Easy Rider (1969)
As one of America’s first counterculture films, Easy Rider captures the hippie lifestyle and how it interacts with the mainstream. As two hippie motorcyclists traveling through the American Southwest into the deep South, Dennis Hopper and producer Peter Fonda also star in this pop culture hit. In addition to depicting the counterculture, the film shows realistic drug scenes (actors injected the drugs they played).
As Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) prepare for the upcoming Mardi Gras celebration, they sell cocaine to a dealer for cash. A hitchhiker joins the two along the way, leading them to a commune full of young hippies practicing free love and shared living.
As they continue on their journey, Wyatt and Billy are arrested for “parading without a permit.” There, they meet George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), a drunkard lawyer in jail. The three of them resume their pilgrimage to Mardi Gras after George helps them out of jail. In the South, the trio faces ignorant, “square” communities that see the trio as a threat.
In the film, the sociopolitical climate of the time is beautifully captured. Our firsthand experience shows how feared the hippies were by mainstream society, and how the counterculture was driven by a yearning for freedom. The scenes that depict drug use, especially the cemetery sequence where Wyatt and Billy drop acid with Karen (Karen Black) and Mary (Toni Basil), give the film an intense and disorienting quality.
In the unscripted LSD scene, jump cuts, fear-filled and remorseful dialogue are intercut with distorted imagery, such as the use of a fish-eye lens and close-ups of the sun. Psychedelic scenes combined with documentary-style realism give the film a sense of the time.
Zabriskie Point
Antonioni’s American film provides its audience with various aspects of life during the height of the counterculture with a mixture of documentary-like realism and a psychedelic desert trip. With its beautiful desert landscapes, hypnotic fantasy sequences, and a tailor-made soundtrack from artists such as The Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, Antonioni’s cult classic remains a milestone for psychedelic filmmaking.
In Death Valley, Mark (Mark Frechette) and Daria (Daria Halprin) meet two young adults. Mark is at a protest meeting when the film opens, with the overarching question of what makes a revolutionary. Mark watches as his friends are tear-gassed, beaten, and one of them is shot by the police during a protest.
Mark is suspected of shooting a police officer after he runs from the scene. At a local airport, he steals a small plane and flies to the desert. At the same time, Daria is driving through a ghost town on her way to Pheonix to meet her boss (and perhaps also her lover), Lee (Rod Taylor). Mark sees Daria’s car in the sky and flies down to meet her. They play in the desert together before facing the gloomy realities of civilization.
In this film exploring the revolution and America’s counterculture, Antonioni captures the recklessness of youth. The dream-like scenes (such as a sensual desert love scene that erupts into an orgy of sand-covered bodies) transport this film from realism into earthy psychedelia.
The Devils (1971)
In Ken Russell’s 1971 film, he incorporated sexually explicit hallucinatory sequences based on a supposed demonic possession that took place in 17th century Loudon, France.
Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) has recently gained political control of Loudon and is leading an order of Ursuline nuns who exhibit wild, uncontrolled behavior. Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), the sexually repressed hunchback Superior of the convent, becomes infatuated with Grandier, and her fantasies of passion haunt her guilty conscience.
As soon as Jeanne learns of Grandier’s secret marriage to another woman, she collapses into fits of hysteria and claims to be possessed by the Devil through Grandier. The convent explodes into a frenzy of sexual outbursts and bizarre exorcisms after other nuns in the convent claim to be possessed.
Russell depicts the effects of a mixture of religious mania and sexual oppression. Among the censored scenes of the “demonic possessions” is a psychedelic montage of naked nuns raping a statue of Christ and Sister Jeanne masturbating with a human bone. It is an amazing and audacious presentation of ecstasy (both religious and sexual) in the uncut version of The Devils.
Wake in Fright (1971)
Almost unnoticed in 1971, Wake in Fright is a nightmarish slice of life set in a barren small town of Australia. The film was restored in 2009 and released by Drafthouse Films. Its psychological, eerie tone (like an episode of The Twilight Zone) puts the viewer in the mind of John Grant (Gary Bond), the film’s protagonist, as he slowly succumbs to his fate within “the Yabba.”
In the tiny town of Tiboonda in the Austrialian Outback, John Grant is eager to visit his girlfriend in Sydney during Christmas Break. The next morning, he gets on a bus to Bundanyabba (affectionately called “the Yabba” by its residents) in order to fly to Syndey.
John is immediately struck by an indefinable strangeness of the town during his stay. The forceful friendliness of Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), a local policeman, lures him into joining the drunken stupor that characterizes the town’s male population.
After drinking a couple drinks, John plays the town’s favorite game of chance. He loses everything, and his ticket out of the Austrialian Outback. Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence), a self aware cynic and (the town’s only intellectual), drives John to the brink of insanity in his dusty prison.
Those watching the film will share Grant’s feeling of depression due to its moody tone and excellent portrayal of life in an abandoned mining town. While we see and feel first-hand how his hopes are crushed by the stark desolation of the Yabba, we also get an insight into his mind by his intermittent daydreams, fantasies, and drunken hallucinations.
The Devil (Diabel) (1972)
Through his passionate saga, Andrzej Żuławski vividly illustrates the monstrosities of war and the roots of insanity. Dramatic performances and dynamic camera work take the audience on an emotional rollercoaster through the depths of hell.
In 1793, a Polish nobleman by the name of Jakub is enclosed in a destroyed monastery that has been turned into a hospital/jail/insane asylum as part of the Prussian invasion of Poland. With the help of a mysterious white horse rider, Jakub and the nun embark on a dangerous journey across the country to rescue the people. With the stranger’s fiendish coaxing, Jakub is driven mad by the horrors around him and commits brutal acts of violence mirroring the all-pervasive violence he sees around him.
After being banned in Poland upon release, Andrzej Żuławski’s film delves into the shattered psyche of residents of war-torn Poland. Throughout the film, all of the characters experience hysterical fits of rage, destruction, and mania. The Devil creates the sensory experience of a living nightmare through the emotional extremes expressed by the characters, the disorienting camera work (including handheld roving shots and POV shots), and the disorienting, lo-fi musical score.
