The Jungian Classic Film School 2024

Chinatown is seen as the last Hollywood film led by a producer, writer, director and star working together, and not by executives trying to justify their existence. Playing J. J. Gittes this was Jack Nicholson’s first role as a leading man. Yet he spends half the time with a huge bandage on his nose. The wound is not only on his face, but on the face of Los Angeles where corruption holds the city to ransom over its water supply. That’s the collective level. At the personal, where the waters run deep, corruption is shoved in Gittes face when he is confronted by incest.

The name of the perpetrator (played by John Huston, in a rare moment that side of the camera) is Noah Cross. What a name. Flood, sacrifice and tension between opposites? Or simply the Old and New testament? Talking of names, why Chinatown? The writer Robert Towne quotes a cop, “You don’t know who’s a crook and who isn’t a crook. So in Chinatown they say: just don’t do a goddamned thing.” Chinatown is not a place it’s a state of mind.
These are some of the things I will be talking about.

~ Christopher Hauke

Ridley Scott’s landmark 1982 science fiction film, Blade Runner, has been lauded as one of the key films of both its genre, and of the 1980s. Despite a troubled production history and an initial lukewarm box office take, the groundbreaking production design and highly influential visuals ensured that the film successfully transcended its initial cult status, and it soon came to be regarded as a genre classic.

With a number of highly ambiguous onscreen individuative journeys present, there are rich rewards in analysing the film from a post-Jungian perspective. This talk will discuss and explore the various themes, discourses, archetypes and symbols that abound within the film, and map out how they are still relevant today. Finally, the film’s legacy in terms of the sequel Blade Runner 2049, (Villeneuve, 2017) will be explored in reference to the contemporaneous advance of AI and robotics and their potential cultural, social and societal impact.

~ Toby Reynolds

The Angel’s Message: It’s Wonderful Life’ begins at a critical juncture in the protagonist’s life: on Christmas Eve 1945, in Bedford Falls (NY), George Bailey is contemplating suicide. From this moment on – and with the help of George’s guardian angel – we will travel backwards, becoming witnesses of this man’s adventures: from his early years as an audacious child to his present as a husband and father of four. What has gone so wrong in George’s life? What darkness hovers over him?

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ talks to us about the struggles of the individual – while painting a larger portrait of a place and a time in American history. The film has become a beloved Christmas movie for how it conveys Christian values and delivers its message of redemption and hope. In this talk, however, I will offer a Jungian reading centered on the process of individuation.

In particular, I will focus on themes regarding midlife crisis (and the feelings of frustration, disorientation and despair that often accompany it); the role of the daimon/angel as guide and protector; and the difficult relation between the ego and the Self. All of this while looking at the elements that make of this film such a rewarding and enduring cinematic achievement.

~ Cristina Álvarez López

The Godfather Trilogy– widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements in cinematic history – resonates with audiences because of its ability, it will be suggested, to capture the complexities, phantoms, and invisible loyalties governing family life. The films are a springboard to exploring both Jung’s thinking on the psychology of the family and the powerful role of the family unconscious in shaping individual development.

The trilogy not only stages the emotional consequences of, and psychology behind, how we interact with family members, but it also expresses, when read from a depth psychological perspective, why we may be compelled to do so. Crucially, not only are we responsible for the family bonds we may cultivate, break and repair, we are equally accountable for the relationships we foster with an internal cast or ‘family’ of archetypal figures, which we ignore at our peril.

~ Kevin Lu

The term Gaslighting gained traction, becoming ubiquitous, after the 2016 U.S. election; by 2022 it was named “word of the year.” This 1944 film, Gaslight, based on the 1938 play, is the source of the term. A husband plots to convince his wife, Paula, that she is going insane because he is after money and jewels left to her by her aunt, whom he had murdered years before when she was a young girl. To gaslight someone is a form of psychological emotional abuse causing the victim to question, doubt, and undermine her/his own feelings, instincts, and sanity.

In the film, the image of the gaslight is a potent living symbol representing her ego consciousness as it is overtaken, possessed by his manipulative control of her and her own identification with the negative animus figure of her husband.

We watch, horrified and helpless, as Paula decompensates from an independent, self-possessed woman to a frightened, passive, submissive-like child with her psychopathic husband. Her vulnerability to being tricked by his predatory, humiliating, calculating deception has roots in her own repressed trauma. Coerced into complicity with his relentless assault on her inner knowing, Paula appears “ready” against her own instincts to believe she is insane because there is no other way of facing or denying the unbearable alternative: that her husband is trying to drive her insane. The film then becomes a critique of romantic love, of pressures society places on women to commit themselves to men without question, without discernment, of suppressing a connection to their own body-knowing intelligence when it conflicts with a romantic ideal in intimate relationships. As the psychologist Carol Gilligan argues in her seminal book Why Patriarchy Persists: Women take themselves out of relationship by suppressing what they know, for the sake of preserving the relationship.

We will explore how the film reveals the embodied movement and unfolding of the archetypal energies of the trickster and the animus, in both their negative and positive poles. This classic, award-winning film, resonant of a Bluebeard fairy-tale, continues to illuminate relational dynamics in our patriarchal culture.

~ Judith Cooper

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1990) was a London born film writer, producer and director who developed a keen taste for the dark thrills of life; suspenseful yet often invisible threats, erotic tension, and the intensity of psychological suffering to mention just a few characteristics. He was a masterful film director/ producer who oftentimes seemed to delight in sadistically terrifying as well as exciting his viewers making room for some projection on my part here. Hitchcock introduced the stylistic element of the cameo appearance of the producer/director in his own films. His unique style of camera work facilitated a capacity to bring the human psyche in all its dark reality to the big screen. Commentary on Hitchcock supports the idea that much of the fodder for his films were based on his own life traumas. The theme of an artists’ muse being their own personal suffering is well known in creative circles and this dynamic never tires.

Hitchcock, a rather mercurial character, struck me as an excellent choice for a Jungian approach to films. His themes so often deal with the shadowy aspects of the human psyche. We are revolted, captivated, terrified, disgusted, and fascinated by his frank and mysterious approach to the complexities of the human spirit. The movie “Marnie” released in 1964 was Hitchcock’s 49th film. The film circumambulates around an innocent looking, beautiful, mysterious dark female protagonist called Marnie. Is she a thief, a seductress, a young woman suffering from a severe neurotic condition, an anima projection of the male protagonist Mark? What does she illicit in the viewer? This controversial film presents sexual and dark erotic themes as well as it amplifies themes of personal and collective aspects of Carl Jung’s notion Shadow. In many ways it painfully reveals attitudes towards the feminine, paternity and patriarchal violence that continues to plague humanity. How do we relate to feminine aspects of ourselves? What needs greater healing and integration? What does it evoke in you? Lets watch.

~ Ronnie Landau