Technicolor Skull: The Music of War

Technicolor Skull is Kenneth Anger’s current collaboration with the musician, film-maker and magician, Brian Butler. They perform as a duo against a video backdrop of clips taken from Anger’s oeuvre remixed with images of skulls abstract iconography. Butler plays discordant guitar noise whilst Anger busies himself with a Theremin. Most performances to date have taken place in gallery-type contexts, in support of exhibitions by Butler and / or Anger and they have also just put out a record. The particularity of this context and the nature of their output thus far sums up the nature of Technicolor Skull as a project: an ongoing series of improvised ‘magickal’ performances that carry the resonance and aura of a rock band.

Musically, Technicolor Skull owes much to the sound of Mick Jagger’s distress signal motif that adorns Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969). In fact, a significant sample of that piece appears in their track ‘Invokation’. The idea of the invocation as a magickal process – that which draws energies in – works as an index of the group’s apparent modus operandi. Essentially, Technicolor Skull seems to serve two purposes: it offers an outlet for Anger to recycle his Magick Lantern films outside of the standard screening / festival context and it also creates a bridge between the work of Anger and Butler, a connection that implicitly positions the latter as something akin to an heir apparent. More skeptically, given Anger’s previous association with Bobby Beausoleil, one could argue that playing with Butler allows the 87 year old Anger to stay young (and relevant). Maybe their stage invocation works to absorb the energy and vitalism of the crowd? Certainly, there’s an overt utilization of Anger’s iconicity at work here. If Butler is a surrogate Beausoleil, he’s the figure that Anger could have done with in the mid to late 1960s; a Luciferean character with the right combination of esoteric interests and business savvy that permits such left-field pursuits as magickal cinema to be efficiently monetized.

Taken as a performance, Technicolor Skull veers away from Anger’s signature material. The visuals are of course consistent but the noise register is somewhat at odds with his pioneering juxtaposition of image and either classical music or classic rock n roll (best exemplified in Scorpio Rising (1963)). The sound, image and mood of Technicolor Skull is actually a lot closer to the kind of material produced by bands who have appropriated Anger’s aesthetic, such as Death in Vegas and Primal Scream. It is as if, in recapitulating his earlier work in the company of Butler, Anger is consolidating his currency in contemporary music culture: a movement of habituation which is the reverse of the trajectory towards margins and extremes that previously characterised his work.

Aside from this simulacral element the abrasive quality of the group (redolent of other noise acts like Skullflower) is relevant as regards its practical element. That’s to say the sonic ferocity of Technicolor Skull points to the close intersection that exists between magick and noise, a link that is arguably integral to Anger’s wider praxis. This was recently highlighted in Zachary Lazar’s novel Sway (2008), a (loosely) fictionalized account of the biographical intersections between Anger, Manson and The Rolling Stones. Lazar populates the novel with a series of fictitious texts that hold the various nuclei together, one of which is the magickal tome The Sephiroth. In this we are told ‘Anger’ reads of the archetypal alignment that connects individuals with their mythical doubles. The realization of this selfhood is offered as the object of the magickal work (an essentially Thelemic concept) and requires the initiate to access a conceptual space in which opposites are negated:

Male and female, self and other, reality and dream. At the meeting point of these opposites was a zone of energy and pain where the spirit of Lucifer burned in isolation. It was the wild chaos of orgasm, the music of war, the entranced stupor of hallucination. Only a few could perceive this zone. To penetrate it was to negate any difference between good and evil, life and death, desire and fear.

Lazar is essentially describing the thinking that is assumed to have informed Invocation. As Deborah Allison has described, the film refers to a “ritualised process of self-development” in which the ‘demon brother’ of the title is indicative of the “higher part of oneself that one must access in order to understand one’s true will”. That Lazar connects this self-actualization to such dissolving and affective sonic phenomena as “the music of war” indicates that extreme noise operates as a potential vehicle for the achievement of the subject position outlined in The Sephiroth.

A certain precedent for this method exists within the broad history of mysticism insofar as the experience of sensory extremes (involving either sensory extremes or amplification) have frequently been tied to the achievement of spiritual elevation. Negating one’s sense of self either by opening the mind to a much wider flow of information or by reducing such activity to a kind of flat-line level seems to be culturally privileged as a method of dialectically producing the zonal existence Lazar alludes to. Hence, the close oscillation between noise and silence as seen in texts like Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur (1962) and William Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded (1962-67).

