Her learned abilities and resources are of a kind that can only be obtained in Hollywood. There are no wasted movements in her camera’s choreography. Her dance training is a clear influence on her approach to making film. What’s telling is that she – like one of cinema’s great cartographers of the divine, Maya Deren (and, dare I say, cinema’s anti-christ, Leni Riefenstahl) – came to film by way of dance. She’s a filmmaker responsible to her financial backers. Clearly, she is not in the ranks of ‘transgressives’ like Nick Zedd or Joe Christ. She also wrote a comedy called Not Dead Yet. As an actress, she was Crockett’s squeeze on an episode of Miami Vice (with, incredibly, Julian Beck of the Living Theatre) and in a thriller with Amanda Seyfried, Gone. Hess is hyphenated Hollywood, a writer-actor-director-producer. Though her biography’s inessential details don’t support her telling of the Stan Grof story, what she omits informs her process. A wide-shot of Earth, explaining her deep sense of alienation in a swirl of Van Gogh clouds, saying she was born on the wrong planet, followed by photos of scrapbooked “happiness” in childhood. Supply images almost subliminally and communicate with the subconscious directly. Her biographical detail is delivered minimally, however, in brief scrapbook stills with little audible commentary. She learns to journey up up up through the darkness, meeting her ghostly teachers, who tell her to reconnect with the energies of the earth but she has a second crisis, after successfully giving birth to two children, and sees her toddlers demonstrate a reluctance to go through tunnel-shaped passageways…. For her, this is a clear sign of a spiritual crisis. In Paris, she finds love but has a difficult time getting pregnant. Even after a seemingly successful career, she still has an overwhelming sense of displacement. And begins to slowly and quietly tell the story of her own spiritual crisis, eventually leading to the work of Stanislav Grof. ![]() The film opens with a cuddly two-shot of the filmmaker, Susan Hess, and the Czech psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof, the man Albert Hofmann called “the godfather of LSD.” Susan explains in voice-over how she found it impossible to tell the story of Stanislav Grof without inserting herself into the narrative. Little did I realize the film would address key questions I had concerning consciousness and spirit. I accepted because film and psychedelics are two areas of interest. There have been some real changes in my consciousness but I don’t have the words to express those changes in a proper context.īut sometimes the universe speaks to you: I was asked to write a review of The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof’s Journey of Consciousness. And, my “spirituality,” since 2004, includes a regular practice of seated meditation which has led to some pretty spooky episodes in the ether. Over the course of my life, I’ve been diagnosed with everything from manic-depression and delusional paranoia to PTSD. I am at that age where supplemental Medicare insurance plans pile on my floor beneath the mail transom to an annoying degree, but I have a mental clarity I’ve not known in years.
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