Adventurous Identities

Film is a medium that invites the spectator to imagine altered states: we sit in the dark and see shadows move across a screen, flesh and blood actors altered into phantoms. Sometimes this is thematized, as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where Kim Novak first alters herself, then is altered to look like and then become Judy. Cross-dressing comedies like Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie keep play with altered states of gender. Or we can think more directly of Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), in which a Harvard scientist researching different states of consciousness conducts experiments on himself with a hallucinatory drug that causes him to regress genetically. Altered states of consciousness can be associated with artistic creativity, with the ingestion of psychoactive drugs, or it can be achieved by means of sensory deprivation, meditation, fasting, or prayer (Mantra meditation, Yoga, etc.), all of which can put the individual in contact with a transcendental reality or divine presence. But, the most profound secular experience of altered states occurs in consciousness and it is in this realm that the cinema of Liliana Cavani excels.