top of page
Research
Still from Black Magic (1949)
My academic research examines simulations of altered states within cinema that, in turn, are subsumed into the properties of altered states in reality. I posit that this process is engendered by trance-like, phenomenological embodied sympathies with body-subjects in cinema that cause a mimesis of the root altered condition presented on screen. With a nod toward Jonathan Goss and his notion of pseudoplace, I coin these presentation, subsumption, and representation cycles pseudostates - altered states of perception the are formed in a recursion between cinema-viewership experiences and psychological reenactment. My research thus takes three threads:
-
Hypnosis as Pseudostate: This thread serves as the central focus of my research. I investigate how modern hypnosis operates as a subconsciously performed phenomenon, influenced by media portrayals. I argue that contemporary hypnosis can be seen as an embodied placebo effect, shaped by cinematic narratives and existing psychological states.
-
​Dream States: While dreams are as old as consciousness and have a significant cultural history, within modernity they can also exhibit cinematic parallels such as time dilation, altered perceptions of color, space, and shape, and lack of control within an experienced reality. I explore how dreams challenge the pseudostate concept, presenting an independent framework for understanding altered consciousness.
-
Psychedelic Experiences: These offer a quantifiable avenue for understanding altered states distinct from hypnosis and dreams from a pharamacoanalytical perspective. I examine how psychedelics manifest dissociative qualities in consciousness and investigate how these experiences can be quantifiably disconnected from cinematic representations.
​
Lenses
Still from Get Out (2017)
Utilizing these three threads as the branching paths of my research, I am interested in, and currently investigating, a variety of different historical lenses:
-
The fall of the late-Mesmerists alongside the early beginnings of cinema.
-
The invention of hypnoanalysis and its influence on hypnohorror in early silent film.
-
Xenophobic black magic, voodoo, and gypsy tropes aside hypnocrime fears.
-
The invention of hysteria and hypno-induced split personality fictions in media and culture.
-
Pyschorama and experimental flicker film trends.
-
MK Ultra and psychedelic hypnosis paranoia fears of the 1960’s.
-
1980’s recovered-memory therapy trends set amidst the Satanic Panic.
-
Stage hypnotism for conferences and school assemblies as paired with trends of the 80’s/90’s hypno-comedy film.
-
Modern hypnotherapy cures for addiction and other conditions.
-
Hypnofetish communities in the proliferation of online pornographic media.
-
Modern resurgence of hypnohorror in cinema.​
​
Still from Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults (1994)
Commitment to Practice-Based Research
I am deeply committed to production based modes of inquiry that regard making as an essential component of academic scholarship. I look to other practitioners of practice-based research for guidance, in particular the work coming out of the UK within Screen Media Practice Research. In this multi-modal view of scholarly study, I am not only interested in discerning how simulations of reality alter our conscious perception, but in reproducing these forms as analytic process. In this way, I aim to detach from an estranged and passive critique to an embodied and active participant, practitioner, and maker. I believe the best way to understand the media is from immersion within its making.
The research methods I employ in my writing are embedded within my practice-based work. I actively engage with the very technologies that I research, from digital editing software to algorithmic processes to chroma key layering to interactive control mechanisms. By engaging these technologies, I gain new insights into their psychological and phenomenological effects. I avail to understand media from all perspectives — its ingestion in the human viewer and its ingestion by machine. Mechanical perceptions of media remain an invested topic for my study alongside the phenomenological. Ultimately, I aim to critically interrogate the systems of representation that shape our experiences, particularly the technologies that mediate our perceptions of self and reality.
Through my work, I am not only trying to deconstruct the way media operates but also to experiment with how we, as audience, may engage with both representations of and inducements into digitally cinematically altered states of consciousness and being. In my recent projects, I apply these theories in practical ways, using film/video as both a site of investigation and a medium for portraying and embodying these altered states.
Still from Infection, Illness, Recovery (2024)
Working Bibliography
Accardi, M.C., Milling, L.S. The effectiveness of hypnosis for reducing procedure-related pain in children and adolescents: a comprehensive methodological review. J Behav Med 32, 328–339 (2009).
Andriopoulos, Stefan. Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Andripoulos, Stefan. “The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism.” Grey Room, no. 45, 2011, pp. 88–105.
Braun, Johanna. “Hysterical Cure: Performing Disability in the Possession Film.” Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, edited by Johanna Braun, Leuven University Press, 2020, pp. 207–32.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. MIT Press, 2003.
Eugeni, Ruggero. “Imaginary Screens: The Hypnotic Gesture and Early Film.” Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, edited by Craig Buckley et al., Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Forrest, Derek William, and Anthony Storr. Hypnotism: A History. Penguin Books, 2000.
Giles, David. Media Psychology. Routledge, 2009.
Greenberg, Alan, and Werner Herzog. Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass. Chicago Review Press, 2012.
Heffernan, Kevin. “The Hypnosis Horror Films of the 1950s: Genre Texts and Industrial Context.” Journal of Film and Video 54, no. 2/3 (2002): 56–70.
Hirschman, Elizabeth C., and Joyce A. McGriff. “Recovering Addicts’ Responses to the Cinematic Portrayal of Drug and Alcohol Addiction.” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, vol. 14, no. 1, 1995, pp. 95–107.
James, David E. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton University Press, 1989.
Killen, Andreas. “Hypnosis, Cinema, and Censorship in Germany, 1895–1933.” Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, pp. 103–36.
Kirsch, Irving. “The Altered States Hypnosis.” Social Research, vol. 68, no. 3, 2001, pp. 795–807.
Kubie, Lawrence S., and Sydney Margolin. “The process of hypnotism and the nature of the Hypnotic State.” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 100, no. 5, Mar. 1944, pp. 611–622.
Landolt, Alison S., and Leonard S. Milling. “The efficacy of hypnosis as an intervention for labor and delivery pain: A comprehensive methodological review.” Clinical Psychology Review, vol. 31, no. 6, Aug. 2011, pp. 1022–1031.
Laffan, Michael, and Max Weiss, editors. Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Orne, Martin T. “The Use and Misuse of Hypnosis in Court.” Crime and Justice, vol. 3, 1981, pp. 61–104.
Powell, Anna. Deleuze, Altered States and Film. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton Univ. Press, 2009.
Toropova A. The Hypnotic Screen: The Early Soviet Experiment with Film Psychotherapy. Soc Hist Med. 2022
bottom of page