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.
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.
Through the women in these men’s lives, we see that admiring their work from a distance is a lot easier than living under their lens. Despite Eddie’s dissuasion, Emily — an anthropologist who admires his passion and dedication to his research — pursues a relationship with him. But after a 7-year time jump, their marriage is falling apart for reasons that barely need explaining. Eddie does love Emily and his children, but he also believes that it’s possible for him to confront God, a prospect that renders all else insignificant. Religion haunts Eddie like the spectre of his dying father: his primary studies surround religious experiences in schizophrenic patients; during sex with Emily, he thinks about “God, Jesus, and crucifixions,” and Russell drapes the scene in hellish red light.
There’s a lot of Emily in Mandy, Zahedi’s third and most recent (ex-)wife, who has been documented in his films since the mid-90s. Mandy clearly likes (or liked) Zahedi’s work to some extent. In The Show About the Show, she acts as herself in reenactments; when we see the making of those reenactments, she’s often playful and enthusiastic about performing. But eventually, she decided to remove herself from the project entirely and complicated the show’s distribution with legal threats. Aside from what we can glean from his work, there’s not a lot of explicit documentation about Ken Russell’s personal life, but one need only glance at the fact that he was married four times to understand that he might not have been the easiest man to live with either (in fact, Altered States was filmed shortly after his first divorce from costume designer Shirley Ann Kingdon).
Chasing after God (either literally or figuratively, through the divine ascension of art) may be a fool’s errand, but I understand the impulse anyway. When I moderated a Q&A with Zahedi, I asked him if he considers his personal documentation to be related to self improvement. After talking about Kafka for a bit, he arrived at this thought: “I make these films because I can’t stand life without it. It’s more about trying to breathe and be free than it is about trying to improve myself. You improve yourself if you can breathe, I guess.” It's a sentiment that many artists may resonate with, including Russell, perhaps, who was frighteningly prolific, crafting strange and subversive films long past when there was any real interest in funding or releasing them. As for Zahedi, his films are so uncommercial that they only exist because the material is his own life, and people are willing to work for him for free.
I worry that my empathy for that unshakeable need to make art, against all odds and reason, is clouding what should be a stronger moral judgement on the way these men’s philosophies complicate the lives of those in their orbit — particularly the women. When we screened Season 3 of The Show About the Show, the audience expressed a lot of justified anger toward Zahedi. More than anything he’s made before, the season lays bare the emotional damage that he and his work has inflicted on the women in his life. I nodded along to friends’ outrage, agreeing with them while still, quietly, feeling warmly toward the person I’d gotten to know over the last week. It makes me feel a little queasy to try to square my feelings about his behaviour with my admiration for and gratitude to him as an artist — as someone whose work has challenged me to be more honest with myself and with others. It’s a feeling that I can’t totally intellectualise; most people’s idea of redemption isn’t something I expect or even necessarily want from him. While before, I believed in Eddie Jessup’s redemption, now, I feel like he might not be so changed at the end of Altered States. Perhaps things will calm down for a while, until something or other calls him back to the pursuit of God. Then, Emily can dust off those divorce papers.