John Rocker

Trailer for the documentary Flicker. The dream machine looks simple enough: A 100-watt light bulb, a motor, and a rotating cylinder with cutouts. Just sit in front of it, close your eyes, and wait for the visions to come. The dream machine offers a drugless high that its creator poet, artist, calligrapher and mystic Brion Gysin believed would revolutionize human consciousness. He wasn't alone. Kurt Cobain had a dream machine. And William S. Burroughs thought it could be used to storm the citadels of enlightenment. With a custom-made dream machine in tow, director Nik Sheehan takes us on a journey into the life of Brion Gysin his art, his complex ideas, and his friendships with some of the 20th century's key counterculture figures. Gysin was fascinated by identity. He saw himself as a incarnation of the 10th-century King of Assassins, trained in counter-espionage during WWII, and wrote and rewrote his name in countless permutations, as if to make it disappear in the process, inventing the cut-up technique that his lifelong friend, Beat novelist Burroughs, would make famous. Featuring greats like Burroughs (in archival footage), singer Marianne Faithfull, singer/artist Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV, poet John Giorno, rocker Iggy Pop, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and artist/turntablist DJ Spooky, FLicKeR is a hypnotic documentary. Taking the dream machine as the basis of its explorations, FLicKeR asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness, and imagines a humanity liberated to explore its creativity in complete freedom.