Noise musicians such as Wolf Eyes and Aaron Dilloway also seem to work in this direction. Particularly when seen live, their performances deviate from the cathartic communality of the standard rock gig. There’s no carnivalesque purging of one’s own energy but a bludgeoning, zombifying negation of the audience into a state of mass. Similarly, Dilloway’s performances, like those of Prurient move towards the corporeal affectivity of Artaud’s embodied theatre: a shift into a violent state of glossolalia that departs from the notion of a ‘performance’ in the sense of a rendition of presentation.

It is this logic that I see at work in Technicolor Skull. Whilst within the ‘canon’, so to speak of noise

music, Anger and Butler add little to the sonic fabric of the discourse, their approach is indicative of the manner in which Anger channels his work into media that is in synchronicity with his esoteric paradigm. Whereas Invocation communicated the chaos of war and conveyed a certain violence in its cutting style, the emphasis of Technicolor Skull is upon the manifestation of a similar affectivity via the creation of a primarily sonic discord. The sound matches the images projected but at the same time, the ‘event’ of the performance appears to work towards the manifestation of a charged and elevated instant. It is of course debatable as to the extent to which this transport is achieved. However the point is, Anger and Butler use the creation of noise as a supplement (in the sense of a parallel and a replacement) to their more overtly theatrical rituals (such as Butler’s Babalon Working). It is an approach that parallels and to some extent clarifies the elision between drone and ritual in the work of Sunn O))).

In one sense Anger is an artist who has constantly sought to reinvent himself through the proximity of his collaborators. However, he is someone whose practice has also remained remarkably consistent despite its change in contexts. If protean, the fluidity of his output is indicative of the manner in which the ideas he deals with are present in the undertow of a variety of different languages.   

Field Notes

Further documentation from the Alchemical Landscape event: Evie Salmon's introductory text.
Many thanks to her for contributing this post. Check out Evie's website and twitter feed. 

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A Field in England was released this year using a special multi-platform approach: it was simultaneously released to cinemas, on DVD, on television and as a digital download. Much of the publicity suggested that it was something of a breakout, if not debut film for Wheatley but he’s actually been building up a firm reputation as an innovative film-maker for some years. In fact, one could argue that A Field in England is intended as something of a prequel in Wheatley’s unofficial ‘landscape’ trilogy; it places itself in curious synchronicity with his tourist / serial killer comedy Sightseers (2012) and his folk-horror hit man movie Kill List (2011).

Each of these films share a pre-occupation with the British countryside and its various uncanny, if not occult resonances. Wheatley draws much of his influence from a rich cultural miasma of late sixties and early seventies TV and film, strange music and obscure regional traditions. His ‘universe’, as it were, is one in which the rural landscape blurs with the particular imaginative landscape of post-war Britain: a potentially unstable mix of heritage and folk revivalism refracted through the lens of modernist community projects.

Taken as a countercultural text A Field in England draws on the 1960s implications of this term with its concern with hallucinogenics and its visual nods to Nicolas Roeg’s cinematography à la Performance (1970). The central image of the field also literalises this term somewhat. This is a film about the warping potentialities of the earth, the ground and the land; it looks at the ability of the landscape to cultivate subversive chthonic energies. In this respect it forms a key part of what could be termed a certain geographic turn in recent film, music and art. That which could be termed the contemporary counterculture is in the large part marked by a revival of interest in T.C. Lethbridge, environmental activism and site specific ambience as evidenced by the work of artists including Julian Cope, Alison Gill and English Heretic.

A Field in England  - with its weird spaces, its magicians and its magic mushrooms - is offered here as both a map and extension of this particular cultural turn.

---Evie Salmon 

Spooky Action

The work of a research team at the University of Washington has recently hit the news after they appeared to succeed in achieving telepathic communication from one human subject to another. Team leaders Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco have developed an internet channel that permits one researcher to control the hand of another through the use of ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’ (TMS). Ostensibly, this method of remote control is no different to the cyborgian networks used by Stelarc in his ‘third hand’ and ‘involuntary body’ performances of the mid to late 1980s. However, in the case of Rao and Stocco’s work the issue is not just one of a body opened up to external manipulation, but of a mind opened up to the influence and suggestion of another.


