FliCkeR
Directed by Nik Sheehan
National Film Board of Canada, 2008
By Jaclyn L. Katz
Closing your eyes is pivotal to experiencing the drugless high of the dreamachine. Having them open, though, is an absolute treat while experiencing Nik Sheehan’s FlicKeR, the Canadian-made documentary showcased twice during this year’s Hot Docs Festival. As North America’s largest documentary festival, Hot Docs did not cease to impress in its 2008 run. Psychedelic FlicKeR deservingly won the Jury’s award for best documentary, awarding the film’s producers $5,000.
The documentary is an ode to stylistic eclecticism: the fuel beneath the spirit of artist and Beat Generation member Brion Gysin. Though the quintessential Beats included just three men — Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs — Gysin’s role as an artist and inventor during the movement and societal upheaval of the late 1950s was crucial to its stamp on American history.
When perusing through the festival’s website, the synopsis of FlicKeR is the only one that cautions viewers with health concerns. The film’s wild visual presence is a risk for people with epilepsy and nervous system disorders. A dangerous filmic experience! How very exciting.
Throughout its 72 minutes, FlicKeR flashes brief, hypnotic images at its audience, resulting in an unsettling yet exciting gut-feeling. Sheehan’s use of flickering images totally entrances his audience into a drugless (or higher) high.
By privileging its spectators to the glorious knowledge of the dreamachine and all of its shining qualities, FliCkeR is a vehicle to the trance-like the feeling one gets from the object. For those that didn’t click the wikipedia link, the dreamachine is tripped kaleidoscope hooked up to a record player that you enjoy with your eyes closed, and let the optic nerve take what it will from the stimuli. The film itself becomes a mechanism to its viewers’ chimerical experience. And after watching it, the question remains: is the dreamachine a creation of brain response or art?
The one and only way someone could have qualms with the film’s subject matter or delivery is if they were the largest, most unexciting square, and did not appreciate its heartfelt salute to the unordinary, creative drive, and the imagination. However, something that really should have been asked during the Q&A after the film when Sheehan was present (and something that I’m sure if there was reasonable motivation for I would have no problem with), but why oh why must the title have a medley of capital and lower-case letters?
For the modern day audience such a jambalaya of letters is directly suggestive of a cheesy, teenybopper screen name on internet chats. Maybe instead of spelling “flicker” fancifully they could have given the title some well-deserved spice. Oh well.
Moving onward — the documentary was a quick jolt of fun and and the things said by Gysin’s peers and other dreamachine users were epically important. Alas, the film does not resonate in the mind, nor inspire any change of livelihood. Though, who can really afford to be stoned not watching a light for hours in this day and age. And not that Nik Sheehan set out to do so in making this film. It illustrates incredibly colourful minds, but ultimately its star players Iggy Pop, Kenneth Anger, and Genesis (half man, half amazing) from psychic TV are ex- or current drug addicts with ideas inflated by way of hallucinogenic concoctions.
FlicKeR bubbles with fascinating interviews as a result of its true-to-their-wackiness subjects. Its fiery ending shows a sold-out concert in which Iggy Pop performs, shirtless, with a dreamachine as his finale prop. The crowd in the concert was wildly pleased at this. As well, the bogus, drugged attitudes of those stoned off the machine are transferred onto the film’s audience. One can expect to walk, or stumble away from FlicKeR with newly glistening eyes and spirits.
