drugs on film / film on drugs

GASPAR NOÉ: In Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, the priest or the shaman is giving a magic drink to all of the people around him, and I was surprised to read in some books about you, that he's giving them yage. I've done yage many times in the jungle in Peru, and it's a drink that is full of DMT. Have you ever done yourself chemical DMT? Or have you drunk ayahuasca?

KENNETH ANGER: No, neither one. I've read about them, but I've never tried them. I don't go out of my way to seek that sort of thing. But yage is from South America, isn't it? I tried peyote, which makes me kind of ill before it clears up. But that takes all night.

NOÉ: Have you tried it many times?

ANGER: A few times. I haven't taken any drugs, of any kind, in years. It was an experimental period in an earlier part of my life.

NOÉ: They open your mind, if you don't lose your mind.

ANGER: Well, one thing you cannot do—once, I tried to film when I was on LSD. And I had very good LSD in the early days, because I was a friend in San Francisco of Owsley Stanley, the famous chemist. And in the early days, it was just a drop of it on a sugar cube. So I had very good LSD, but the problem was—I tried making a film, or doing some filming, when I was on LSD, and it's impossible. I couldn't focus. I tried focusing, but when I looked through the lens, I'd see all different layers of focus, and I couldn't find which was the real one behind the camera. And I just thought, this does not work, and I never tried that again.

NOÉ: I have a heavy question... What is the essence of cinema for you? Is it reproducing the language of dreams, or creating a shamanistic trance?

ANGER: I think it's basically quite different from dreams. If only cinema was that easy. Because dreams, all you have to do is fall asleep, and you can have fantastic vision. I know Baudelaire and people like that enhance their dreams with opium or something. But films are very constructed—they're like architecture. They're pieced together, glued together. To me, it's a craft. It's like making a tapestry. And I prefer to think of it—you know, um, the sweat is supposed to be invisible. But a lot of sweat can go into making a film. But of course, if you enjoy doing it, you enjoy doing it. I will go on cutting for three days without sleeping. You can have everything from a realistic story with recognizable people, or...

I actually love the Italian neo-realist films, and in some ways they seem very dreamlike. You know, the early Rossellini and so forth... But you can have a very expensive dream, which is quite beautifully done, which is like Cameron's Avatar, which you probably saw. Did you see it?

NOÉ: Yes.

ANGER: Well, that can be considered like a dream, a very expensive dream. I prefer simpler things.

(Interview Magazine)

“Opium has been a good friend to me; it has taken away my sorrows,” Aziza said, seated in the corner of her one-room house, with her children looking on. "When I need it, it is a kind of an attack,” she said afterward. “I can’t resist the opium; it is stronger than I am.”

NY Times

"Opium, for women who give themselves to Yves Saint Laurent"

"Opium was the only name it wanted. It's a fragrance which evokes all the things I love—the refined Orient, Imperial China, exoticism. Nineteenth-century aesthetes, poets, and writers knew and understood the very release of imagination, dreams and mystery it evokes. Byron, Delacroix, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, they all understood the exotic beauty of the orient without having traveled there. If you don't have the power of imagination, you don't have anything."
— Yves Saint Laurent, 1978

Quetta

Lot Notes:
In the 1970s Sigmar Polke produced a series of photographic suites based on his journeys. While in Quetta, Pakistan in 1974 he shot numerous images of opium dens "that ultimately became some of the most visually exquisite and most carefully crafted photographs in his entire oeuvre." (Schimmel, p. 72) The Quetta, Pakistan prints were embellished by hand with colorful egg tempera inks and gold and silver paint. As opulent as nineteenth-century Orientalist images, Polke's representation does not, however, isolate and thereby objectify the smokers as exotic curiosities. Rather they are viewed from across the den, behind other smokers, thereby positioning the artist (and the viewer) as den dwellers themselves.

Beginning with his 1971 Paris photographs printed using experimental techniques while under the influence of LSD, Polke exploited the photographic process as a means to alter "reality." He sought to expand the representational possibilities of photography beyond the objective to include the poetic, in a way that paralleled the mind-expanding effect of drugs. Like his Surrealist predecessors (Man Ray, for example), Polke embraced chance and accident in the darkroom and, in the case of Quetta, Pakistan, highlighted them. The intent, however, was not to tap into some mysterious unconscious realm, but rather to simulate an alternative perception of reality.

Lot Description:
Sigmar Polke (b. 1941)
»Quetta, Pakistan«
signed, titled and dated 'S. Polke 74 Quetta' lower right
watercolor and metallic gold paint on gelatin silver print
33.1/8 x 47in.
Price Realized $145,500

– From Christie's Auction, Lot 5 / Sale 9228

Opium dens, 1974

Sigmar Polke, Quetta, Pakistan 1973/1974

Jeremy Everett, Opium Feast, 2009

Jean Cocteau

"Living is a horizontal fall."
(Jean Cocteau,
1930)

Opium

Laudanum

Tracey Moffatt, Laudanum, 1998

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present. (Antonin Artaud, 1934)

Study for a Dispenser of Incense, LSD, Marijuana, Opium, Laughing Gas