Lecture: The Secret Life of Movies
Film as a medium is a resevoir of unconscious imagery. The work of great masters of the medium can be compared to alchemy, in which the search for commercial gold becomes transformed by a spiritual subtext of urgent creative autobiography that reveals a process of individuation. Alongside the story and day-residues of popular culture that we have grown used to finding in film, archetypal imagery makes its unexpected appearance. In this lecture, Dr. Beebe will show how this active imaginal process is alive in the movies of our leading contemporary filmmakers and will tell us how to look for it.
Workshop: The Mythic World of the Post-Modern Film
“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.
John Beebe, M.D. is a Jungian analyst in San Francisco where he practices, teaches, and edits The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. He is a graduate of Harvard College and of the University of Chicago Medical School. After an internship and two additional years in the United States Public Health Service he did his psychiatric residency at Stanford University’s Medical Center. He graduated from the C.G. Jung Institute in 1978 and is active in that institute’s training program. He is also on the clinical faculty of the UC Medical School, San Francisco.
He is co-editor and author of Psychiatric Treatment: Crisis, Clinic and Consultation; editor of Money, Food, Drink, Fashion and Analytic Training (the proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Analytical Psychology) and of Apsects of the Masculine, a collection of Jung’s essays on masculine psychology to be published in 1989. His articles have also appeared in Spring Quadrant, Psychological Perspectives, and The Journal of Analytical Psychology.