The Washington experiment consists of two researchers watching the same video game, one that requires the player to fire at a series of targets. The researchers occupy opposing sides of a simple communication circuit consisting of sender, channel and receiver. The ‘sender’ watches the game whilst connected to a computer via an electroencephalographic interface. When the sender thinks about firing, their EEG registers the signal and transmits it to a second computer. Here, a link is established to the ‘receiver’ via a TMS machine. This device fires an electromagnetic impulse into their motor cortex that mimics the neuronic impulses governing hand movement. A flicker of thought at one end of the circuit is thus immediately rendered as a twitch of movement at the other end. The sender thinks, the receiver fires. 

Unsurprisingly, this story generated some ominous murmurs amongst the press, and perhaps rightly so. Sebastian Anthony, writing for Extreme Tech suggested this “slightly terrifying human-to-human interface” raises a number of ethical issues regarding autonomy, control and the possibility of subversion. As ever, William Gibson’s adage that the street will find its own use for things casts a dark shadow over news of technological progress. Certainly the vaguely militaristic implications of Rao and Stocco’s ‘game’ are hard to avoid. But the particular anxiety generated by this development seems to specifically circulate around the concept of telepathy. Thought transference and implantation appears to symbolise a transgression that is far more intimate than ‘mere’ physical control. Not only does the process hint at psychological passivity but it also points to a mode of communication that uncannily exceeds visible, tangible and material media: an almost occult practice. 

It’s probably for this reason that such implications are presented as reassuringly futurological. In a brief act of foreclosure, Anthony reports that the Washington research could yield “implants that allow for full telepathy”; the unease is registered but its source is posited as a still unrealized development.  It’s easy to understand the nature of the concern here. All kinds of films ranging from The Psychic Killer (1975) to Scanners (1981) have presented telepathy as a force of malevolent destruction. But just how alien is the phenomenon? Some would argue that telepathy, in theory – and to a certain degree in practice – is not “coming soon”; it’s already here and it’s been with us for a long time. 

The word ‘telepathy’ was first coined in 1882 by Frederic Meyers, one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research. Working as a combination of tele (‘distant’) and patheia (loosely translated as ‘feeling’) it was used to describe one of the Society’s main areas of investigation, the apparent phenomenon of thought transmission that occurs in the absence of a material or sensory channel.

The SPR emerged as something of a counterpoint to the late 19^th century interest in spiritualism and theosophy. In essence, it was an organization of rational enquiry that sought to observe various parapsychological phenomena in order to assess their veracity. Along the way, these investigations would seek to debunk where necessary the work of ‘sham’ psychics. Within this field of study, telepathy was understood as a possible form of communication between individuals as well as the ability that would have to be proved in order to confirm mediumship – contact with the dead – as a physical reality.

A classic case-study of the latter is A.J. Howard Hulme and Frederic H. Wood’s Ancient Egypt Speaks (1937), an account of an alleged case of ‘trance possession’. Hulme and Wood describe how ‘Rosemary’, a medium with no knowledge of ancient languages, apparently became the vessel for the voice of ‘Nona, Babylonian wife of Amenhotep III’ during several weeks in 1936. The historical reference points are of course vastly different to the Washington experiment but Hulme and Wood posit a similar network of exchange: instantaneous communication between a sender and a receiver that carries with it the same unease as regards individual submission. As with the involuntary movements prompted by the TMS hook-up, Rosemary was said to have been ventriloquised, having “relinquished conscious control” to this “external spirit” of “the eternal sphere”.

In 1902 the psychologist C.G. Jung wrote about a similar case and presented it as an instance of cryptomnesia, the resurgence of repressed memories as new experiences, due to the susceptibility of the entranced ‘medium’ to leading questions. Sigmund Freud, who dealt with telepathy in four essays written between 1921 and 1933, expressed a similar scepticism. He argued the majority of cases could be explained as instances of unconscious wish fulfilment. However, in ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ (1922) he admits that in theory, the receptivity of sleep and the dream state could create “favourable conditions” for the transmission of a mental act from one mind to another. In ‘Dreams and Occultism’ (1933) he adds that such hypnagogic receptivity, if possible at all, is likely to occur between individuals with a “strong emotional interest”.

Judging from this line of enquiry (and there are many involving telepathy) the initial articulation of the phenomenon leads to the hypothesis of the telepath: the individual who possesses the ability as a remarkable talent. In a sense, this designation has the same function as the speculative projection of telepathy. Both seek to present the process as that which is different to and therefore distant from the accepted norm.

By contrast, another line of analysis seeks to emphasise the proximity of telepathy to normative modes of communication. In the mid to late 19^th century, the prefix tele was used to name a succession of technological innovations including the telegram, the telegraph and the telephone. For cultural historians like Pamela Thurschwell, these teletechnologies supported spiritualist claims regarding the “inexplicable trafficking between minds and bodies” because they established an “imaginative correspondence for delineating psychic and physical transmissions”.

J. Hillis Miller takes this further in his book, The Medium is the Maker (2009) where he argues that communications technology of the 20^th century negates the necessity for “mediums in the occultist sense”. Miller explains that “the word ‘medium’ once named a man or woman who was the apparatus for downloading voices […] from the spirit world” via telepathy. In contrast ‘medium’ now names “the whole bio-techno-prosthetic apparatus […] of telecommunications”, the “technical means of reproduction and transmission of what is at a distance”. The 20^th and 21^st century dominance of telecommunications media thus marginalizes the concept of telepathic and clairvoyant phenomena. Technologies such as “telephone, radio, tape recorders, cellphones, TV [and] the internet” make “instantaneous” contact at a distance an “everyday” occurrence.

If anything, this is what the Washington research makes clear. The stark extremity of the interface it uses masks the fact that the experiment is an amplified rather than aberrant image of what currently passes for contemporary interaction. We’re all connected by the cortex to the open source nervous system that is the internet and are constantly twitching into action at the vibrating command of our mobiles, tablets and devices. The queasy future shock generated by transcranial magnetic stimulation relates not to the glimpse it offers of developments to come but to the way it reminds us that telepathy is already hardwired into our conception of communication.

This article was originally published in Monolith magazine. My thanks to Lore Oxford for letting me post it here. 

                                                                                                     

Fleapit Article

Film journal One+One have just published their latest issue, the second volume of their special edition focusing on trash, exploitation and cult cinema.  I've written an article for volume two, 'White Walls and Empty Rooms: A Short History of the Fleapit'. This looks at the culture of underground film exhibition and also provides a brief account of the 'Fleapit' screening group I ran between 2003 and 2009.

Fleapit is the topic of Road Movies and this article works as something of a primer for that project.   

Critical Fields

The following text was based on my contribution to Film,Geomancy and the Alchemical Landscape, a film screening and symposium featuring Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013). The event was held at the University of Cambridge on 28^th November. Many thanks to Evie Salmon  for organizing the event and inviting me to speak.

For a film so concerned with space, it’s very hard to place Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013). It’s geographically indistinct and historically ambiguous. The attempt to define a critical position is similarly fraught, mainly because the film offers a very strange combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Horizontally in terms of generic specificity it’s hard to tell where the film might sit. Is it a historical drama? A horror movie? A comedy? Director Wheatley and writer Amy Jump certainly work with each of these registers to construct the film but it carries no dominant generic markers. However, if we look vertically, in terms of a historical and cinematic continuity, A Field in England does seem to fit into a discernible lineage of ‘trip’ cinema. More specifically it seems part of a psychotropic mode that includes films about altered states and / or attempt to induce to altered audience perception. This group includes film like Corman’s The Trip (1967), Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) and Bass’ Phase IV (1974). We could also insert the film into the retroactive sub-genre of ‘folk-horror’ alongside the likes of Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). But again, the connection to these genres, certainly the latter is one of mood or ambiance rather than direct reference, permutation or citation. 

In the light of this difficulty, we could use the intersection of these axes as a mode of categorization and offer the film as an example of ‘uncanny cinema’, insofar as it stands as a film that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. However, unless we’re prepared to use ‘uncanny’ as a generic signifier rather than an aesthetic marker (which is what it is), we need to be a bit more specific.

