As part of the 2026 edition of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies conference, held in Montpellier under the theme “In-Visible,” this panel explores the cinematic and media histories of hallucination across a wide range of scientific, clinical, and aesthetic contexts. Entitled “Hallucination on Screen: From Psychiatric Archives to Psychedelic Media,” the session brings together scholars working at the intersection of film and media studies, history of psychiatry, visual culture, and sensory studies in order to examine how hallucination has been represented, mediated, theorized, and technologically produced throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

This panel examines hallucination as a privileged object for analysing how cinema negotiates the boundary between visibility and invisibility. Defined in psychiatry as a perception without an external object, hallucination designates an intrinsically invisible experience that nonetheless calls for visual and auditory mediation. Cinema has long functioned both as an epistemological model for hallucination and as a technical apparatus capable of giving form to inner, unstable, or non-shareable perceptions. Bringing together approaches from film theory, media archaeology, disability studies, colour studies, and the history of psychiatry, the panel explores how hallucination is rendered visible across different historical moments, institutional frameworks, and media configurations. The first contribution focuses on psychiatric and scientific films produced in clinical contexts, particularly archival materials, where hallucination is approached through regimes of observation that privilege bodily signs, gestures, and behaviours. The second paper addresses semi-industrial and experimental films produced in close relation with the pharmaceutical sector during the 1960s, with a focus on Éric Duvivier’s work. Mobilising surrealist and psychedelic aesthetics, these films move beyond symptomatology and attempt to translate hallucinatory experience through visual saturation, chromatic excess, and perceptual destabilisation. The third contribution adopts a media-archaeological and archival perspective, analysing how technological choices, duplication practices, and preservation histories affect the visibility of hallucination, particularly through colour. It shows how hallucinatory effects can be materially altered, diminished, or rendered invisible through processes of circulation and archiving. The final paper turns to contemporary animated television and psychedelic aesthetics, examining hallucination as a means of visualising pain, dissociation, and non-normative temporalities. Drawing on crip and trans theories, it reframes hallucination as a mode of embodied knowledge that challenges medicalised narratives of cure and normalisation.

Mireille Berton (University of Lausanne) – Hallucination on Screen: Spectatorship between Observation and Experience
This paper examines how cinema constructs different regimes of visibility and invisibility of hallucination and how these regimes shape the spectator’s position between observation and experience. Focusing on two distinct film practices, it analyses psychiatric research films from the Waldau collection in Switzerland and the scientific films produced by Éric Duvivier for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz during the 1960s. In the Waldau films, hallucination is approached through a clinical regime of observation that privileges bodily signs, gestures, and behaviours. Rather than visualising inner perception, these films render hallucination legible through external indices, positioning the spectator as a clinical observer confronted with an experience that remains inaccessible. By contrast, Duvivier’s films mobilise surrealist and avant-garde aesthetics to explore hallucination through visual excess, montage, and perceptual distortion. Here, hallucination is no longer only a symptom to be documented but becomes an audiovisual experience that engages the spectator at the level of sensation and destabilised perception. Through sequence analysis and historical contextualisation, the paper compares these two configurations with a fiction film from the 1960s in order to sketch a typology of audiovisual regimes of representing hallucination. It asks how these dispositifs organise different economies of visibility and invisibility and how they redefine the spectator’s status as an instance of knowledge, empathy, or power in relation to madness, with particular attention to the limits of representing psychic invisibility.

