“I wonder what it’s like to be twins. Do you think they know which one they are?” Sissy Spacek’s Pinky Rose asks her eventual roommate Millie—played by an improvising Shelley Duvall—who fails to take the question for the warning that it is. One of Altman’s most hallucinatory creations, 3 Women was conceived from a dream he had of Duvall and Spacek in the desert, starring in a film about “personality-theft.” Twins and doublings haunt the edges of 3 Women, as Pinky’s infatuation with Millie, a fellow worker at a therapeutic spa for the elderly, takes an obsessive turn. Meanwhile, the “third” woman lurks in the background, expressing herself silently and potently through mythic paintings and mosaics depicting a domineering patriarchy. Ultimately, the triangulated transference of personas reflects a malleability of sense of self which can be by turns sinister and liberatory. In this unpredictable hall of mirrors, Altman’s characteristic multi-track audio soundscaping creates a muffled, almost underwater effect, reflecting the film’s uncanny surreality, rather than the seamless naturalism for which he was known. – Brittany Gravely / Sidney DritzDirected by Robert Altman | US, 1977, 35mm, color, 124 min.
Visit the screening page on the HFA Website
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:
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.
LOCATION:Harvard Film Archive (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street) STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20240908T010000Z DTEND:20240908T010000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR