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The Mythic World of the Post-Modern Film
September 23, 1989 @ 9:30 am - 4:30 pm PDT
“Reading” a post-modern film is not easy for those brought up on modern cinema. The content is often disturbing and the style is frequently strange. New kinds of protagonists have replaced the familiar hero and survivor figures, and familiar conventions of film narration are continually being challenged. Yet often there is a gripping intensity to the stories that are told in this new way. Among recent attempts to establish this new film style, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet stands out as a genuine mythic achievement. This is a complex work of art that records the emergence of new archetypal solutions to the problems left by the modern era.
After the special showing of the film, Dr. Beebe will conduct an inquiry into its imagery, which probes the deep wounds that modern culture and the myth of the hero that informs it have left for post-modern men and women to resolve.
Related Lecture: The Secret Life of Movies
John Beebe, M.D., a past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, is a psychiatrist who specializes in psychotherapy. He is the author of Integrity in Depth and Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness. He is co-author, with Virginia Apperson, of The Presence of the Feminine in Film, and co-editor, with Ernst Falzeder, of The Question of Psychological Types. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, he has written about psychological types for numerous books and journals. Beebe’s eight-function, eight-archetype model of type is widely studied and applied in the field. In addition, he has spearheaded a Jungian typological approach to the analysis of film.