Images of a Visionary World

Henri Michaux, Images du monde visionnaire (still), 1963.

This week, Film Notes publishes an essay by Mats Antonissen on Henri Michaux’s Images du monde visionnaire (1963). Antonissen places the film within the overlapping contexts of Michaux’s psychotropic writings, the history of pharmaceutical film, and postwar avant-garde cinema. This text appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Vandenhove Centre in Ghent devoted to the film, its archival context, and related works by Michaux, on view through May 23, 2026, as well as an accompanying publication by MER Books.

Henri Michaux began investigating the influence of drugs on the creative act in 1955, at the age of fifty-six, and continued to do so until 1966. The artist-writer’s psychedelic decade resulted in a handful of books in which he combined text and drawing to gain an understanding of the workings of hallucinogens. While these books are well known, the fact that Michaux’s quest for psychotropic knowledge—and, as he emphasized repeatedly, not for pleasure—also involved the medium of film is less common knowledge. In 1963, the Franco-Belgian artist collaborated with French director Éric Duvivier and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz to realize Images du monde visionnaire. Michaux’s principal aim was to translate the visions brought on by ingesting mescaline and hashish into moving images. He was disappointed with the result—the thirty-four-minute-long short lacked the force and speed of what he originally saw and felt. 

One explanation for the “failure” of Images is its industrial context. In the 1950s, Sandoz, currently known as Novartis, was one of the first companies in the world to put psychopharmaceuticals such as antidepressants and antipsychotics on the market.1 The Paris offshoot of this Basel-based company gained notoriety for producing short films through an arm they called “Cinémathèque Sandoz.” While French pharmaceutical companies used film to communicate their research and promote products as early as the 1920s, Sandoz distinguished itself thanks to its experimental area of expertise.2 What goes on in someone’s head when they are in a psychotic state? Sandoz invited directors, artists, and writers to attempt to portray these and other derangements of the psyche so that clinicians could better treat patients and chemists could tweak their drugs. 

The text scroll preceding Images du monde visionnaire establishes this pedagogical intent and is therefore worth quoting in its entirety:  

With extraordinary clarity and incredible precision, Henri Michaux succeeded in retaining in his memory certain images of a visionary world that appear under the influence of certain hallucinogenic substances. The scientific value of these experiments justified the initial medical perspective of this production by Éric Duvivier. Professor Jean Delay presented this film to the medical world in 1963 as follows: “The analogy or correspondence between these experimental states, which can be induced and disappear within a few hours, and certain mental disorders forms the basis of current research into the biochemical pathogenesis of psychoses.”

The premiere referred to in this message took place on November 21, 1963, at the Salle d’Iéna in the 16th arrondissement in Paris.3  Two additional shorts were shown that night: another production by Duvivier and his production company ScienceFilm on the clinical potential of chronophotography, and an animated film by Swiss director Nag Ansorg about psychiatric patients in Lausanne, Switzerland. Sandoz provided drinks and appetizers during soirées like these, distributing leaflets detailing their latest products and discoveries in psychopharmacology to the audience.4 Instead of advertising in film, the company advertised by way of film. This preserved the shorts’ artistic integrity and made it possible for Images du monde visionnaire to soon also play in art cinemas across the city.

But despite the company’s relative absence—the Sandoz logo appears only at the very beginning—the collision of commerce and creativity is integral to the film. Critic Jean-Jacques Lebel wrote that the film displays “a monosemic gaze that is completely at odds with Michaux’s ‘visionary world.’ In short: a ‘documentary’ about colors, filmed by someone who is color blind.”5 Since Duvivier had no experience with hallucinogens whatsoever, he was, in a sense, “color blind.” The director also worked at breakneck speed—Images is just one of the hundreds of films he made during his long career. Michaux, although fond of and aspiring to create cinema throughout his life, was no director. He had no practical knowledge of how to adapt his writings into moving images.

At the same time, a project such as this would have proven difficult for just about anyone, regardless of their experience or skill. Michaux’s psychotropic texts are brilliant but dense and essentially literary. They deal with language and its shortcomings in articulating the ineffable character of a hallucination. Much like the rest of the writer’s work, these books are propelled by aiming for a target that is beyond words and therefore always out of reach.

But whereas in literature there was a tradition of writing about toxins that Michaux could fall back on (Aldous Huxley, Ernst Jünger, Antonin Artaud—although Michaux preferred reading medical auto-observations), in film there were very few precedents. The “psychedelic film” as such didn’t quite exist yet. Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954/1966) was a significant but American exception. Directors in Michaux’s immediate environment, like Chris Marker and Agnès Varda, were preoccupied with totally different issues, producing essay films on time and memory and aiming to blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction. 

