ALTERED STATES

Orla Smith finds kinship between Ken Russell and the films of Caveh Zahedi.

Hello, and welcome back to our summer release, Volume 20: Ken Russell’s History of the World. This week, Orla Smith writes about conventions of masculinity in Altered States. Orla is co-director of the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend, which takes place from Friday, July 4th-6th at the Rio Cinema in Dalston. Cinema Year Zero has produced a print zine for the occasion, which you can pick up for free at the venue.

And to celebrate our Ken Russell issue, join us at The Cinema Museum on July 23rd for a rare screening of Crimes of Passion on 16mm, where print copies of the issue will be exclusively available. Tickets are now on sale here.

Orla Smith

I’ll start at the end, because the question of redemption has been on my mind. In the final scene of Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) admits to his wife, Emily (Blair Brown), that he has achieved the goal of his extreme and obsessive psychedelic experiments: returning to the ‘first self’ in order to discover life’s great truth. Terrified, he confides that “the final truth of all things is that there is no final truth.” Eddie’s body contorts and morphs into an amorphous mass of light that infects Emily too — as trippy and charmingly janky as Russell’s visual effects tend to be. Emily burns like the centre of the sun on their hallway carpet, until the power of love compels Eddie to drag his disintegrating body over to embrace her, saving them both. I was moved by this ending the first time I saw the film, and I still am, but I see more shades to it after getting to know Caveh Zahedi.

In March, I was part of a team of curators who organised a UK tour of Zahedi’s work. He is a documentary filmmaker who has spent the last 30 years documenting his life in intense detail, through films, webseries, social media posts, podcasts, and various ephemera. You might know him from the scene in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) where he monologues about Bazin, Truffaut, and ‘holy moments’. Zahedi’s art is primarily about pursuing honesty, above all else. In I Am a Sex Addict (2005), he recounts his past obsession with sex workers in a camera address recorded on the day of his wedding to his third wife, Mandy. In The Show About the Show (2015-2025) — a webseries where each episode is about the making of the previous episode — we witness that same marriage (now with two young children) crumble due to the pressures of making The Show. And like Eddie, his work has also involved a lot of experimental drug taking, fuelled by an obsessive desire to connect with some kind of higher power.

To live as a cinephile is to harbour affection for a number of male artists who could be called ‘egomaniacs’ or ‘womanisers’ or much worse. Artmaking in general is filled with these men; Altered States explores one such man in a way that’s both completely whacky and surprisingly touching. The film presents a redemptive vision of Eddie, a man who journeys to the edge of the human psyche and pulls himself back through the sheer power of love. It shows us a world we all want to believe in — and the spectacular, bombastic, Ken Russell fantasia of it all makes it easy to buy in. If you believe a man can turn into a gorilla, then surely he can also learn to be a good husband? I felt an urge to look back at the film, perhaps with a more critical eye, after spending a week with Zahedi, a man who is, in many ways, a real life Eddie Jessup.

To rewind from the end to the beginning: Altered States begins with Eddie in a sensory deprivation tank, weeping. Leaving the tank and fired up by his own vulnerability, he urgently asks his colleague Arthur (Bob Balaban), “Did you take notes?” It’s rare and attractive to see a man who embraces tears. But he goes further by obsessively documenting his emotional state, turning feelings into data. Zahedi’s motive is art rather than science, but he is still experimenting on himself. He catalogues his tears with pride. Last November, he posted a picture of his tear-stained face to his Instagram, and in the text discussed the death of his father. He writes: “I started crying and, relieved that I was crying, my first thought was to photograph that moment as proof of my humanity.” It’s something he told us, too, at a workshop on his first day in London: that an ability to cry in front of others is one of the things that makes a person most interesting.

In many ways, I wish more men would follow the example of how Zahedi and Eddie break free from the conventions of masculinity. Where Zahedi bucks convention by matter-of-factly laying bare his (and our) ugliest and most unacceptable thoughts, Russell, too, exposed the desires hidden beneath each Englishman’s stiff upper lip. Russell visualised flamboyant and surreal emotional landscapes: his films are filled with horny, drug-fuelled fantasies, laced with religious imagery. But just as Eddie’s pride in his emotions is as professional as it is personal, these men — whose art gives licence for exuberant self expression — are so dedicated to their art that making it seems to take priority over almost anything else.