The paper argues that controlled LSD therapy during Federico Fellini’s personal and creative crisis altered his phenomenological experience of time, space, body/others and the self, thereby enhancing his filmmaking. Manifestations such as irregular temporal flow and flashbacks, hyper‑vivid colours detached from objects, disembodied sounds, grotesquely distorted bodies and a collapse of dream and reality contributed to the distinctive "felliniesque" aesthetic.
Since its discovery in 1943, LSD has been used by artists, scientists, and intellectuals, amongst others, to stimulate their creative insights. Federico Fellini, one of the most important film directors in the XX century, used LSD when it was still legal under the guidance of his psychoanalyst during a phase of personal and creative crisis. This article proposes a phenomenological analysis of how his filmmaking and his creativity was enhanced after using LSD in such controlled therapeutic settings, according to four main domains: (a) time, (b) space, (c) body and others and (d) perception of the self. In particular, time flows irregularly and is punctuated by disorienting flashbacks, colours become supernaturally brilliant and detached from objects, sounds pop up independently from any visible source, and human bodies become often deformed, grotesque and caricatural. The boundaries between dream- and reality-worlds also collapses. His films became so distinctive and original that an adjective was coined felliniesque.
O. and colleagues used a phenomenological, qualitative approach to analyse how LSD may have influenced Federico Fellini's creativity as expressed in a sequence of his films. Rather than interviewing the director or analysing clinical data, the authors applied phenomenology in a third-person mode to cinematic texts, treating films as manifestations of an author's life-world that can be read for changes in subjective experience. The authors frame their project within prior theoretical work that conceives creativity as arising from multiple mental states (for example a Dynamic Framework of Thought) and within phenomenological accounts (notably Merleau-Ponty) that emphasise pre-reflexive, hyperassociative realms of experience. They note that psychedelic states are characterised in earlier literature by changes across perception, emotion and cognition, including hyperassociative structure, altered figure/ground relations, intensified colour and light, and a continuum of perceptual change that can culminate in ego-dissolution. The analysis focused on five core dimensions of the life-world as operationalised through cinematic elements. The authors assessed: (1) lived time — how time is experienced and represented, visible for example in editing strategies such as flashbacks; (2) lived space — the director's experience of space as indexed by scenarios, atmospheres and use of colour; (3) others — the depiction and expressive behaviour of characters, including grotesque or caricatural personae; (4) the lived body — bodily experience inferred from actors' physiognomy and embodied behaviour (the authors explicitly note the need to infer Fellini's own bodily experience from his alter egos on screen); and (5) selfhood — distinctions between pre-reflexive, embodied self-awareness and narrative selfhood, which the authors read through narrative structure and editing. The authors explain that these five dimensions were examined across films produced before and after a documented LSD session that Fellini underwent in summer 1964 under medical supervision. Data for the analysis were the films themselves (their characters, scenarios, costume, colour, sound design and montage). The authors present this as a novel application of phenomenology — analysing a sequence of films in order to infer how a specific event (LSD therapy) may have altered an artist's life-world and creative output. The Methods text does not provide a formal coding scheme, inter-rater reliability, or a defined set of films analysed in a numbered list; rather, the approach is described as interpretative, based on reading cinematic features through the five life-world dimensions.
