Hippie Mov(i)ement

Hippie Mov(i)ement

Hippie Movie 2007

HD and Super-8, 53 min

Watch Hippie Movie on Ubu.com

 

Hippie Movie is a funny and romantic 'documentary' about a Hippie movement named TroPolicalia, which was founded by Christoph Draeger in Warsaw 2007 as an ironic remake of San Francisco's Summer of Love 1967. The movement's name is a pun on Brazil’s Tropicalia movement of the late 1960’s. 
In the light of rising social injustice, an unpopular war in Iraq, ecological concerns and a new cold war looming, the film is a meditation on political, social and cultural behaviour first coined in the 1960's by the Hippies, who protested and contested many issues that are making a comeback today. It is also a celebration of the inventions of 1960's rock music, and last but not least, a hallucinatory, post-psychedelic visual trip.

Marianka Dobkowska, curator at CCA Warsaw, in 2008: “It was really the summer of love last year.”

 

Stills from Hippie Movie 2007

HD and Super-8, 53 min

 

From top left to bottom right:
Hippies on a jeep: a homage to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966)
The magical boat ride, Marianka Dobkowska on the left
Hippies hitchhiking
A trip to the country in the Magic VW bus
The fire department in Brok
The Egg, a psychedelic club: first, and last party
The day after: The club, and the castle, on fire
All we are saying, is give peace a chance! Anti-war protest during military parade.
Don't Bogart that joint, my friend! Kuba II, hippie dissident.

 

The TROPOLICALIA saga, a two-months durational performance:
During my residency at Ujazdowski Castle (CCA-Center of Contemporary Art) in Warsaw in the summer of 2007, I founded a hippie movement as a two-months durational performance. We proclaimed the psychedelic revolution in Poland. Volunteers in drags played out many actions inspired by the Summer of Love, one of the defining moments of the 60’s era that happened exactly 40 years ago in San Francisco. Poland, in the Sixties behind the Iron Curtain, didn’t enjoy anything like the summer of love, and its transition after 1989 from authoritarian communism to hyper-capitalism and neoliberalism of the Chicago school was fast, leaving little room for idealism or alternative ideology. 2008 looked like it could be a good moment for a new born hippie movement in Warsaw.
Different episodes, like a mini-Woodstock hippie music festival in the park of the castle, an anti-war demonstration in the city centre, a party at TheEgg club (specially created for the project, complete with psychedelic light show and music) were improvised, lived and documented. The shootings were happenings, mixing simulation and reality. The resulting film, shot in HD video (and some Super-8), is a doc-soap, a critique of conformity and consumerism - and a hallucinatory visual and musical trip that ironically reflects upon lost innocence, forgotten ideologies, political expression, and most of all, peace and love.

 

Stills from Hippie Movie 2007

HD and Super-8, 53 min

 

From top left to bottom right:
Taking a shower in the prickly brown waters of the fountain Na Rozdrozu
Only one hippie is bathing in the toxic Brok river...
...others merely wet their toes
Resting on a grave stone á la Easy Rider '
The Egg festival, a psychedelic mini-Woodstock, in Ujazdowski park (5-9)