Indications as regards the film’s own field, can I think be found in its publicity and promotional material. Here’s the poster  - designed by artists Luke Insect and Kenn Goodall, who work under the moniker The Twins of Evil. As their name (taken from a 1971 Hammer Horror film) suggests, their style is influenced by the hysterical morbidity and residual psychedelia of the late 1960s and early 1970s genre cinema. Insect’s work in particular – largely on account of his involvement in the rave scene – has been called neo-psychedelic. It maintains the day-glo intensity of Nigel Waymouth but is characterized by a certain level of negativity that is at odds with the transcendental optimism of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat

The poster for Field exemplifies this approach. It uses the same silkscreen techniques that we might expect of Waymouth and incorporates a comparable luminosity into its brooding image of the sun / moon. However as this is a black hole or dark eclipse we're not provided with the the orgasmic harmony and elevation that we might associate with the posters for UFO or Middle Earth. It's quite obviously an appropriate symbolic extraction that can be used to encapsulate the bad trip that is the film.

Although these features link Field to neo-psychedelia, another way of viewing the film is suggested by the alternative trailer designed by the artist Julian House.  Here we have a similarly high contrast palette indicative of stereotypical psychedelic imagery. The trailer is shot through with the kind of mescalinized intensity described by Aldous Huxley in Heaven and Hell (1956). However, House adds a number of additional details. Unlike the smooth, HD black and white that embellishes the film, what’s emphasised in the trailer is the grain of decaying film-stock. House emphasises the degraded materiality of celluloid which seems to enhance the paranormality of the of the events in the filed as depicted in the film. The impression is created of spectral emanations momentarily captured on film with distorting results.

This combination of analogue technology, countryside nostalgia and an underlying sense of occult unease is a hallmark of Ghost Box, House’s record label. Whilst Ghost Box owes much to the matter and colour scheme of psychedelia it has been placed under a very different aegis, that of hauntology.   

Hauntology is, (in)famously, a term that appears in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993) as a cultural extension of his work on the trace. As has been extensively glossed elsewhere the word is a play on ‘ontology’ that exploits its homophonic overlap in French with hanter (haunt). Derrida uses it to critique ‘metaphysical’ notions that associate ‘being’ to self-presence. ‘Being’, insofar as it can be defined – when not erased or cancelled as an unthinkable aporia – is a state of spectrality: there is no ‘archive’ or starting point but a proliferation of echoes and shades. As Brian Baker has described over at (SF) 365, in around 2006 writers like Simon Reynolds used the idea to describe the sensibility of Ghost Box and similar artists who collectively appeared to express a “nostalgia for the future”: a nostalgia for the future as conceived by post-war community projects and the optimism of public information films. Such a future is seen as subject to nostalgia because it represents a forward trajectory posited in the post-1945 period that was ultimately “foreclosed by late capitalism”. 

Although this use of the term is not without problems, I’m inclined to adjectivally apply it to A Field in England and offer the film as an example of hauntological cinema rather than neo-psychedelic cinema. This is because the latter term threatens to obfuscate the specificity of the film’s events. Despite the obvious resonance of the mushrooms and the temptation to compare the film with Roger Corman’s The Trip – an acknowledged influence on Wheatley – to term it neo-psychedelic veers towards pastiche. That’s to say, it’s easy but unproductive to shorthand the film as a recapitulation of classic drug movies that adds nothing to the form. Similarly, a persistent strain of English psychedelia (early Pink Floyd, Tolkien revivalism, John Michell) valorised the rural as a space of alterity away from the kind of brutalist projects so lamented by John Barr in Derelict Britain (1969).

It’s precisely the decline and virtual disappearance of these projects: new towns, garden cities, comprehensives and polytechnics that’s investigated and valorised in the hauntology of Ghost Box et al. Coupled with a fascination with the mediating productivity of redundant recording technology the idea is that such spaces, equipment and architecture exude a powerful psychogeographic resonance. 

I think it’s very much this kind of territory that Wheatley’s film fits into. Despite its atavism, it offers a perspective on the occultural landscape that’s different to that which we might expect to find in broadly comparable 1960s texts. In the film the filed itself is narratologically foregrounded. It is not, as in Witchfinder General, a backdrop across which acts of violence take place or a screen which, as in the cityscapes of The Trip is seen differently under synthetic stimulation. Instead the field is presented as a deeply affective space. It is an instrument and a cultivated technology of mediation that exerts a powerful influence over its receivers; an influence which, if we are to go along with the trilogy reading of Wheatley’s work, is still active in Kill List (2011) and Sightseers (2012).

