In our popular imagination — and especially in film — the request to “stare into the light” is often an invitation to let our waking life fall into submission. The words so often spoken by hypnotists, anesthesiologists, and mystics also describe the act of watching movies, and speak to film’s implicit promise of taking us to some other scene accessed through the flickers on the screen.
The transportive and conscious altering qualities of light were not lost on William S. Burroughs and his compatriot and frequent collaborator Brian Gysin. “We must storm the citadels of enlightenment,” Burroughs wrote to Gysin, “the means are at hand.” The means at hand were Gysin’s revelation about the hallucinatory qualities of flickering light and the device he invented in 1957 to harness its potential: the dreamachine. Nik Sheenan’s hypnotic documentary FlicKer — which makes its U.S. premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — looks into the dreamachine’s pulsating brilliance while also sketching a portrait of its troubled and brilliant creator. […]
