Anthem For A Consciousness
“Dope is dope. The movie is not about dope. Dope is the ground, like the earth - always there.” - Flame Schon (formerly Diane Rochlin)
Featuring Donovan and Australian artist/dancer Vali Myers, the spectre of underground folk legend Geno Foreman, Marianne Faithfull talking about poppers, Syd’s Floyd in full UFO freakoutmode, The Fool andmainlining in Richmond Hill, DOPE is the definitive document of counter-cultural life in the capital during 1967. IAN O’SULLIVAN prepares to get loaded.
T
HE RARELY SCREENED documentary Dope, by husband and wife directorial team Sheldon and Diane Rochlin, tells of two American
couples and a free-spirited New Zealander living together in a large flat in Richmond and provides what is possibly the closest filmic insight to what life in London in 1967 was like for those on the inner circle of the counter-culture.
Like Peter Whitehead’s Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London (’67), Dope shows the party in full flow as London threw caution to the psychedelic winds, but it also takes us to the downtime world between the fixes and
the happenings. If Whitehead’s slowed-down, blurred Piccadilly Circus lights aped the perception of the tripping city reveller’s acid gaze, for the Rochlins, the same lights offer a harsher, glaring backdrop to the midnight sprint to Boots for legal prescriptions of heroin. Dope takes us to the bed-sits and smoke-filled rooms where the talk is of busted dealers and fallen companions, and to the roadside caffs where lorry drivers vacantly pore over newspapers with headlines of drugged up pop stars and moral outrage.
The film follows five main characters: Chris and Sharon are the entrepreneurial couple, with properties in the Balearic Islands and
India. Sharon enthusiastically consumes the fruits of the hip new marketplace, searching out the latest items of bespoke underground chic. Enigmatic hippy Diane, with her artist/musician beau Casey, appear to have simpler needs as they get some wheels together with a view to an unfettered life of the open road. Lastly, weaving in and out of these couples and through a chorus of heads, dealers, artists and lovers is Caroline, whose unquestioning hedonism and direct take on life leads her to embrace the needle with the most zeal and whose decline through addiction is recorded in Dope.
Although drugs are prevalent throughout the film, anybody expecting to find an exploitation flick for the flower generation will be sorely disappointed. As US film trade bible Variety commented, on its screening at The Locarno Film Festival in ’68, Dope “is not just another look at the so-called drug, or hippie scene… [it’s] a rugged documentary with revealing insights into the sad, touching, downbeat and sometimes tender drug scene”. Also, as a documentary, Dope is no mere “fly- on-the wall” piece; the filmmakers lived with the subjects of their film, were their friends and as such are part of Dope too. One of the film’s many strong points is that it does not take sides or make moral judgements about the assortment of people and lifestyles that it depicts. In Dope, Diane and Sheldon Rochlin pushed the documentary format into new territory: 90 minutes of rapid montages are accompanied by a multi-layered soundtrack of voices, fleeting narrators, music and significant silences. Dope, by seeking to have the effect of the very thing that it depicts, simultaneously transcends the period it was made yet reveals to us the very essence of the era.
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