Michaux acknowledges the struggle to translate psychedelic experience in the film’s prologue. While the camera glides across his drawings, he proclaims in voice-over that

When I was asked to make a film about mescaline visions, I stated, repeated, and still repeat that it is an impossible undertaking. No matter what we do, this drug is beyond that. Even with a superior film, made with much greater resources, with everything needed for an exceptional production, I would still say in advance that these images are insufficient.

While a cinema of the mind on mescaline might have been an impossible and unparalleled undertaking, another cinema of the mind already existed. In 1974, P. Adams Sitney wrote in his book Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde that “the great unacknowledged aspiration of the American avant-garde cinema has been the mimesis of the human mind in a cinematic structure.”6 Michaux and Duvivier’s aspiration was the same; their expression of this aspiration bears similarities to that of other “visionary” directors. 

Images du monde visionnaire consists of two main parts: the first depicts hallucinations caused by mescaline and the second those caused by hashish. Both parts begin with a sequence which depicts the slow onset of the drug in a male protagonist. The actor appears in a domestic setting and functions as a stand-in for Michaux himself, who likewise consumed the hallucinogens in the confines of his home. The effects of the drug gradually become apparent through the man’s facial expressions— concern and fear for mescaline, glassy eyes and giggling for hashish. After he covers his eyes, a montage of the events unfolding inside his head follows.

These preludes call to mind the definition Sitney provided for the “psycho-dramatic trance film,” a subgenre of visionary film. On Anger’s Fireworks (1947), a paradigm of this category, Sitney writes: “the filmmaker himself plays out a drama of psychological revelation; it is cast in the form of a dream beginning and ending with images of its hero as a sleeper; finally, the protagonist is the passive victim of the action of the film.”7 Although here the hero is not asleep but on psychedelics, the premise of Duvivier and Michaux’s short film clearly approaches that of Fireworks.

Henri Michaux, Images du monde visionnaire (still), 1963.

Not only does the framing device align with the American visionary film, but the action within Images also resembles it formally. The lyrical renditions of light, reflections, and shadow, for example, recall the distinct style of Stan Brakhage. Much like Dog Star Man (1961) or Anticipation of the Night (1958), Images du monde visionnaire is replete with abrupt bursts of color, light streaks and flares, streams and jets of water, bare and sweeping tree branches, and so on. On Anticipation of the Night, Sitney wrote that it is “the distillation of an intense and complex interior crisis into an orchestration of sights and associations which cohere in a new formal rhetoric of camera movement and montage."8 In Images du monde visionnaire, too, a (willed) inner crisis is represented cinematically through an assortment of rapidly changing, disparate scenes. Though Duvivier’s camerawork is nowhere near as expressive as Brakhage’s, his frantically paced edit still evokes folly. Were Michaux to have decided alone, the short’s montage would have been even faster. After a screening of the film’s rough cut, he proposed to make each scene last about half a second or less.9

It is documented that Michaux was a cinephile. He repeatedly wrote about his theater visits in Paris and abroad, clearly idealizing the potency of the medium. What’s not known is whether he or Duvivier personally watched any Anger, Brakhage, Maya Deren, or any of the other representatives of this so-called introspective turn. Chances are high, however, considering the American avant-garde cinema’s popularity in the French capital.10 At the very least, Michaux knew the work of Jean Cocteau, whose Sang d’un poète (1932) all three of the aforementioned Americans were heavily indebted to.

Images du monde visionnaire is then the unlikely synthesis of the codes of avant-garde film and medical education. But it is also the product of a mutual opportunism: Michaux consumed mescaline so that he could experience madness and continue his life’s project of exploring the recesses of his mind and imagination. His providers, Sandoz and Delay, used him in turn: as a creative and eloquent guinea pig through which they could gain both knowledge and cultural and financial capital. 

Fellow writer and critic Maurice Blanchot once nicknamed Michaux, by way of Edgar Allen Poe, “l’ange du bizarre” (the angel of the odd). One could argue that the innocence and otherworldliness that make Michaux’s art and writing so mesmerizing to this day are compromised in this collaboration with industry. Here, the angel has crashed down to earth and wound up in the real world, where it is hard to make a film as beautiful, dazzling, and charged as the turbulence and terror in one’s mind. But the author’s oddness, his profoundly bizarre sense of humor and mercurial fantasy, luckily persists.