The dream: I am projecting
Film Portrait to the symposium’s members
in preparation for my talk. I am changing reels. Behind me
a man prepares to leave, saying as he goes—in a voice clearly
intended to let everyone know his feelings and to garner
accompanists—”you mean some people are still watching this
film!” My spirits sink; his antipathy confirms my fears. About
one third of the audience follows the man out. Just then,
also behind me, I hear Jerome Hill call. I turn. He is accompanied
by a woman. He is smiling as he comes forth to shake hands.
I realize I must have invited him to the symposium. I am sorry
and embarrassed that he has had to witness people walking out
on his film. To my surprise, Hill expresses delight in being asked
into the symposium, saying explicitly that he has made several
nourishing contacts in conversation. He ignores the departures
with the civility attributed to him by those who knew him. The
woman echoes his sentiment. Deeply heartened, I put up the second
reel for those who remain.
Next morning, I knew
I must finish and deliver the paper as scheduled.
Otherwise, the delight Hill and his woman companion expressed
would be confined to the dream. But this would violate the
dream itself, i.e., their attendance at the symposium at my
invitation. I had to do my part to insure that their attendance—which
was already present in the dream—would come to pass in social
reality. The authenticity of this dream, and the responsibility
it called forth, was the matrix out of which the following essay
was born.
Why Jerome Hill? Within the history of film there exists a relatively unknown tandem between Jung and a significant set of filmmakers in the personal film mode. This tandem is often characterized by the influence of Jung’s writings upon the filmmakers’ lives and work: in the instance of James Broughton, a Bay-area filmmaker, by analysis with the Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson; and in Jerome Hill’s case, a significant acquaintance with Jung himself, through Hill’s cousin, Maud Oakes. 1 Outside this tandem, made by fairly direct influence, there exists a much larger number of personal filmmakers whose work openly invites Jungian and post-Jungian commentary. (By post-Jungian, I mean especially James Hillman and those who work within his definitions of archetypal and imaginal psychology.) 2 In these instances, the crafting of films accurately described as symbolic, archetypal, mythic, imaginal, or liminal already suggests the utility of some form of Jungian hermeneutics, including amplification. 3
The fact that this link
between Jung and personal filmmakers is unknown
is not surprising; the mode itself is largely unknown. By
and large, public exhibition venues exist only in metropolitan
museums and art institutes, and in universities. Within the
academic study of film, the personal film tradition is generally
ignored, because it lacks the social influence of documentary
and commercial narrative film. Or, conversely, it is denigrated
as self-indulgent, narcissistic, obscurantist, elitist. And
it sometimes is. But, from a psychological point of view, these
qualities invite interpretation, not unreflective dismissal.
One correctly diagnoses
this situation, albeit only partially, as a result of
the lack of interest our extroverted and philosophically
materialistic culture has in an essentially introverted
manner of filmmaking.
Additionally, the film
medium itself seems at first glance to favor the extroverted
and materialistic attitudes, given its extraordinary
capacity and tendency to take a kind of molding of the face
the world presents to the camera. Much of the credibility,
power, and fascination of documentary film depends upon
our recognition of, and acquiescence to, this filmic molding
of the world’s face. Understandably, if somewhat ironically,
it also undergirds the impression of reality we attribute
to the fictional worlds of commercial narrative films.
But even documentary
filmmakers know that film is always more than a molding
of the world’s face. One of the best of them, the Australian
ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall, states that awareness
this way: “The film image becomes a piece of evidence, like
a potsherd. It also becomes, through the denial of all other
possible images, a reflection of thought. In that double nature
is the magic that can so easily dazzle us.”
5
Thought in film can operate, of course,
in extroverted and introverted modes, in tandem with
the other psychic functions—sensation, feeling, and intuition—but,
to acknowledge any of these functions as factors in filmmaking
is to acknowledge the reality of another world, the world
of the psyche, which they presuppose.
By and large, the filmmakers
in the personal film mode have started from this
end of the stick, the reality of the world of the psyche,
and in an introverted manner (although there are exceptions).
