Peyote Queen 

(1965) 

- a classic of the psychedelic tendency, directed by the film-maker Storm De Hirsch. An attempt to visually render the wealth of kaleidoscope visions of peyote.

Ubuweb turns up another gem of abstract cinema with this 1965 work by Storm de Hirsch. The only film of hers I’d seen prior to this was Third Eye Butterfly (1968), screened at the 2005 Summer of Love psychedelia exhibition. Both these shorts share the same spilt-screen effect but Peyote Queen cuts kaleidoscopic views of the woman in question with brightly-coloured animated glyphs and shapes created by drawing directly onto the film emulsion. This is an old technique which goes back at least as far as Len Lye's pioneering films of the 1930s. Peyote Queen’s drum soundtrack and white dots flickering on black are very reminiscent of Lye's brilliantly minimal Free Radicals (1958) which was also made by scratching the film.

 

Source: John Coulthart

 

 

A classic of the psychedelic tendency is, without a doubt, Peyote Queen by the film-maker Storm De Hirsch (1965, 8 minutes.) An attempt to visually render the wealth of kaleidoscope visions of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus ritually used by the Indians of New Mexico. According to the film-maker, Peyote Queen is an "exploration in the colour of ritual, in the colour of thought, a journey in the depths of sensorial disorder, of the inner vision, where mysteries are represented in the theatre of the soul."

 

Source: Abstracta Cinema

 

 

Filmmakers never have a valid excuse not to make films — you don't even need a camera to make a film — nor a computer.  Storm De Hirsch, a film avant-gardener of the '60s, didn't have a camera — she definitely didn’t have a computer — all she had was old, unused film stock and a few rolls of 16mm sound tape. Throwing aside the animation conventions of the '60s (usually frame-by-frame photography of drawings on paper or transparencies), De Hirsch successfully created a trilogy of films by painting directly on old film stock, cutting, and etching the film emulsion. The trilogy included De Hirsch’s Divinations (1964), Peyote Queen (1965), and Shaman, A Tapestry for Sorcerers (1966).

 

After completion of the trilogy, Storm De Hirsch explained to her friend Jonas Mekas how the projects came to fruition:

"I wanted badly to make an animated short, but I had no camera available. I did have some old, unused film stock and several rolls of 16mm sound tape. So I used that — plus a variety of discarded surgical instruments and the sharp edge of a screwdriver — by cutting, etching, and painting directly on both film and [sound] tape."

 

Peyote Queen begins with scattered, epileptic movements of simple, white globs. An uptempo drumming rhythm of a African tribal song accompanies the imagery, which segues into white lines, and then into split screen imagery where the frame is divided into four quarters — featuring female breasts, unidentifiable objects, abstract light phantasms, and so forth.

Eventually the images flicker to technicolored hieroglyphs and what appears to be tiger (or some other big cat) claw scratch patterns. This is one of the strongest moments of the film; this queues spacey, reverb-drowned basement music. Soon the technicolor tiger claw scratches melt into dancing, human-like lines, and this is intercut with the progressive symbolism of the glyphs — breasts, fish, water, stars, the moon, female lips, seemingly a sailboat — De Hirsch represents these prehistoric glyphs by painting directly on the film stock. Unique, psychedelic motifs such as these certify Peyote Queen as an avant-garde gem.

 

Source: DINCA

 

 

Peyote Queen, found footage, drugs, 2nd generation, Film

Reading

Len Lye (2009) co-edited by the curator Tyler Cann and the writer, critic and poet Prof. Wystan Curnow is a tribute to one of New Zealand’s most internationally acclaimed artists is the most comprehensive visual presentation of Len Lye’s art to date.

Over 1,000 new photographs were created and hundreds of them selected for this image-rich publication, presenting the full range of Len Lye’s work, from drawings and paintings right through to his photograms and kinetic experimentations. (Govett-Brewster)

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994) by French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. (Colombia University Press)

 

SEE ALSO

Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910-1975 (1979) is a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery in London from 3 May until 17 June 1979 on rare, essential and controversial avant-garde film history.

Funkstörung: The Zoo (2004) - Zeitguised's interpretation of The Zoo by Funkstörung is a lighthearted piece that affirmates the facility of synthetic constructions against the heavy, serious notion of established constructions, including CG's own means of photorealism. (Zeitguised)

Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)

The Film Work of Norman McLaren (2007) by Terence Dobson approaches the puzzles that are set by the film work of Norman McLaren. It is divided into three parts, based on chronological divisions in McLaren's life. The first part deals with McLaren's formative years in Scotland and England and examines his early exposure to the social, artistic and institutional influences that were to shape his filmic output. The second part deals with McLaren's maturation in the USA and Canada. The third part examines specific issues in relation to McLaren and his work and as such is concerned principally with his mature output. (John Libbey Publishing)

Robert Heel is a German audiovisual artists, VJ and electronic musician in the fields of video and sound design, installation, audiovisual live performance, VJing and music production. (Robert Heel)