Dope

Signals Through the Flames is at once a history and a celebration of the Living Theatre. Founded in the late 1940s by husband-and-wife performers Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the Living Theatre was for many years the predominent American outlet for the avant-garde movement. There were occasional self-imposed exiles to Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, but the group returned full-force during the Aquarius Age to entertain a new generation of theatregoers.

A pair of Village beatniks goes up against a clan of moneyed squares vacationing on the Maine coast.

Barbara, a young woman consumed by despair, contemplates suicide, while a man she meets in a church and a married couple struggle to persuade her that life is still worth living. Mekas’s film weaves this intimate drama into a larger reflection on alienation, politics, and the turbulence of early 1960s America.

At the court of the Yellow Emperor, the Majoon Traveler & Lady Firefly appear in the Hall of Unconscious Magnetism.

Mystical, ephemeral and nearly lost to time, alchemy was a "magical theory of nature" widely held in pre-Enlightenment Europe. Author Terence McKenna portrays John Dee, court magician to Queen Elizabeth I, in this history of the discipline. McKenna discusses the role of the science as he travels to key sites in alchemic lore throughout Eastern Europe, including Heidelberg, home to the world's only contemporary alchemy lab.

Travel with mythology expert Joseph Campbell as he explores shared iconic imagery that marks the human experience and influences our ability to dream and find our spiritual center. Campbell suggests that all religions share the same path to enlightenment, but it's up to us to make the actual journey. Evidence of the commonality of mythological symbols is investigated in the ruins of Ajanta in India, Delphi in Greece and Stonehenge in England.

Herbalist Letha Hadady shares the secrets of her trade in this fascinating lesson in nontraditional medicine, revealing which Chinese herbs help mitigate conventional Western diseases such as high blood pressure, depression and diabetes. You'll also discover certain food products that contribute to overall health. Follow Letha to her kitchen, where she concocts her potent potions, and find out how you can replicate her approach in your home.

At least forty films have been made about the Living Theatre; it remained to the American underground filmmaker Sheldon Rochlin (previously responsible for the marvellous Vali) to make the 'definitive' film about one of the most famous of their works, Paradise Now, shot in Brussels and at the Berlin Sportpalast. Made on videotape, with expressionist colouring 'injected' by electronic means, this emerges as a hypnotic transmutation of a theatrical event into poetic cinema, capturing the ambiance and frenzy of the original. No documentary record could have done it justice.

A documentary portrait shot in Positano, Italy in 1965 about Australian artist and occultist Vali Myers.

Over a booze-fueled, increasingly hectic five-day shoot in East Hampton, Norman Mailer and his cast and crew spontaneously unloaded onto film the lurid and loony chronicle of U.S. presidential candidate and filmmaker Norman T. Kingsley debating and attacking his hangers-on and enemies. This gonzo narrative, “an inkblot test of Mailer’s own subconscious” (Time), becomes something like a documentary on its own making when costar Rip Torn breaks the fourth wall in one of cinema’s most alarming on-screen outbursts.

Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham examine chaos, creativity and imagination in nature, life, Gaia, mathematics and more. Recorded at the Esalen Institute in 1995.