CW: FLASHING LIGHTS, STROBE EFFECTS

UFOs
Dir. Lillian Schwartz
1971

The last weekend I visited my dad, he showed me his mind machine. It was a shoddy looking piece of tech strapped onto a pair of goggles. He told me that in order to use it, I’d have to close my eyes. The homemade headset would flash lights in psychedelic patterns over your eyes, which of course you kept shut. I used the machine for twenty minutes when I was 17, about six weeks before he died. I have no idea if he made it himself or got it from a friend of his. 

Lillian Schwartz’s UFOs is widely considered one of the very first computer animated films. Her collection, including Pixillation, Olympiad, and Enigma, are largely similar experiments in color and light, exhibited as museum films and now living almost exclusively online. It is the kind of experimental work that, for many, will serve only as a historical oddity, something for academics and archivists and no one else.

I admire the film’s choice of compositions. The strobing circles that make up the majority of the runtime, the flashing rim of a flying saucer, are alienating. The rippling strokes create a very cool liquid motion effect that would be hard to successfully capture in digital effects for some time afterward. The sea of lines create such an abstract darkness that it captures the oceanic more than the extraterrestrial – though obviously many would cite terrors of the deep as more likely to be met in our lifetime than someone out there. While the fear of the unknown is on mind with this film, I don’t find its portrayal of the other as threatening so much as neutral. Confronting that discomforting fear in a safe setting feels healthy.

I am not the only person who has found this film very personally comforting and beautiful. One mutual of mine found it to capture something spiritual – another writer found it to be the ultimate overstimulation. This film reminds me of my father – it reminds me of how firm his bed was, how his brined oven baked chicken tasted, of his rat tail hair and the story he told of getting LSD from a coworker at his Starbucks cafe.

Today, writing this [April 25,] I am laid out with a sinus infection [it was COVID.] I recharged the Oculus Quest I received from Mom a few years ago, loaded up the Internet Archive video of UFOs, and shut my eyes. I saw the sort of flashing colors I remembered from all those years ago. I wondered if Schwartz ever experimented with drugs. Her work is currently exhibited at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Maybe someday I’ll go – I wonder if I’ll feel Dad as close as I did this afternoon.