Flicker

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1h 15m | Documentary

The dream machine looks simple enough: a 100-watt light bulb, a motor and a rotating cylinder with cutouts. Just sit in front of it, close your eyes and wait for the visions to come. The dream machine offers a drugless high that its creator – poet, artist, calligrapher and mystic Brion Gysin – believed would revolutionize human consciousness. He wasn't alone. Kurt Cobain had a dream machine. And William S. Burroughs thought it could be used to "storm the citadels of enlightenment."

With a custom-made dream machine in tow, director Nik Sheehan takes us on a journey into the life of Brion Gysin – his art, his complex ideas and his friendships with some of the 20th century's key counterculture figures. Featuring greats like Burroughs (in archival footage), singer Marianne Faithfull, singer Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV, rocker Iggy Pop, poet John Giorno, filmmaker Kenneth Anger and artist/turntablist DJ Spooky, Flicker is a hypnotic documentary.