In 1964, when LSD was still legal in Italy, Federico Fellini underwent a single guided session under the supervision of psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio.
He later said it shaped his classic film, Juliet of the Spirits.
Juliet of the Spirits (Italian: Giulietta degli spiriti) is a 1965 fantasy comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini and starring Giulietta Masina, Sandra Milo, Mario Pisu, Valentina Cortese, and Valeska Gert. The film is about the visions, memories, and mysticism that help a middle-aged woman find the strength to leave her philandering husband. The film uses "caricatural types and dream situations to represent a psychic landscape".[2] It was Fellini's first feature-length color film, but followed his use of color in "The Temptation of Doctor Antonio"
Birds, Orphans and Fools (Slovak: Vtáčkovia, siroty a blázni) is a 1969 Czechoslovak fantasy film directed by Juraj Jakubisko. The film is about three people who are all orphaned by political violence. In an unspecified time and place, these three characters face a tough, violent world and survive by adopting a childlike philosophy of life and live a life of foolish, joyful denial.
The film released in 1969 and was shown that year at an international film festival in Sorrento, Italy. Soon after, though, it was banned by the communist authorities until the end of the regime in 1989.
Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Japanese: 田園に死す, Hepburn: Den-en ni shisu; lit. 'To Die in the Countryside'), also known as Pastoral Hide and Seek (French: Cache-cache pastoral), is a 1974 Japanese experimental surrealist film written and directed by Shūji Terayama. Adapted from Terayama's 1965 tanka poetry collection and a 1962 television drama he scripted—both sharing the film's Japanese title—the film stars Kantarō Suga, Hiroyuki Takano [ja], Kaoru Yachigusa, and Isao Kimura. Employing a film-within-a-film structure, it depicts an adult director (Suga)—a stand-in for Terayama—who encounters resistance from his younger self (Takano) as he attempts to complete a cinematic reimagining of his rural adolescence.
Toshio Matsumoto depicts an unreal world created by piecing together fragments of fantasies and delusions seen by a single woman. The mysterious color tones, which are far removed from the actual sense of color, are due to the use of color infrared film.
Fruit of Paradise (Czech: Ovoce stromů rajských jíme) is a 1970 Czechoslovak avant-garde drama film directed by Věra Chytilová. It was entered into the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. The film is an adaptation of the Adam and Eve story. This was Chytilová's last film before she was placed on an eight-year ban by the Czechoslovak Government. Fellow Czech screenwriter and costume designer Ester Krumbachová collaborated with Chytilová on the screenplay, costumes, and decor.
Himiko (Japanese: 卑弥呼) is a 1974 bizarre Japanese fantasy drama film directed by Masahiro Shinoda. It was entered into the 1974 Cannes Film Festival Feature Film Competition.
The story follows the myth of the Sun Goddess, Himiko, who is the earliest Japanese historical figure documented in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean history, although her existence, identity, and location have been the source of endless debate.
Nevertheless, the consensus talks about a queen-shaman who was ruling Yamatai, the Kingdom of the Sun before Japan became a specific, separate entity.
In the film, she is a shaman who speaks for the Sun God, being revered in the society she lives in but also constrained by the will of her people for her to be a sacred entity. As the story begins, she finds herself in the middle of political turmoil regarding the succession of King Ohkimi, who is actually the true decision-maker in the kingdom, despite Himiko's role.
Ohkimi plans to have Mimaki as his heir, but his younger brother, Ikume also wants the throne, while priest Nashime prefers Himiko to be the ruler.
The tension in the film escalates when Takehiko, Himiko's half brother, returns after his world travels. Himiko, the shaman, finds herself falling in love with him, adding a layer of emotional conflict to the narrative.
However, Takehiko seems to have feelings for Adahime, a woman who assists Himiko in her various rituals.
As the story unfolds, the antagonism between the Kingdom of the Sun, the Kingdom of the Land, and The Kingdom of the Mountains also reaches a boiling point, further heightening the emotional stakes.
Here is the full-length film with English subtitles
She was too surreal… even for the Surrealists. Ithell Colquhoun stepped into a movement built on dreams, rebellion, and the subconscious—and still managed to make them uncomfortable. While others flirted with mysticism, she went all in, studying the occult and refusing to separate her art from her inner life. That’s where the tension began. The Surrealists, led by André Breton, wanted control over the movement, and Colquhoun refused to choose between their rules and her beliefs. So they made the choice for her—and expelled her.
