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 Door and The Staircase on 31st January, and another Hillman/Kidel collaboration, Kind of Blue, on 28th March.

The Window
Focusing on a recurring trope in cinema - itself a framed opening on the world - James Hillman’s exploration of windows includes an obsessive sexually-motivated voyeur in Patrice Leconte’s “Monsieur Hire”, to Miss Havisham’s heavily draped window in David Lean’s “Great Expectations”, and the moment that Pip finally draws the musty curtains open to expose the elderly woman to the light. In paintings of the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit, beamed down to Mary by a celestial dove, travels through windows. The late artist Charlotte Johnson (mother of Boris) talks of her voyeuristic tendencies, and the erotic chase that peering at others from window to window can facilitate. As frame for reality, a vehicle for penetrating light, and a fulcrum for the imagination, the window is rich in archetypal associations.

The Tower
In a film that darkly anticipates 9/11, this episode describes the hubris that comes with over-reaching for Heaven, seeking the protection of a super-sized building, cut off from the earth. A surprising cast of characters includes a lonely man who dwells in a tower that rises up above Southall’s streets, a New York writer who senses the total isolation and unreal lives of those who dwell around her high up in skyscrapers. The skyscraper in King Vidor’s film of super-élitist philosopher Ayn Rand’s classic novel “The Fountainhead” offers an image of over-reaching ego – once again the excessive promotion of the individual at the expense of the collective, begging to be destroyed, as was the Tower of Babel, and the towering buildings in Fritz Lang’s dystopian and vision of authoritarianism, “Metropolis”.