In their works they provide ample evidence that film can
manifest not only thought, but intuition, sensation,
and feeling in their introverted vector.
Jerome Hill was a filmmaker
in this tradition, which goes all the way back into
the teens and twenties in Europe and America, when some
artists in the traditional fine arts (novelists, poets, musicians,
and, especially, painters) recognized in film a new and
additional medium for personal expression.
6
Due to a number of factors, paramount
among them the Great Depression, the rise of totalitarianism,
and the expense of sound filmmaking, European and American
personal filmmaking died out in the thirties. In 1943 an American
renaissance of such work began with Maya Deren’s psychodramatic
short Meshes of the Afternoon. Jerome Hill, after substantial
work in painting, music, poetry, architecture, and documentary
filmmaking, publicly entered this second heyday of the personal
filmmaking tradition in 1961 with a Jung-inspired feature-length
film titled The Sand Castle. I say publicly, because Hill had
already made a personal film in the early thirties, which was unreleased
at the time, but incorporated in full in Film Portrait, his
autobiographical film, released in 1971, just prior to his death.
Three years after The Sand Castle, in 1964, Hill released
another feature-length film, Open the Door, described
in Film Portrait as a Jungian black comedy with lyric
overtones! These two films resulted from Jung’s suggestion that
Hill not complete a planned film biography of him, but make films
illustrating aspects of Jung’s psychology. Maud Oakes mentions
that the biographical film project was not completed because
of “difficulties” in the professional relationship between Jung
and Hill. She does not name these difficulties. Hill had already
made film biographies of Grandma Moses and Albert Schweitzer, winning
the 1957 Academy Award for documentary film for the latter. Hill’s
footage of Jung was posthumously edited by Jonas Mekas, and released
in 1991, under the title Dr. Carl G. Jung; or Lapis Philosophorum
.
Why Jerome Hill? Because
he is representative of the tandem between Jung
and personal filmmakers that needs to be better known,
and interpreted, by scholars sympathetic to Jung’s psychology
and its development by other analyst-scholars.
7
Of this need one rightfully expects
a demonstration. Film Portrait is itself one such demonstration;
a second, derivative one is the following commentary.
Film Portrait was Hill’s last film. Within
weeks of its premiere at the Museum of Modern Art he
was dead from cancer. In 1989, Stan Brakhage, probably the
world’s most seminal and prolific personal filmmaker,
called it “the only direct autobiography we have in
film,” and cited its influence on subsequent autobiographical
films by himself (Sincerity and Duplicity), James
Broughton ( Testament ), and Jonas Mekas (Diaries,
Notes, Sketches ).
8
Brakhage’s characterization of Film
Portrait as a “very straight attempt to present
autobiography on film” is accurate, but incomplete, insofar
as the film also includes discussions of the history of film
(Hill observes that he and the medium grew up together), and
of the temporal and alchemical character of film. The latter
topic takes Hill rather directly into the philosophic
issue of film’s ontology. Nonetheless, Hill’s life, his vocation
as a film artist, informs whatever else the film attends to.
The film is most fruitfully interpreted as a filmic anamnesis,
and as an anamnestic film. The first function informs its
making; the second its viewing by the creator and others.
9
Jung’s utility in understanding
Hill’s films does not come down to one idea; it draws
instead from a multiplicity of notions and sources,
all of which can be linked psychologically, but which do
not necessarily follow one another in strict logical fashion.
(Hence the tribulations we all experience trying in our
writing to be both psychological and logical.) These include
Jung’s own autobiographical statement (Memories, Dreams,
Reflections ), individuation, persona, and vocation psychology,
the puer-senex and puer-mother tandems, the function and
attitude typologies, the depth psychology of alchemy, and the
relationship of aesthetic creation to psychological self-realization.
No full application of these interpretative parameters will
be attempted here. Instead, I will work selectively and suggestively,
in the hope that my observations will draw the reader back to
the film itself.
Briefly, I will sketch
out how the film can be understood from a Jungian
perspective as an anamnesis of individuation, then as a
demonstration of film as an alchemical medium of expression.
