Maya wakes in a ghostly light… Photo by Ira Cohen & Bill Devore
From The Sunday Times of London (November 25, 2007):
Ira Cohen: From the Mylar Chamber
‘It blew my mind, man’ – our correspondent sees a forgotten 1960s genius swirl back into focus
Waldemar Januszczak
A couple of years ago, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and turned on the telly, on which Channel 4 was showing something weird and wobbly that caught my eye. Had it been any other hour, I would surely have zapped ahead to a more legible offering, but you know how it is with late-night television. It takes you somewhere else. So, I found myself staying till the end with something called The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, directed by someone called Ira Cohen.
It is difficult to describe what happens in Thunderbolt Pagoda – not because I have forgotten, but because the action is pretty much indescribable. Against a background of throbbing Moroccan trance music, punctuated by the occasional screech of what seems to be a Formula One car going too fast around a bend, strange people dressed in strange robes loom in and out of focus in a strange and bendy way as the camera moves strangely among them and into them. The director appeared to be on acid, the actors on angel dust, the make-up artists on opium, the costumiers on methedrine and the set designers on speed. Ninety-nine times out of 100, I would have hated it. But The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, in the preferred parlance of its time, blew my mind, man.
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