Touring: Psychedelia and Experiment

We take you on a trip from the Swinging Sixties to the Psychedelic Seventies, when the bfi supported many of Britain's most innovative film-makers.

80 mins total

Incident (3 versions, interspersed)

  • Dir Jonathan Gili
  • Cast Stephen Frears
  • 1971 / col / 3 mins

The director of Dangerous Liaisons and High Fidelity appears in a very rare acting role. A man is sitting quietly in his flat, reading his newspaper, until he hears the sound of a car crash outside. He leaps up to see what happens, then sits down again before the credits roll. The same sequence is repeated two further times, but each time the man's reaction becomes less concerned. This ingenious juxtaposition can be read as either a comparison between attitudes, or as the progressive hardening of the man to the accident taking place outside.

San Francisco

  • Dir/scr Anthony Stern
  • 1968 / col / 15 mins

This film examines the characteristics of late Sixties American society through the contrasts of San Francisco - home of alternative culture. Using a startling flash and freeze-frame technique, the film's rapid and closely-cut sequences form a colourful montage of bizarre images creating a portrait of the city in all its photogenic glamour and kooky excess. The film is edited to Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive.

Solarflares Burn For You

  • Dir Arthur Johns
  • 1973 / col / 9 mins

This personal short is an extraordinary essay on colour effects. To a hypnotic soundtrack by Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt, we are taken on a colour-saturated journey of tangerine skies, scarlet landscapes and acid yellow roads.

Love Affair

  • Dir Roy Evans
  • 1971 / col / 2 mins

In this sad, simple animated tale a bee encounters a man's beautiful, buzzing electric razor and falls in love...

Meatdaze - New Print

  • Dir Jeff Keen
  • Cast Jacqui Keen, Tony Sinden, Jim Duke
  • 1968 / col / 10 mins

A complete cinema programme in one film. Six numbered segments contain a wild and pleasurably eccentric mix of cartoon, newsreel and featurettes (including The Death of Mighty Mouse and Teevee Capers). Then we're into the main feature - The Invasion of the Hundred Foot Woman - comprising numerous events randomly superimposed. Meatdaze is an anthology of Keen's repertoire of pop imagery all conducted at the speed of light.

Sunflowers

  • Dir/scr Ian McMillan
  • 1968 / col / 5 mins

An impressionistic, magnificently photographed film that uses sunflowers as a symbol of life.

Head Rag Hop - New Print

  • Dir Peter Turner
  • 1970 / col / 3 mins

The double-entendres of Romeo Nelson's blues classic are underlined in a montage of images: patterns, pictures of famous bluesmen, animated objects and colours. At points when the words become particularly arch, they are presented, one at a time, in embellished lettering.

Beyond Image - New Print

  • Dir The Sensual Laboratory
  • 1969 / col / 17 mins

Capturing the essence of late Sixties psychedelia, Beyond Image explores the colour and light effects of coloured oils moving between glass plates, creating swirls and bubbles of colours. The filmic answer to the lava lamp with a soundtrack by Sixties cult band Soft Machine.

The Peaches - New Print

  • Dir Michael Gill
  • Scr Yvonne Gilan
  • Cast Juliet Harmer, Tom Adams
  • 1964 / col / 15 mins

This pleasurably idiosyncratic and impressive fantasy, hallmarked by its considerable visual flair, was Britain's official short film entry to the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, and tells the story of a multi-talented young woman who lives on peaches until true love comes along. The Peaches assembled a truly extraordinary array of talent: shot by the great Walter Lassally; music by John Addinson (Tom Jones, Torn Curtain); narrated by Peter Ustinov; and directed by Gill who went on to make the major BBC documentary series Civilization and Royal Heritage.