Marie Rebecchi (Aix-Marseille Université) – Visualising Hallucination: Eric Duvivier between Surrealism and Psychedelia
My talk explores how hallucinations are visualised in both medical-experimental cinema of the 1960s and in the psychedelic films of the same period. The analysis focuses on Eric Duvivier’s experimental film programme entitled Hallucination, presented in Paris in 1968 at the Le Ranelagh art gallery and movie theatre. The programme included Images du monde visionnaire (1964), La femme 100 têtes (1967), and Concerto mécanique pour la folie (1963). Like many of Duvivier’s works, the films in this programme are deeply permeated by references to the artists and aesthetics of early Surrealism, above all Max Ernst. However, I argue that Duvivier’s films are less aligned with the historical Surrealist avant-garde than with the visual and perceptual imaginaries of 1960s psychedelic experimental cinema. I will show how these films attempt to render hallucination not as a representation of mental pathology, but as a perceptual regime that destabilises the boundaries between vision, consciousness, and the film itself. In this sense, hallucination emerges as a privileged site of the in-visible: a mode of experience that resists direct representation and can only be approached through experimental strategies of visual distortion, repetition, and sensory excess. This paper proposes that Duvivier’s work occupies a crucial transitional position between medical visual cultures, Surrealist imaginaries, and psychedelic experimental cinema, revealing how hallucination functions as a key interface between scientific observation, artistic experimentation, and altered states of perception.

Bregt Lameris (Open University of the Netherlands) – The (in)visible colours of Images du monde visionnaire (1963), a media-archeological study
During the 1960s, the French semi-professional filmmaker Éric Duvivier made a series of films exploring hallucinations. One of these films, Images du monde visionnaire (1963), has moving colours as its most interesting component. However, like many semi-professional filmmakers at the time, Duvivier used small-gauge film stocks to produce his films. For his colour films, he used Kodachrome film, which has proven to be very colour-stable over time. However, for the distribution of his films, he used various reversal film stocks that duplicated colours in different ways. As a result, the hallucinatory colours of the camera material remained invisible to the audience. Instead, they were shown colours with lower saturation and greater contrast, thus creating different atmospheric spaces and hallucinatory colours than the camera material suggests was intended. In this talk, I will discuss the visibility and invisibility of colours of Images du monde visionnaire (1963). I will address questions about differences in colour rendition and quality resulting from duplication practices in the case of Kodachrome and various reversal duplication stocks. I will illustrate this with images and scans of the various prints that are the result of the interdisciplinary team of the FilmColors project at Zurich University that finished in 2020. This resulted in a combination of film-historical, aesthetic, colourimetric, and archival studies that make visible the history of this film title through the various prints the archive has unveiled.

Slava Greenberg (University of Amsterdam) – Out of your body, out of your mind: Trip time, Crip Time, & Pain in psychedelic cinema
Animating an otherwise invisible mental state into audiovisual form, BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014–2020) as an aesthetic experimentation, repeatedly stages hallucination as a cinematic problem of in/visibility. The show mobilizes dissociative, ketamine-inflected visual regimes—voids, erasure, looping temporalities, and loss of bodily boundaries—to render pain not as an aberration to be cured, but as a structuring condition of perception and experience. Refusing the classic prosthesis narrative, where a disabled, Mad, or chronically ill subject is either cured or euthanized at the end, BoJack’s narrative operates on trip time, which is much like crip time, and redraws the lines of pleasure and pain, insanity and reason, alone or “independent” and in community. I read BoJack’s (bad) trip time through crip time and its pain-alleviating mechanisms with Alyson Patsavas’s “cripistemology of pain” to stress both structural oppressions that govern our understanding of pain and individually negotiated relations that give way to “a livable life.”
In medical and popular discourses, pain is shaped by the ableist, sanist, cissexist frameworks that render the invisible illegible, invalidating bodyminds in pain. In crip and trans theories, as in experimental animation, pain presents a personal opportunity and connects one with collective forms of care. By positioning spectatorship alongside ketamine as a form of pain alleviation, through a trans-crip media archeology, I argue that psychedelic hallucinations on screen provide a critical framework for understanding how disabled, Mad, and trans bodyminds negotiate invisible pain, challenging dominant medicalized accounts of health, sanity, and embodiment.

NECS 2026 – https://necs.org/conference
NECS CONFERENCE 2026 – 18th-20th of June 2026
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier
Hallucination on Screen: From Psychiatric Archives to Psychedelic Media
Proposed by Mireille Berton and Marie Rebecchi
Endorsed by the Media, Health and Disability Workgroup
19 June 2026, 9:30–11:10






