Psychedelic Cinema | "The Shooting"
Date and Time
Location
PSYCHEDELICS IN SOCIETY & CULTURE
PSYCHEDELIC CINEMA AT THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
About the Film
One of Hellman's undisputed masterpieces, The Shooting is a stark variant of the so-called “acid Western” that gave psychedelic dream, here nightmare, dimension to the genre. Expanding the tradition of the taut and minimalist "revolving poker game" narratives defined in the late studio Westerns of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, The Shooting goes even further by embracing a Gothic abstraction of story that transforms its characters into mysterious woodcut emblems of fate and human destiny, chiseled onto a barren desert wasteland. The script by legendary screenwriter Carole Eastman (Five Easy Pieces, Puzzle of a Downfall Child) brings a cryptic feminist dimension to the dark fable played out, in mesmerizing performances, by Warren Oates, Jack Nicholson and the alarmingly beautiful Millie Perkins. – Haden Guest
Directed by Monte Helman | US, 1966, DCP, color, 81 min.
Visit the screening page on the HFA Website
About Psychedelic Cinema
Psychedelic Cinema is cosponsored and hosted by the Harvard Film Archive. Rather than solely focusing on LSD films that more directly depict or allude to drug use and psychedelic culture, this series aims to expand the notion of psychedelic cinema through the hallucinogenic lens. Through sounds and visuals, the films seek to bring viewers to an altered state of mind in which the impossible becomes possible and the unexpected becomes reality.
The series runs from September 6 through November 7. For the full screening schedule, visit the series page HFA website:
About the Study of Psychedelics in Society & Culture
The Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture, an interdisciplinary effort across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Divinity School, seeks to transform the psychedelics research landscape by producing cutting-edge scholarship and convening faculty, students, and experts to engage in discussion around their far-reaching implications.