PSYCHEDELIC FILM AND THE MUSIC essays

PSYCHEDELIC FILM AND THE MUSIC essays Film has been categorized by genres since it became popular in the early 1900s. Even within these categories (comedy, romance, action) genres often overlapped one another. George Melies 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon is a timeless piece that mixes science fiction with psychedelic aspects far before its time. Since than films have come a very long way. The more developed they become, the more a genres line gets blurred. The short lived life of the psychedelic film blurs with one of Hollywoods long standing film genres, the musical. The psychedelic genre does nothing more than borrow preexisting concepts from other genres; it does find some success with a merger with the musical. What draws people to psychedelic musicals and are they more psychedelic than musical? Through looking at some of the genres more noteworthy crossovers, Tommy, Magical Mystery Tour and The Wall, an answer will be made clear. The psychedelic film, or the Hollywood LSD film came to popularity in the early 1960s and quickly vanished by the mid 1970s. Although glimpses of the genre appear throughout cinema, it was never as prevalent as it was during that decade and a half period. As described in The Velvet Light Trap by Harry M. Benshoff, the LSD film is constructed through the rapid editing of glowing, colorful, abstract, and/or mythical images; they suggest a heightened state of awareness and sensory common to the hallucinogenic experience (p. 3). These type of colorful surrealism was able to sneak into the mainstream when Hollywood experienced a slump at the box office in the mid 1960s. As the popularity of television was growing, fewer people were going to the movies. Hollywood was looking for ways to put people back into their seats and the LSD film was one of them. The inclusion of avant-garde stylistics into Hollywood feature films, as in the case of LSD films, is yet another example o...