Papers cited by this study that are also in Blossom
Girn, M., Mills, C., Roseman, L. et al. · NeuroImage (2020)
Kraehenmann, R. · Current Neuropharmacology (2017)
Nour, M. R., Evans, J., Nutt, D. J. et al. · Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2016)
Preller, K. H., Vollenweider, F. X. · Behavioral Neurobiology of Psychedelic Drugs (2016)
O. and colleagues argue that Fellini's post-LSD films show a marked shift in the depiction of time, space, bodies, colours and sound that is compatible with phenomenology of the psychedelic state and with earlier reports of LSD's effects on artists. The authors report that after a supervised LSD session in the summer of 1964 (which Fellini himself later described as producing an exaltation about colours, seeing colours detached from objects), Fellini's first colour film Giulietta degli spiriti is distinguished by very bright, high-contrast tints in costumes and scenarios. The authors link this change to prior studies in which artists given LSD reported altered figure/ground relations, greater intensity of colour and light, symbolic and abstract depiction, and fragmentation or distortion. The authors describe subsequent post-LSD work as showing a continued evolution toward bizarreness and exaggeration. Satyricon (worked on from 1967) is highlighted as a culmination in which characters, costumes and scenarios are grotesque and distorted rather than philologically accurate; the film explicitly sought to erase boundaries between dream and imagination. Later films such as Roma are described as combining subdued, fairy-tale coloration in certain sequences (e.g. childhood memories) with brighter colours and more deformed individuals elsewhere (obese figures, hunchbacks, exaggerated prostitutes), indicating a persistent metamorphosis in the perception of space and otherness. Sound design in the post-LSD films is also emphasised: voices and ambient sounds frequently appear dissociated from visible sources, producing disembodied or para-atmospheric acoustic effects that the authors liken to experiences reported in schizophrenia and to psychedelic phenomenology (including synesthetic relationships between sound and vision). The authors cite Fellini's own account of the LSD session and link his description to a broader interpretative claim: while they do not assert that LSD alone caused all stylistic changes, they argue that LSD played a role in shifting Fellini's creative approach toward surreality, heightened colour autonomy, grotesque embodiment and altered soundscape, thereby contributing to what came to be labelled "felliniesque." The authors position these observations alongside previous literature on psychedelics and creativity, noting concordance with reports that LSD can change artists' styles and deepen perceptual understanding of colour, form and light. They acknowledge that causation cannot be definitively established from this kind of interpretative, third-person analysis; nonetheless, they maintain that the timing of the LSD session and the subsequent stylistic developments in Fellini's films are consistent with an influence of the psychedelic experience on his creative output.
Our qualitative analysis of the impact that LSD had on Fellini's work is based on the phenomenological method. Phenomenology has been already used to assess creativity influenced by psychedelics. Different authors have conceptualised the framework in which psychedelics work,for instance put the creative process within Dynamic Framework of Thought. In their view, creativity is the product of different mental states, rather than one. Therefore, also the psychedelic state can be considered a mental state that facilitates creativity and should be considered in the Dynamic Framework of thought. Other authors believe that the psychedelic experience and subsequent descriptions of pre-objective and pre-subjective sphere of "wild world" or "wild being" as defined by Merleau-Ponty have a hyperassociative structure and therefore psychedelic experiences can be classified as fantasy activity. They argue that the most important element of the psychedelic non ordinary state of consciousness is the hyperassociative capacity, that can foster imagination and creativity. According toduring the psychedelic experience the individuals go through a continuum of changes in the perception-hallucination domain culminating with increasing arousal and ego-dissolution. This way psychedelics have a deep effect on sensory perception, emotion, cognition, and creativity. Because Fellini's films highly autobiographical and personal, we could argue that they reflect the director's subjective experiences before and after the use of LSD. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that phenomenology, used in a 3 rd person perspective, is used in a case study analysing a sequence of films, to assess the effect that an event, in this specific case the use of LSD, had on creativity. The description and the comprehension of personal experiences are fundamental not only in the clinic of mental disorders, but in every science and art dealing with humans. The phenomenological method can be useful not only to describe subjective experiences, but also search for their conditions of possibilitiesthe structures of subjectivity that underpin the experience of reality, which, when modified, may determine abnormal or psychopathological life-worlds. The life-world is the world where we live in, the original, obvious, and unquestioned foundation of everyday acting and thinking. Next to the common-sense world we all more or less share, there are several frameworks of experience, as for example, fantasy worlds, dream worlds, and psychopathological worlds. We could argue that the change in the framework of experience can manifest itself with symptoms but also can spark creativity. The experience of time, space, body, self, and others are the basic dimensions of the life-world within which gives the framework of our way to experience and make sense of reality. In this paper, we assess the following dimensions of the life-worlds depicted and narrated in Fellini's movies, including its characters (the actors' physiognomyintended as their facial characteristics and expressionsand their behaviour), scenarios (the setting in which the characters paly and the plot develops) and editing (i.e., the film technique also called montage through which a series of shots are sequenced suggesting the passage of time): 1. Lived time is the way the person experiences time (which must be distinguished from the time of the clock or "objective" time). Every experience receives its specific significance and value from its temporal profile. This dimension of the life-world, i.e., time flow, is particularly explicit in the editing, e.g., flashbacks. 2. Lived space is the way persons lives space. This space is based on the relationship of the person to her world as a situated and embodied entity. This dimension is revealed through the movies' scenarios, e.g., dream-like atmospheres or the costumes' colours. 3. Others are a key factor in a person's life-world since the majority of everyday relations are grounded on prereflexive encounters with other persons. The others' mental states, including their emotions, beliefs, and desires are directly expressed in their actions and are typically grasped as meaningful in an emergent, pragmatic context. This dimension becomes manifest in the movies' characters and their expressive behaviour, e.g., grotesque characters. 4. The lived body is the body as it is experienced from the first-person perspective and must be distinguished from the physical body. Fellini's experience of his own body (as well as his own selfhood, see below) can only be inferred from the way his alter ego's (e.g., Mastroianni) behaves in his movies 5. Selfhood is also fundamental dimension of one's lifeworld. The notion of Self comprises the "pre-reflexive Self", the most primitive form of self-consciousness rooted in the lived body. It is neither conceptual nor linguistic, but a primordial contact or acquaintance with oneself. Next to this dimension of self-consciousness there is an experience of one's own Self that implies the possession of a concept of oneself. This is the Self as a narrative identity-the Self that tells stories about itself that exists in those stories and conceives its identity in terms of those stories. The narrative Self is strongly related to one's lived time and as such it emerges in Fellini's editing.
Federico Fellini has been a very prolific film director and screen play writer producing some of the most relevant films in cinema history. His films were internationally acclaimed and inspired other film makers and intellectuals. An adjectivefelliniesquedescribed by the Oxford dictionary as "relating to, characteristic of, or reminiscent of Fellini, his films, or his style; often specifically: fantastic, bizarre; lavish, extravagant" was coined after him. The felliniesque features of Fellini's production are epitomized in his movies' characters, which in his post-LSD films (in particular Satyricon, Roma, Amarcord and Casanova) are more and more caricatures whose bodily physiognomy is distorted, reflecting a metamorphosis of otherness and (partially) of embodiment. Also, costumes and scenarios are different in the pre-and post-LSD periods, showing an evolution toward bizarreness and exaggeration in the experience of otherness and space that culminates in Satyricon. It is also interesting that Fellini has chosen as an inspiration Petronius' Satyricon, one of the most bizarre and unusual Latin novels. In the movie, there is no classic elegance and proportions. There is a significant shift toward using characters that are deformed, they either have physical deformity or they are dressed and have a make-up that makes them misshapen. Fellini in this film does not just uses deformed individuals, but also costumes and the scenario are grotesque and distorted, far form an accurate and philological reconstruction of ancient Rome. Like other intellectuals of his time, Fellini usedunder medical supervision -LSD, in a moment of personal and creative crisis. This psychedelic compound was used, before being banned as an aid in psychotherapy (psycholitic or psychedelic therapy) as well as a catalyst for creativity. Federico Fellini used LSD a Sunday in summer 1964, after he completed his masterpiece 8 ½ and while he was working on his next film Giulietta degli Spiriti. This is his own account of the session: "In order to try to understand what colours really are in a detached way, you have to become a yogi. . . Also the experience of making a colour picture can be a spiritual experience. [LSD] was a bit of a disappointing experience. I have not the memory of feeling a special sensation, but the doctor gave me an explanation, and I agree with him. He said that an artist lives always in the imagination, so the barrier between sensorial reality and his imagination is very vague; an artist is always here