Abstract

Watching a film as Altered States by Ken Russell brings to mind Jean Epstein’s reflections on the visionary essence of cinema. There has always been a powerful idea that runs through the seventh art, throughout its history: the idea that it is the cinema itself that reshapes the world in a hallucinated form, starting from its own elements, the filming and editing. The article explores this idea starting from the relationship between body and vision in the experience of the viewer, passing through the hallucinatory power of cinema and therefore through the possibility of constructing a counter-history of cinema as a device of altered vision.