First, as an anamnesis
of individuation: Hill was the grandson of James
J. Hill, the railroad baron who pushed the American railroad
from east to west on the idee fixe that “people should
move along a line of shared weather.”
10
This grandfather, who lived next door in
St. Paul, dominated the extended family. In Film Portrait
he hovers over Hill’s early life as a negative senex.
“The negative senex is the senex split from its own puer aspect.
He has lost his ‘child’ “is the way James Hillman describes
this archetypal constellation—a fact poignantly implied in
Hill’s remark that “this family to which I belonged did not belong
to me.” 11
As one might expect, such a familial environment carried within it severe persona expectations. Hill suffered from these because his nascent artistic vocation, his inner calling to a life of image-making, had little legitimacy in his grandfather’s eyes. The business and political personae considered legitimate, i.e., “manly,” within this environment would have been experienced by Hill as socially-sanctioned, publicly-imposed masks of feigned individuality, very much in keeping with the persona psychology described by Jung in Two Essays in Analytical Psychology:
"/The persona/ is, as its name implies, only a mask
of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality, making others
and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply acting
a role through which the collective psyche speaks."
12
Vocation psychology, described by Jung in “The Development of Personality,” is a quite different matter, insofar as it involves heeding an inner voice which sounds the call to personal integrity, and which insists on being obeyed:
What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way....It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation....The best known example of this is Faust, and an historical instance is provided by the daemon of Socrates. 13
Hill’s response to this environment is clearly
marked by aspects of puer psychology, aspects of
which he kept to the end of his life, if this final film
is believed. These include an early and deep response to
beauty; a creative relationship to the feminine through a series
of females—including his mother, a blind Native American shamaness,
Maud Oakes, and female characters in his 1932 personal film,
The Fortune Teller ; emphasis upon creative renewal and “possibilities”;
and the overcoming of time as embodied in the senex. These last
two aspects begin and end the film.
The first scene has the 66-year-old Hill shaving
and musing intuitively over his future as an old man: possible
futures, impossible ones (e.g., Pope or family patriarch), hoped
for and unhoped for ones. He longs for a present that remains present,
but acknowledges that the present is always already past. “This
is the me that am,” he says, “or, rather, the me that was at that
moment and never will be again. The me that am, alas, does not last
as long as a single cinematographic frame.” Hill will find his personal
solution to the problem of time’s passing in his alchemical
view of film, as we shall discover later.
That a consideration of history, including personal history in autobiography, should call forth the puer-senex pair James Hillman states is not a surprise. As he puts it:
Our polarities—senex and puer—provide the archetype for the psychological foundation of the problem of history. First, in the conventional sense, puer and senex are history as a process through time from beginning to end. And second, history as a problem in which I am caught, for which I suffer and from which I long to be redeemed, is given by the pair as Father Time and Eternal Youth, temporality and eternity, and the puzzling paradoxes of their connection. To be involved with these figures is to be drawn into history. To be identified with either is to be dominated by an archetypal attitude towards history: the puer who transcends history and leaps out of time, and is as such a-historical, or anti-historical in protest and revolt; or the senex who is an image of history itself and of the permanent truth revealed through history. 14
In this context Hillman speaks of a
need: the “human ideal in which the polarity
youth-age works towards a balance.”
15
As Film Portrait draws to its
close, its own “old age,” Hill, himself near death,
appears to be striving for just such a balance, perhaps made
possible by his relationship to two charismatic embodiments
of the positive senex: Albert Schweitzer and C.G. Jung. This
balance, like the problem of time’s passing, will partially
find its expression in Hill’s alchemical view of film’s ontology.
It is also evident in the film’s conclusion.
The film’s very last image is Hill’s replication of the putatively first “public” film images, shot by the Lumière brothers at La Ciotat in 1896. This image and Hill’s voice-over are philosophically rich: the train, Hill tells us, still arrives at La Ciotat, providing proof with his 1971 image. By this gesture he simultaneously identifies himself with two of the progenitors of film, renews their seminal beginning of film by placing its duplication in 1971, and asserts the power of film to overcome time by preserving the past.