But she didn’t disappear. She kept creating, developing her own techniques, building a visual language that was entirely her own, and pushing deeper into the subconscious without permission or approval. For years, she was overlooked while others became icons. Now, her work feels more modern, more fearless, and more honest than ever—because she wasn’t trying to fit into a movement, she was building something beyond it. Some artists wait to be accepted. Others redefine what acceptance even means.
Ithell Colquhoun’s reputation as a provocative and accomplished visual artist and writer is becoming well established. However, less is known about her work as an occult and esoteric essayist, primarily because many of her essays were published in occult ephemera, and limited run local and specialist magazines. This illustrated talk will be an introduction to the wide range of topics that Colquhoun masterfully tackled, ranging from primers on the Kabbalah to Celtic spirituality, meditation, mysticism, and magical color theory.
Jessica Hundley Series Editor for TASCHEN Publications multivolume collection, The Library of Esoterica, a book series exploring the visual history of Tarot, Astrology and other esoteric traditions introduces the event.
Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic. She has a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA and has published academic and popular articles on a wide range of topics such as Paganism and the New Right, women’s esoteric art, Cornish cultural nationalism, Arthuriana, color theory, and occult performance art. She has written widely on artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, notably the biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently editing a selection of Colquhoun’s esoteric essays. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and Spike Island, Bristol.
A fishmonger's daughter drinks some tea rumoured to cure insomnia and enters into a hallucagenic fairy-tale world where she must complete a series of tasks to determine if she has what it takes to become a Tzarevna (the daughter of the Tzar).
Click on the image above to be taken to the full film.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is perhaps the most densely packed, aggressively weird movie to ever emerge from a major studio. It posits a hero who is a neurosurgeon, particle physicist, rock star, and comic book hero all at once. Peter Weller plays the titular character with a deadpan cool that holds the madness together. The film throws the audience into the middle of a complex mythology without a map, featuring a team of sidekicks called the "Hong Kong Cavaliers," an alien invasion by "Red Lectroids" from Planet 10 (all named John), and a plot involving a jet car driving through solid matter.
Despite flopping at the box office, it became a legendary cult classic because of its refusal to explain itself. It treats its absurd premise as absolute fact. The cast is a marvel of 80s talent, including Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy outfit, Christopher Lloyd as a manic alien, and John Lithgow giving a scenery-chewing performance as Dr. Emilio Lizardo. The film’s aesthetic and tone—particularly the end credits sequence where the cast walks in sync to the synth-pop theme—have influenced directors like Wes Anderson. It remains a litmus test for sci-fi fans: you either bounce off its chaotic energy, or you become a lifelong initiate of the Banzai Institute, quoting, "No matter where you go, there you are."
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czech: Valerie a týden divů) is a 1970 Czechoslovak gothic coming-of-age surrealist dark fantasy film co-written and directed by Jaromil Jireš, based on the 1935 novel of the same name by Vítězslav Nezval. It is considered part of the Czechoslovak New Wave movement. The film portrays the heroine as living in a disorienting dream, cajoled by priests, vampires, and men and women alike. The film blends dark fantasy, eroticism and Gothic horror genres.
If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.
The Witch's Cradle, sometimes billed as Witches' Cradle, is an unfinished, silent, experimental short film written and directed by Maya Deren, featuring Marcel Duchamp, and filmed in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery.
The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman (Pajorita Marta) and an elderly gentleman (Duchamp).
The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura.
The Witch's Cradle was written and directed by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. The film was developed at a comparison between surrealists' defiance of time and space and that of medieval magicians and witches. Daren developed the film over a period of one month, lasting from August to September 1943. However, long after principal photography for the film commenced, she abandoned the project, leaving the film incomplete. Some of the film's outtakes were found and stored at the Anthology Film Archives, while several sequences that were shot appear to be lost. Surviving shots from the film are mostly semi-edited sequences, including one particular sequence that Deren had engineered during post-production to be played backwards.
