Ira Cohen @ cynthiabroan.com

New York poet and photographer Ira Cohen recalls the making of his classic 60s underground movie, The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda, now on DVD.

A packed yet enthusiastic audience is spilling onto the street outside Zebulon, a small but lively bar/ performance space in Brooklyn.They have gathered to witness the premiere of the DVD release of The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda, the 1968 psychedelic underground film made by New York poet, photographer, filmmaker and self-styled electronic multimedia shaman, Ira Cohen. Partly assembled by Cohen acolyte Will Swofford and published by Bastet (an imprint of alternative music/arts magazine Arthur), the commercial release of this important document from Cohen's secret archive is indeed a cause for celebration. Boosted with a rare and previously unseen opening scene, alternative soundtracks from Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Acid Mothers Temple, new documentary material and a slide show of Cohen's Mylar chamber photographs from the period, the DVD dramatically expands on Cohen's original vision.The extras also include Swofford's Brain Damage, a prismatic collage of found footage from the Thunderbolt Pagoda sessions. Featuring a Cohen reading and suitably drone infected live music from Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Mahasiddhi, tonight's performance is a further extension of the project, which originally emerged as a result of Cohen's 60s photographic experiments inside his legendary Mylar chamber, which he describes as being "one of the biggest experiences in my life".


	Cross Platform: Sound in other media - Ira Cohen by Edwin Pouncey The WIRE September 2006
New York poet and photographer Ira Cohen recalls the making of his classic 60s underground movie, The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda, now on DVD. A packed yet enthusiastic audience is spilling onto the street outside Zebulon, a small but lively bar/ performance space in Brooklyn.They have gathered to witness the premiere of the DVD release of The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda, the 1968 psychedelic underground film made by New York poet, photographer, filmmaker and self-styled electronic multimedia shaman, Ira Cohen. Partly assembled by Cohen acolyte Will Swofford and published by Bastet (an imprint of alternative music/arts magazine Arthur), the commercial release of this important document from Cohen's secret archive is indeed a cause for celebration. Boosted with a rare and previously unseen opening scene, alternative soundtracks from Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Acid Mothers Temple, new documentary material and a slide show of Cohen's Mylar chamber photographs from the period, the DVD dramatically expands on Cohen's original vision.The extras also include Swofford's Brain Damage, a prismatic collage of found footage from the Thunderbolt Pagoda sessions. Featuring a Cohen reading and suitably drone infected live music from Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Mahasiddhi, tonight's performance is a further extension of the project, which originally emerged as a result of Cohen's 60s photographic experiments inside his legendary Mylar chamber, which he describes as being "one of the biggest experiences in my life".

Encouraged by his friend Allan Ehrlich -who in 1968 had just started a business selling psychedelic posters, black lights and rolls of Mylar reflective paper - to make creative use of his stock, Cohen (assisted by fellow photographer Bill Devore) began a series of alchemical photographic sessions that would imprint his distinctive style into the consciousness of all who came into contact with the melting distortions he managed to capture and project. "I put up these big sheets of Mylar and started to take some photographs," Cohen explains, "hamming it up by making faces or wearing costumes, just to see how it worked. I found that if there was a little ripple in it, you would suddenly get an image where all kinds of distortions happened, and if the distortion was powerful enough then that was the key. I was always looking for something harmonious, where a beautiful face could be somehow made more beautiful by the distorted changes in dimension reflected in the Mylar. "Devore was taking most of the original shots and I was setting everything up," he continues, "finding suitable people to act as models and directing the shoot. I always saw those first photographs as individual shots of great beauty, but they could also be viewed as a series of images, like a kind of comic strip where captions could be added." A selection of these exotically captioned images, including At The Court Of The Golden Emperor, The Majoon Traveller & Lady Firefly Appear In The Hall Of Unconscious Magnetism and Lord Dope Frog Awaits His Lady Somewhere Beyond Time, appeared in such magazines as Avant Garde, Life and the Angus and Hetty MacLise-edited psychedelic issue of Aspen magazine. Cohen also produced slide shows of his work, at one point joining forces with fellow artist Don Snyder, who allowed him to add his aniline dye studies to the Mylar chamber mix. "Occasionally I would photograph somebody like Jimi Hendrix or John McLaughlin in the Mylar chamber," recalls Cohen, "so suddenly these pictures became saleable as album covers and paperback covers for science fiction novels. It was a very good period. I was flourishing and loving it." When Cohen was given access to a Bolex movie camera, the dream of extending the Mylar chamber experience into film suddenly became reality. Using the same crew and his faithful Universal Mutant Repertory Company (which included Tony and Beverly Conrad, Jackson Mac Low, Henry Flynt, Peter Birnbaum, Jack Smith and Diane 'Flame' Rochlin) who had helped produce the still photograph series, Cohen devised three sections for what would become Thunderbolt Pagoda, and shooting began under his direction. "The first of these was The Opium Dream, which featured Rosalind, my girlfriend at the time, who was filmed smoking an opium pipe," he recalls. "We did another session some weeks later called Shamanic Exorcism that had Angus MacLise and others playing music and trance dancing. For the final section, Heavenly Blue Mylar Pavilions, I decided to try the Mylar out of doors in the country, which I had never done before." The location was a rented house in Buck's County, idyllic with its pond jumping with frogs and perfect for the naturalist Mylar illusion that Cohen had in mind. But sadly no footage was shot that day, for, on his return some weeks later, he was dismayed to find that the pond had been drained, the frogs had hopped away and all that was left was a muddy pit. With his original plan sunk, Cohen resorted to improvisation. "Angus was standing there in a loincloth and he had a lawn shovel with him, so I suddenly had this thought," he remembers. "I asked Angus if he could dig this hole for me in the soft earth where the pond had been that would be big enough for me to get into. Then I asked him to completely cover me with that earth and, after a minute, I would emerge from the hole naked. I told Diane Rochlin to shoot it in slow motion." The resulting scene, shot in sepia, has now been found and restored to the original footage as a prologue. When asked if Thunderbolt Pagoda portrays a state of mind, Cohen remembers Kenneth Anger's Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954) as being a similarly psychedelic cinematic experience. "[Anger's film] did not affect me directly in the making of my film," he insists, "it didn't have that kind of influence on me, I was just awed by its beauty. It is definitely psychedelic in a certain way. I knew [the late] Ganesha Baba, and his definition of psychedelic was 'consciousness expanding'. I always liked that definition and it completely changed for me the idea of the word psychedelic being solely associated with the effects of dropping acid. So when I say it's a psychedelic film, I'm thinking more about that than the acid I took when making Thunderbolt Pagoda." - Ira Cohen's The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda DVD (Bastet) is available from arthurmag.com. Sunburned Hand Of The Man play a live soundtrack to the film at Brussels Centre For Arts this month.