Just prior to this concluding
image, Hill is seen swimming in the surf of the Mediterranean
Sea with a woman. In voice-over he expresses his faith
that film’s possibilities are “still wide open,” symbolically
linking his own creativity and film’s with the sea as an
image of the creative matrix we now call the unconscious.
This image is the last of the series linking Hill’s creativity
and self-realization to his relationship with women. They are
all, one cannot resist saying, pregnant with significance, none
more so than the very first, in which Hill finds his vocation while
spending his early childhood nap-period in his mother’s room. There,
by manipulating the double shades on the windows, Hill discovers
for himself the principle of the camera obscura, and in the process
finds the means to invert his grandfather’s next-door mansion. The
power to manipulate and, in one sense, overcome his grandfather’s
world through such means was not lost on Hill. This, in answer to his
own voice-over question, is where children’s games lead: in his case,
into a life of image-making via painting and filmmaking. We know from
Donald Winnicott, the English child psychoanalyst, how the capacity
and license to play elicits what he calls the “true self,” and here we
see Hill’s true self being born, as it were, in the womb which was his
mother’s room. 16
By way of contrast, soon after this,
Hill includes newsreel footage of the family,
shot by a Hollywood cameraman brought into the family
by his father, in which Hill is made to pretend to be
working on a painting that is not his own, but a professional’s.
The two scenes present with clarity the difference between
images linked to his true self, and one linked with a false
self imposed by his father. Little wonder, then, that Hill
states that he was, during his childhood, “living a life apart,”
and being initiated personally, secretly, into the “mysteries
of the unconscious,” including the “authenticity of dreams.
The second incident occurs when Hill
is twelve or thirteen. At this time his father was taking
the family along on extended trips into traditional Blackfoot
Indian lands, where he was in the process of helping “without
guilt” to uproot the Indians for a national park, which the railroad
would supply with tourists. Here a most peculiar event happens.
Hill tells us the Blackfoot were still “authentic”; their authenticity
must have struck a resonant chord with this adolescent boy who was
already initiated into the “authenticity of dreams.” He learned
something of their songs, dances, and sign language. Then he was
accepted into the tribe by an “ancient blind woman,” and given an
Indian name. The symbolism of these matters did not escape Hill: in
the voice-over he tells us he shared his new name with no one else,
although he now shares it with his viewers at the end of his life.
He means the name was a secret; he also means it separated him from
his family. In both cases, this secret name is a marker of individuation,
which is partly defined as the process of differentiation and self-realization
of the particular and limited individual one is. The holding of personal
secrets as a crucial aspect of individuation, especially early in
life, is well described by Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections
. 17
The woman’s blindness marks her as
a seer, whose simultaneous initiation of Hill into the tribe
and into himself gives his individuation-saga an appropriately
shamanic character. Here we meet one of the ironies in stories
of individuation: had Hill not been the grandson of a rich, powerful
man, he would have never gained such contact with the Blackfoot;
yet, that contact initiated him into a realm his grandfather would
never understand, a realm that fed Hill’s differentiation from his
grandfather’s world. While the family participated without guilt
in the destruction of Native American culture, Hill’s own individuation
was being aided by his initiation into it. By this irony Hill was provided
the opportunity to be initiated by a culture where the liminality of
traditional rites of passage still operated; thus he could say with authority
“here ended my childhood.”
18
Hill’s next creative experience of
the feminine does not occur until 1932, when he was twenty-seven.
In that year he made his first complete film,
The Fortune Teller. (Earlier films,
including one titled The Magic Umbrella,
made in 1927, and included in Film Portrait, were
not considered truly his own by Hill; he described The Magic
Umbrella as a “home movie.”
19
Hill portrays the intervening years as a wasteland
in which he “did what he was told to do, what he was supposed
to do.” For six years he was seriously ill with thyroid problems.