In her essay taken from her dissertation for her doctorate at The University of Southern California,
“So I Would Move Among These Things: Maya Deren and “The Witch’s Cradle,” Fox Henry Frazier revives
the important legacy and cultural importance of Ukrainian-born, avant-garde poet and filmmaker Maya Deren,
who died too young of a brain hemorrhage in 1961. Frazier’s analysis of Deren’s filmic semiotics reminds
present day readers not only of Deren’s groundbreaking work as a filmmaker in the nineteen forties and fifties,
but her poetic genius as well for creating memorable surrealistic imagery in both her poetry and films. By
documenting Deren’s particular brilliance for converting a torturous, misogynistic ritual called “The Witch’s
Cradle” at the hand of the writer and “adventurer” William Seabrook, Frazier explains just how Deren
ingeniously converted her torturous experience with Seabrook into her own visionary feminist film starring
Marcel Duchamp under the same title, thus not only exposing Seabrook’s ritual for his thinly disguised enactment
of one of his perverse sexual fantasies in the guise of witch-training for broom-riding, but co-opting it
as her own with a far superior philosophical conceit for betraying the complexity of the feminine psyche via
the symbolic use of string. “Deren’s interest in the power of objects may feed into bigger questions triggered
by the Rhinebeck episode,” Frazier writes, “questions, for example, about bodily/embodied autonomy for
female and femme people, and subject-versus-object power within that context…We might ask,” she goes on
to suggest, “whether there is an implication here that, if these objects have subjectivity and agency, then perhaps even a woman who has been reduced to an object, in a violent way, might then more easily be able to envision herself possessing subjectivity and agency—even if that, too, must be achieved by supernatural or occult means, i.e., witchiness.” –Chard DeNiord
Simon, a deeply religious man living in the 4th century, wants to be nearer to God so he climbs a column. The Devil wants him to come down to Earth and is trying to seduce him.
Begotten. God dies, Mother Earth, the Son of Earth, Flesh on Bone.
Presented in a surreal, gory and entirely visual manner, Begotten tells of the death of religion, the abuse of nature by Man and a nihilistic outlook on what life ultimately is.
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925), who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and obtained no diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.
After a spell in which he composed little, Satie entered Paris's second music academy, the Schola Cantorum, as a mature student. His studies there were more successful than those at the Conservatoire. From about 1910 he became the focus of successive groups of young composers attracted by his unconventionality and originality. Among them were the group known as Les Six. A meeting with Jean Cocteau in 1915 led to the creation of the ballet Parade (1917) for Serge Diaghilev, with music by Satie, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine.
Satie's example guided a new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian impressionism towards a sparer, terser style. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc, and he is seen as an influence on more recent, minimalist composers such as John Cage and John Adams. His harmony is often characterised by unresolved chords, he sometimes dispensed with bar-lines, as in his Gnossiennes, and his melodies are generally simple and often reflect his love of old church music. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) ("True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)", 1912), Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois ("Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man", 1913) and Sonatine bureaucratique ("Bureaucratic Sonatina", 1917). Most of his works are brief, and the majority are for solo piano. Exceptions include his "symphonic drama" Socrate (1919) and two late ballets Mercure and Relâche (1924).
Satie never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and, from 1898 to his death, in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, and is known for his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He is believed to only have had one intimate relationship with another person. A passionate four month affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon (who painted Satie's portrait in 1893-94, shown below).
Despite being a musical iconoclast, and encourager of modernism, Satie was uninterested to the point of antipathy about innovations such as the telephone, the gramophone and the radio. He made no recordings, and as far as is known heard only a single radio broadcast (of Milhaud's music) and made only one telephone call. Although his personal appearance was customarily immaculate, his room at Arcueil was in Orledge's word "squalid", and after his death the scores of several important works believed lost were found among the accumulated rubbish. He was incompetent with money. Having depended to a considerable extent on the generosity of friends in his early years, he was little better off when he began to earn a good income from his compositions, as he spent or gave away money as soon as he received it. He liked children, and they liked him, but his relations with adults were seldom straightforward. One of his last collaborators, Picabia, said of him:
"Satie's case is extraordinary. He's a mischievous and cunning old artist. At least, that's how he thinks of himself. Myself, I think the opposite! He's a very susceptible man, arrogant, a real sad child, but one who is sometimes made optimistic by alcohol. But he's a good friend, and I like him a lot."
Throughout his adult life Satie was a heavy drinker, and in 1925 his health collapsed. He was taken to the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in Paris, diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. He died there at 8.00 p.m. on 1 July, at the age of 59. He was buried in the cemetery at Arcueil.
Peter Jones (Anthony Higgins) a British diplomat in France, suspects his wife Margaret (Charlotte Rampling) of having an affair. He hires a private detective, who reports that Margaret has rented an apartment. It then turns out that her live-in lover is a pet chimpanzee she calls Max.
A bizarre love triangle comedy in the surreal style of Buñuel.
Directed by Nagisa Oshima (In The Realm Of The Senses, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence), written by Jean-Claude Carrière (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie).
