trip, and it does it quite convincingly. But overall, I don't think it ages very well.

We also considered a film called The Flicker, a 30 minute, black and white, stroboscopic effect — like, “DUN-dun-DUN-dun-DUN-dun.” As you watch the film, you start to see other colors and shapes. It really makes you aware of the relationship between your mind and your vision, which become altered over the course of the film. There's another film using flicker by the filmmaker Paul Sharits called Touching, which is similar, but it also fragments words. I arranged a screening for Michael Pollan, another colleague, and me, where we watched a couple of these flicker films back to back. It was amazing, but you couldn't watch anything afterwards. They're just so powerful; your vision needs time to recover. It’s like sprinting a 100-yard dash, you need to just sit down after. So we decided it probably wasn’t a good fit for the series. 

What has the reception been like?

It's going very, very well. Our screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey is already sold out. The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is considering doing a similar program.

People use the word immersive a lot these days — sometimes it can be annoyingly overused. But I feel like these films are truly immersive; they seek to realize the full potential of cinema to engage our senses: sight, hearing, but also consciousness. That’s what makes these films influential. 

Psychedelic film might seem like a minor, small chapter in film history but it’s one that continues to resonate into the present day. For example, there’s a film coming out called Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross, which is probably going to be one of the big films of the year. Ross is just one example of a filmmaker deeply influenced by the filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, who made Koyaanisqatsi, a film we’re screening that is considered one of the ultimate head movies — it’s a testament to how these films have had lasting influence.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.