  

In this sense, I’d place A Field in England not with Blood on Satan’s Claw but with more directly hauntological texts such as the work of Nigel Kneale, particularly Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and The Stone Tape (1972). In each case the results are the same, it’s just the technology that’s different.  In offering this categorization, I’m using ‘hauntological; as a critical term because in this expanded sense (and such an expansion needs to be kept in mind in order that its specificity for Derrida can be maintained) as is suggested by Reynolds, the flickering status of the spectre represents a riposte to the zombification implicit in the ‘retro’ work. By extension this operates against the underlying essentialism and lamentation active in postmodernism. It points not to the return of that which has been seen before and that which says it again, but to that which seeks to ‘make it new’ via the return of something we never knew existed. 

Film, Geomancy and the Alchemical Landscape

On 28th November, the Cambridge University Counterculture Research Group will be presenting Film, Geomancy and the Alchemical Landscape, a special event and symposium at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge connected to Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013). I'll be speaking on the night along with Henry K. Miller, Brendan Gillott and Yvonne Salmon. 

I've previously written about the film for Monolith and since then I've been thinking about its visual links to neo-psychedelia, particularly the work of Luke Insect who designed the poster with Kenn Goodall under the Twins of Evil moniker. Julian House of Ghost Box fame was also involved in the production of an alternative trailer for the film. In my talk on the evening I'll be trying to put my finger on the various strands of aesthetic thinking that tie these artists together. Note: the word 'hauntology' might be used...

Visions of Enchantment

In March 2014 I'll be speaking at Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Spirituality and Visual Culture, a conference at the University of Cambridge. 

The two day event is "a collaboration between the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and the Arts University Bournemouth and is organised in association with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism." It "seeks to investigate the formative role that occultism and spirituality have played in the creation of both Western and non-Western visual and material cultures."

It should be a great conference: a lot of work has gone into the organizing and the committee have booked a particularly strong line-up of keynote speakers.  

I'll be giving a paper linked to The Bad Trip project that will look at Kenneth Anger, Donald Cammell and Performance. Abstract below.  

Pandemonium ‘69: Magick, Performance and the ‘End of the Sixties’

In 1970, Warner Bros. released Performance, a film co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg The film featured Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones and exhibited thematic and structural parallels with the the work of magician and film-maker Kenneth Anger. The film had originally been completed in 1968 but was delayed due to a number of censorship issues regarding its representation of sex and violence. As such, its completion and release bookended another infamous cultural happening featuring The Rolling Stones: their disastrous concert at the Altamont Speedway on December 6^th, 1969. This event involved the death of an audience member, Meredith Hunter, at the hands of the concert’s ‘security’, the Oakland Hells Angels and was also captured on film by the Mayseles Brothers as part of their documentary Gimme Shelter (1970). 

Speaking about Performance at the time of its eventual release, Cammell implicitly read this proximity as an instance of synchronicity, if not active conjuration. Whilst the film was completed “before Altamont”, he stated, the concert “actualized it.”

This oscillating matrix of influence and absorption, event and representation underpins a narrative arc that has come to characterize the cultural representation of the late 1960s. An agglutination of contemporaneous popular culture (film, literature, music, and visual art), conspiratorial thinking and retrospective re-imagining has cast the decade as one that plotted a catastrophic trajectory from youthful optimism to violence, death and “bad craziness”. The ‘End of the Sixties’ has thus come to signify not the conclusion of one period within a wider historical continuum, but the destructive eclipse of a unique and utopian culture.

With reference to the microcosm surrounding the production of Performance and associated examples of contemporary visual culture, my paper will investigate the role of magickal imagery and occult discourses in the creation of this apocalyptic mirco-narrative. From Aquarian revelations to Anger’s Luciferianism, the discussion will focus on the visual representation of the occult in this subculture and the manner in which such strategies were instrumental in establishing the ‘End of the Sixties’ as a trope that has extended far beyond the end of the 1960s.

Keywords: Occulture, Counter-culture, 1960s cinema, apocalypticism, magic, visual culture, popular culture, Kenneth Anger, Donald Cammell, Aleister Crowley.