Based on John Geiger’s book Chapel of Extreme Expe­ri­ence, Nik Sheehan’s FLicKeR is a fas­ci­nat­ing voy­age into the life of artist and mys­tic Brion Gysin and his leg­endary inven­tion the dream machine, a device that projects stro­bo­scopic light, pro­vok­ing a “drug­less high” and cin­e­matic hal­lu­ci­na­tions. In this Hot Docs world pre­miere Shee­han cap­tures the dynamic, super­nat­ural world of Gysin, the queer cul­tural ter­ror­ist who fused sci­ence, magic and art to expand human con­scious­ness and tran­scend mate­r­ial reality.

Gysin’s biog­ra­phy is dif­fi­cult to con­dense, but he grew up in Edmon­ton before rein­vent­ing him­self as a bohemian glo­be­trot­ter who went on to become the unac­knowl­edged genius behind some of the most inter­est­ing devel­op­ments in the 20th-century avant-garde. He died in 1986. Shee­han casts him as a rad­i­cal artist intent on har­ness­ing “the vision­ary poten­tial of light” (as Geiger puts it) to rev­o­lu­tion­ary ends. Gysin was not a man but, like the machine, a way of per­ceiv­ing the world — pure energy. He even tried to make him­self invisible.

“It’s incred­i­ble that nobody’s made this film before,” says Shee­han, whose pre­vi­ous cred­its include God’s Fool about writer Scott Symons and the ground­break­ing AIDS doc­u­men­tary No Sad Songs.

“I was sur­prised how anx­ious peo­ple were to open up and talk about Gysin because peo­ple have so many dif­fer­ent views of him.” What is so com­pelling about FLicKeR is that Gysin remains mys­te­ri­ous and ephemeral through­out, no amount of talk­ing could ever explain him.

Sheehan’s film is pop­u­lated with a who’s who of pun­dits, coun­ter­cul­tural fig­ures and Gysin con­fi­dantes, remind­ing you that rock ‘n’ roll has always gone hand in hand with the most out-there shit: Mar­i­anne Faith­full, Iggy Pop, Ken­neth Anger and Gen­e­sis P-Orridge all wax poetic on Gysin, magic and their most mem­o­rable trips, as do younger devo­tees like Lee Ranaldo and DJ Spooky. How did Shee­han land all these stel­lar inter­vie­wees? “That’s the mag­i­cal ques­tion,” quips Shee­han. “It’s a very inter­est­ing group; they go back a long time. And because they’re cult fig­ures they’ve obvi­ously built up all these defences. So it was a very com­pli­cated and long and ded­i­cated effort to bring every­body online.”

The film is also chock full of bril­liant archival footage, par­tic­u­larly of Gysin, his art and his intensely fruit­ful and influ­en­tial col­lab­o­ra­tions with William S Bur­roughs. We visit the “Beat Hotel” in Paris where these sedi­tious kooks built a poor-man’s lab to trans­form the world through all man­ner of strange exper­i­ments in per­cep­tion. “That’s one of the things about Gysin and Bur­roughs and these guys, it’s this com­bi­na­tion of the silly and the sub­lime,” Shee­han says. “We have to remem­ber how incred­i­bly brave they were. They did not accept what soci­ety was offer­ing — it was all lies. And they were very moral, good peo­ple in their way. With Nazi Ger­many they saw what could hap­pen to a gov­ern­ment [if] we get a lit­tle too trusting.

“That ele­ment of rebel­lion has some­thing really serious.”

Shee­han feels Gysin’s gay­ness was fun­da­men­tal. “A shaman to me is always a pan­sex­ual being,” says the gay Cana­dian film­maker. “These guys all came out of that period where queer was really hard­core, it was part of their rad­i­cal art — and of course it was illegal.”

Shee­han says his film “wasn’t so much a biog­ra­phy of Gysin or a story of the dream machine as a story of the dream machine as a biog­ra­phy of Gysin — the way the two fuse together. I think [the pro­duc­ers] were expect­ing it was just going to be this cute story about this spin­ning lit­tle machine, not these crazy queer mystics.

“The dream machine is [Gysin’s] ulti­mate work, this end-of-art thing that went beyond some­thing you made to some­thing you cre­ated indi­vid­u­ally in your own head.”

One chal­lenge that Shee­han encoun­tered was how to rep­re­sent this inter­nal, neu­ro­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non on screen, so there are many shots of peo­ple pressed up close to the device, eyes closed, nar­rat­ing their expe­ri­ences in ecsta­tic tones. It calls to mind Eric Emer­son in Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls who just “groove[s] on myself” as coloured lights play over his body, a tran­scen­dence through nar­cis­sism. The dream machine isn’t much to look at — sort of like a twirling lamp­shade — so you have to take people’s word for it. But whether you can imag­ine what they are see­ing or not, the ideas behind the machine are what matter.

“One of the things I really wanted to do is put things in the present tense, to give it some rel­e­vance,” says Shee­han. “The idea of try­ing to build a machine to change your world, we’re doing that all the time, aren’t we?

“The Beats came to fruition in the late ‘50s in the Eisen­hower years where the world was pet­ri­fied by the bomb and con­for­mity was every­thing. Well, where are we now? We live in this time when we recently had this rightwing Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment, which turned into a tor­ture state. There are weird par­al­lels. It was the old mes­sage: Don’t trust the man, he doesn’t always have your best inter­ests at heart. And the dream machine is the per­fect metaphor for this: Get rid of tele­vi­sion, get rid of cin­ema, make your own inner movie, be your own per­son.”

In its enthu­si­asm for this long-gone cul­tural moment and its most beguil­ing cat­a­lyst, FLicKeR has great poignancy. At one point P-Orridge sug­gests that the con­trol that Gysin and his com­rades were fight­ing against is now dif­fuse and all-pervasive, and that rather than deserv­ing to be lib­er­ated by the ulti­mate mind trip, the inert pub­lic now “deserve to have their bot­toms smacked.”

[Form Xtra.ca]