C G Jung Lectures Bristol present two films featuring James Hillman, by Mark and Susan Kidel from their series The Architecture of the Imagination. After the films we'll have a discussion including Mark Kidel and the audience.

In 1984 Mark Kidel invited the post-Jungian writer and psychologist James Hillman to Dartington to run a weekend seminar on animals in myths, dreams and fairy tales. Following this, Mark, James and Susan collaborated on seven films based on Hillman's ideas. The Architecture of the Imagination (1994) is a series of five ground-breaking films, 30 minutes each. Focusing on key architectural features that we encounter every day, Hillman explores the rich and archetypal ambiguities of such images as The Door, The Staircase, The Window, the Tower and the Bridge. These original, thought-provoking and often humorous films include many examples drawn from the history of art and classic cinema.

We will be screening The Window and The Tower on 28th February, and another Hillman/Kidel collaboration, Kind of Blue, on 28th March.

The Door
This is poetics of the doorway – with detours through thresholds, hinges, locks and keys. A designer bolts herself up in a ground-floor London apartment that becomes a kind of prison. A heavily-built doorman incarnates the image of Janus as he stands guard outside a Piccadilly nightclub and looks right and left, two-faced like the Roman God. Others evoke the essential nature of the edge between “in“ and “out”, the sacred and the profane, the comfort of home and the dangers of the outside world. Hillman concludes by commenting on a world in which the doorway has given way to open-plan, and our need for secrecy, intimacy and containment is ignored, with a price - a loss of soul.

The Staircase
The staircase can evoke ascent and descent in life, whether it’s Jacob’s Ladder reaching up to Paradise or the stage on which a beautiful lady can make a graceful entrance - an image of Aphrodite descending from Heaven. It’s also a place of drama, chases, bone-shattering falls or encounters with Fate. The film follows Shell’s CEO as he climbs up over twenty floors to his office overlooking London, a daily test of his fitness as man and executive. The film brings to life a multi-faceted image of life’s journey, seen as a matter of reaching for glorious heights or being catapulted down to failure, as in the classic game of Snakes and Ladders.