Quick Billy (1970) by Bruce Baillie
Saturday, March 28, 2026, 4:00 pm
Grains of Perception: Films by Bruce Baillie and Nathaniel Dorsky
Psychedelia & Cinema
Filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky in person
Presented in association with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Admission: $18 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
Psychedelia & Cinema
March 1–May 10, 2026
Organized with the support of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Psychedelia & Cinema presents a kaleidoscopic array of movies that explore expanded or enhanced consciousness, psychedelic experiences and numinous encounters. Realized through psychoactive substances, meditation, deprivation or other means, these experiences have been an important element of many cultures for millennia and have more recently become the object of scientific study, as well as being used for both therapy and recreation. Cinema, the “Seventh Art,” is uniquely suited to explore altered and non-ordinary states of consciousness. From cinema’s earliest flickers to the present day, filmmakers have used techniques from montage to multiple exposures, lens distortion to animation and CGI, to create mystical visions and ecstatic journeys into inner and outer space. (Kate MacKay, BAMPFA Film Curator) Full series details here.
Nathaniel Dorsky explained that “in Stoic philosophy ‘pneuma’ is the ‘soul’ or fiery wind permeating the body, and at death survives the body but as impersonal energy. Similarly, the ‘world pneuma’ permeates the details of the world. The images in Pneuma (1983 come from an extensive collection of out-dated raw stock that has been processed without being exposed. …A world is revealed that is alive with the organic deterioration of film itself, the essence of cinema in its before-image, preconceptual purity.” Bruce Baillie’s Quick Billy (1970) merges cinema, consciousness and self-portrait “dreams and daily life. …One of the masterpieces of the American avant-garde …a rare ‘synoptic’ film that tries to construct an entire cosmos. [It] immerses viewers in a timeless flow of indistinct forms that nearly obliterates self and place.” (Fred Camper)
SCREENING:
Pneuma (1983) by Nathaniel Dorsky (US); 16mm, color, silent, 28 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema. Quick Billy (1970) by Bruce Baillie (US); 16mm, color, sound, 56 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema.
TRT: 84 minutes