Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens' documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which was selected for this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, continues its run on the fest circuit with screenings at the BFI London Film Festival, where it plays today and tomorrow as part of the Debate strand. It's now been more than 30 years since David Lynch stepped in to save the production of Almereyda's black-and-white vampire flick Nadja—Lynch funded the entire film after the initial financing fell through—a witty, highly stylised work that brought its director into the arthouse spotlight.
Since then, Almereyda has continued making narrative features, several of which—including his most recent effort, the biopic Tesla—have starred Ethan Hawke, but he's also no stranger to documentary, having directed the likes of This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World and Escapes. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, co-directed with Courtney Stephens (Invention, The American Sector), sees Almereyda once again embrace non-fiction as he and Stephens essay the strange tale of the dolphin-bothering neuroscientist of the title, whose work inspired a classic video game.
Lilly is best remembered for both his invention of the isolation tank and his attempts at establishing communication between humans and dolphins. It is hard to say which of these projects was the more outlandish: the former has endured as a means for those seeking sensory deprivation, while the latter gained a lot of publicity yet yielded no notable legacy. The received wisdom about dolphins is that they are highly intelligent mammals that possess advanced cognitive skills, but Lilly believed they were also capable of language acquisition, and conducted countless cruel experiments on these fine marine animals.
If floatation tanks and talking dolphins aren't sufficiently outré, also consider Lilly's LSD and ketamine-fuelled insistence that there was a cosmic entity—the Earth Coincidence Control Office, or ECCO, of the title—managing earth's inhabitants. Lilly coasted through his life and career on the back of a seemingly bottomless trust fund, and died in 2001 at the age of 86. What, if any, value can be placed on his crackpot theories is something Almereyda and Stephens appear to be on the fence about, yet this doesn't prevent John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office from being a hugely entertaining and engrossing 90 minutes.
Darren Arnold
Images: Festival Scope