and there. . . . Anyway I remember I had some exaltation about colours. I saw colours not like they normally are-we see colours in the objects, you know; we see objects that are coloured. I saw colours just like they are, detached from the objects. I had for the first time the feeling of the presence of the colours in a detached way". Fellini's account that was somehow minimising the effect of the LSD session as he mainly described the session in terms of its effect on his perception of colours. Yet, this is an important clue because the next film he did -Giulietta degli spiritiwas his first film in colours (with the exception we mentioned before of Boccaccio 70 that was only an episode of a film made by 3 directors where use of colour was imposed by the production and not chosen by the director, Fellini, for instance shot his next film 8 ½ in black and white), characterised by the very bright tints of the costumes (often with sharp contrast, e.g., green and red) and of the scenarios. This event is consistent with a paper mentioned byreporting that artists treated with LSD presented "alteration of figure/ground and boundaries; greater intensity of color and light…symbolic and abstract depiction of objects; and fragmentation, disorganization, and distortion". In a following paper, stated that "all of the artists who participated in a creativity research project said that LSD not only radically changed their style but also gave them new depths to understand the use of colour, form, light, or the way these things are viewed in a frame of reference. Their art, they claimed, changed its essential character as a consequence of their experiences." It is remarkable, therefore that the first film post-LSD, Giulietta degli Spiriti, stands out for the use of colours. The colours are very bright and neat. Most of the scenes are full of light with a big chromatic contrast. The feminine costumes are also flamboyant, with extravagant hats and sharp contrast of colours. Men instead are dressed in a more traditional way (except for the members of the entourage of the Guru) keeping however strong contrasts, for example, white shirt and blue suit. The second post-LSD film, Satyricon, instead presents a significant evolution. Colours are not bright and neat, rather they are subdued, even in scenes shot in open air, possibly because the experience of LSD somehow has lost some of its influence. Fellini started working on it in 1967 and, with his words the aim of the film was to re-invent the boundaries between the real world and the world of dream and imagination: "to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination: to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it in order to explore it as something all of a piece and unknowable". Successive films like Roma present, for instance both characteristics (alteration of colours and forms): in the scenes that narrate Fellini's childhood in Rimini, colours are more subdued and the characters have a fairy-tale features (the school master with a grotesque beard, the maids with pink cheeks etc.) while in the scenes set in Rome colours are more bright but there are more deformed individuals (obese women, hunchback, weird prostitutes, etc.). A metamorphosis in the experience of colours, that is, the perception of colours as independent from worldly objects, so that colours stand out autonomously as salient features of reality, is a profound transformation of the perception of space.highlights that, thanks to LSD, colours in Fellini's movies would show their essence freed from any link with objects-what Huxley called "the miracle of naked existence". This is part of a process that accentuates Fellini's expressionistic trend, "leading him to interpret reality as a permanent vision in which pure senses prevail over intellectual elaboration". Moreover, according to, this mystical experience of space and colours matches "the narrative core of Giulietta degli spiriti, which is focused on the mediumistic abilities of the main character: like mescalin takers, many mystics perceive supernaturally brilliant colors, not only with their inner eye, but even in the objective world around them". We can argue that also in later films the abnormality of the colour representation and the distortions of the characters remain a signature of Fellini's style. We cannot claim that all these changes were solely caused by LSD but we argue that this psychedelic compound had a role in this change of approach and affected his creativity pushing it toward surreality. The metamorphosis of lived space in Fellini's post-LSD production is also reflected in the experience of sounds. Voices are often heard independent of any visible source, "they are whispered as though they came from an inner perception that is dissociated from the characters with whom they should be associated". Voices, and sounds in general, are so to say disembodieda characteristic that is also typically found in the experience of persons with schizophrenia. "Ambient sounds (wind, fire, sea), para-atmospheric sounds (white-noise hiss e, hypertrophic fan sound i), electronic sounds (f, g, h, j), and paramusical sounds (b, k) follow one another like acoustic epiphanies. They aim to be experienced per se, almost systematically released from univocal semantic connotations, unless they are able to build unusual synesthetic relationships with elements of the sensitive visions.".
Create a free account to open full-text PDFs.
Sessa, B. · Journal of Psychopharmacology (2008)