C G Jung Lectures Bristol present a film featuring James Hillman, by Mark and Susan Kidel. After the film we'll have a discussion including Mark Kidel and the audience. This is a unique opportunity to revisit these cult classics, with James Hillman as his provocative best – films made for mainstream and primetime television (BBC2 and C4) which would never get a chance of being commissioned today.

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. Kind of Blue: an essay (1994, Winner of a Royal Television Society Award in 1995) is a film in defence of the melancholy mood, a film often used all over the world by psychotherapists, as a kind of homeopathic intervention in the lives of their clients.

Named after a late 1950s’ Miles Davis jazz album, Kind of Blue is a deeply stirring and poetic film-essay defending the notion that feeling ‘blue’ isn’t to be avoided at all costs, but embraced, as the Ancients did, acknowledging that going ‘down’ offers a potential pathway to wisdom and wholeness, an experience of life in which darkness and suffering have as much of a place as well-being and light. An experience of life in which the god Saturn and his archetypal slowness offer a contrast to the fast pace that we frantically seek in an attempt to avoid the complex richness of the soul. We must, James Hillman argues, accept the downward pull of dark feelings and thoughts, recognising the ephemeral and the inevitability of change and decay. There can be transient beauty in melancholy as well; the “beauty”, as one contributor puts it, quoting Keats “that must die”.

A film rich in evocative imagery – empty beaches at low tide, gloomy graveyards, lonely woodland ponds, withered flowers, derelict houses with broken windows, shuttered shops in abandoned streets, the desolation of urban crowds - and melancholy sounds that range from Bartok to Ray Charles, and Beethoven to John Coltrane. There are paintings by Dürer, Giorgione, Cranach, Picasso, Munch and others, all of them conjuring the melancholy mood. Contributions from writers Jenny Diski and Trevor Preston, mythographer Jules Cashford, the Irish uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn and others, are structured around an inspiring and provocative interview with James Hillman.

We will also be screening films from the Architecture of the Imagination series: The Door and The Staircase on 31st January and The Window and The Tower on 28th February.