The Comic Strip are a group of British comedians who came to prominence in the 1980s. They are known for their television series The Comic Strip Presents..., which was labelled as a pioneering example of the alternative comedy scene.
1985:- England has been invaded by the Warsaw Pact countries and middle-class couple Hermine and Godfrey retreat to their rural hide-away but after witnessing a bunch of incompetent commandos kill each other, they get separated.
In keeping with the war theme of the episode, Hermine is reading a copy of The Sun from the time of the Falklands War. The headline "GOTCHA" was from 4 May 1982, about the sinking of the Argentine warship ARA General Belgrano.
With - Robbie Coltrane, Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Daniel Peacock, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson and Jennifer Saunders.
Barry Humphries died today. This is one of his many films.
The Naked Bunyip is a 1970 Australian documentary film directed by John B. Murray. The film explores sex in Australia using a fictional framework. A shy young man is hired by an ad agency to conduct a survey on sex in Australia. The somewhat clueless young man investigates homosexuality, transvestites, prostitution, and strip clubs along with every other variant on the "norm". While doing his interviews he meets celebrities, self proclaimed sex experts, prostitutes, female impersonators, pop stars, actors, and legislators as well as self appointed moral guardians.
The Naked Bunyip is a sex documentary and a blend of fact and fiction; "[it] incorporates the fictionalizing of the 'real' that had been a feature of tendencies in French 'new wave' and the American avant-garde narrative cinema." Graeme Blundell plays a shy young man who works for an ad agency, and the agency hires him to survey about sex in Australia. The film consists of "unrehearsed and unscripted" interviews as Blundell's character investigates a variety of sexual experiences, all except for the "normal" heterosexual experience.
Among the people interviewed are Dame Edna Everage, Jacki Weaver, Aggy Read, Harry M. Miller, and Russell Morris.
The Commonwealth censors insisted on five minutes of footage being removed but the producers refused, simply blacking out the offending images and bleeping the soundtrack. On the black footage, Murray inserted a picture of a bunyip performing a parody of the forbidden action. Murray also previewed the film without cuts to censors, angering the censor. This led to a debate about censorship which helped lead to a reform of censorship standards
"The True Story of Artaud le Mômo", by Gérard Mordillat and Jérôme Prieur, produced in 1993. Attendees: Luciane Abiet, Jacqueline Adamov, André Berne-Joffroy, Annie Besnard-Faure, Gustav Bolin, Denise Colomb , Pierre Courtens, Alain Gheerbrant, Alfred Kern, Gervais Marchal, Domnine Milliex, Minouche Pastier, Henri Pichette, Marcel Piffret, Rolande Prevel, Marthe Robert, Jany Seiden de Ruy, Paule Thévenin and Henri Thomas.
Note:
Poet, man of the theatre, actor, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is the author of an immense body of work among which is The Theater and its Double, The Voyage to the land of the Tarahumaras, Van Gogh the suicide of society, Artaud the Mômo... On May 26, 1946, after nine years of internment in various asylums and finally at the Rodez hospice, Antonin Artaud returned to Paris, welcomed at the Gare d' Austerlitz by his friends Henri and Colette Thomas, Jean Dubuffet and Marthe Robert... Arthur Adamov and Marthe Robert having guaranteed his material life, he will now live at the Maison de Santé in Ivry, under the authority of Dr. Delmas who will provide him with a pavilion and will leave him completely free of his time and his movements. We want to revisit the friends of Antonin Artaud, his loves, his companions the path he took, to find in their memory the places he frequented, to redo his journey between the clinic of Ivry and Saint-Germain-des- Prés, in the Paris of the immediate post-war period. That is to say that we want to find the voice of Artaud, his face, his presence, in the voice, the face, the presence of those who accompanied him, and whose life he changed: Paule Thévenin, Henri Thomas, Marthe Robert, Anie Besnard, Jany de Ruy, Rolande Prevel, Henri Pichette...
Bausch’s powerfully dramatic, dreamlike work, which has come to define the genre of tanztheater, or dance theater, over the last 40 years.
But when Bausch created “Bluebeard,” there was no concept of tanztheater. This mixture of dance, theater, fragmented music and patchworked scenes was new and a turning point in her career — a departure from straightforwardly expressive dance pieces, like “The Rite of Spring,” which she had created after taking over the Wuppertal company in 1973.
When it was first presented “Bluebeard” astonished and angered many spectators, who were disturbed by Bausch’s stop-and-start use of the score and her relentless depiction of male-female violence. Audiences screamed abuse at the dancers and slammed the doors of the theater as they departed in droves.