Of the period between his thirteenth and twenty-third years
he shows almost nothing in Film Portrait. The next several
years he played at living, unknowingly waiting, he says,
for certain events and things, in order to experience the reality
of the present and to imagine a livable future. The image Hill
provides of these empty years has him and friends dancing in forward
and reverse motion, back and forth, around an empty center.
The “event” was his decision to settle in Cassis, France, on the Mediterranean.
Nearby was La Ciotat, the summer residence of the now-aged Lumiere
brothers.
The”thing” was the Eastman Kodak 16mm
Special, whose significance resided in the fact
that it was the first 16mm camera whose engineering and
optics allowed the non-studio filmmaker a full range of
expressive possibilities. One might say metaphorically that
the Eastman Kodak Special allowed the 16mm film gauge to escape
its home-movie persona, and to gain a vocation as a medium
for artistic creativity. In this sense, the medium, like Hill,
is realizing progressively its artistic nature. (The home movies
Hill includes from this period have the same lack of integrity
he himself suffered: “heads cut off; no action carried through
to completion.”) Hill himself seems to have seen it somewhat this
way, insofar as the camera constellated in him a fruitful “investigation
of the pictorial language of cinema,” as he states it. With these
newly discovered “laws” of pictorial language, Hill seems
to have understood that he could see the world anew, exercising
his imagination in the creation of an imaginal reality—echoes
of MacDougall on film’s “double nature.” The result was The
Fortune Teller , a haunting, beautiful, and serene film;
unreleased until its inclusion in Film Portrait, almost forty
years later.
This film marks Hill’s birth as a film
artist of psychological depth and power. In
it a washerwoman receives a conch-shell call to leave
her drying laundry and have her fortune told by another
young woman, a gypsy. After the first cards are drawn—the
Queen of Hearts and the Jack of Spades—stones cover the
cards. In turn, the stones are covered by water, and abstract
designs shimmer across its surface. A submerged man’s body
emerges into these designs, superimposed over the sleeping washerwoman’s
face. Out of the water’s shimmering body emerge flowers. The
woman makes a wreath for her head, over which are superimposed lights,
and the swimming man in the shimmering water. Emerging out of
the sea, the man stands at the boundary of sea and land, a pregnant,
liminal space, betwixt and between. The wreath appears to be floating
on the water. Time reveals it is attached to the head of the woman,
who rises out of the sea to stand next to the man. (This description
is incomplete, but sufficient for an initial, suggestive interpretation.)
20
At the very least, one can say about
this film that it expresses Hill’s deep receptivity
to the feminine, here more appropriately called the
anima than the mother or shamanic crone, given the youth
of the washerwoman and the gypsy fortune-teller. The authority
with which the film expresses psychological depth also reveals
that here the anima is functioning as Jung claims it should:
as an inner bridge between the ego and the transpersonal unconscious.
21
The filmic story is not a capricious invention,
but a symbolic externalization of an inner psychic process,
in which film images and film techniques operate as matter did
for the alchemists, who, in Jung’s thesis, were projecting inner
transformations onto matter. Here we have the first clear
indication of how film was operating alchemically for Hill—and,
parenthetically, for a significant set of our personal filmmakers.
22
But why did Hill hold back this film
for almost forty years? I believe it is because
this film for Hill carries an essential secret: he
was homosexual. This does not appear to be a secret Hill
hid from himself, but a personal truth he wisely chose not to
broadcast in an explicit manner. That is, the film is not
an exercise in self-delusion, but a poetic rendering. The
film’s mystery and power are not in the secret, but in the
rendering.
Hill’s familial environment,
presided over by his patriarchal grandfather, this
hidden fact may well have been a cause for Hill’s adolescent
sickness and his silence about his teens and early twenties.
These may have been the years when Hill first experienced
the homosexuality that was part of his integrity. The blind
Blackfoot woman could give him his true name, his individuated
name, but she could not protect him from the outer and inner
pressures which the particulars of his individuation-sage
apparently produced.
These are matters perhaps better interpreted by gay film scholars, but the following intuitive responses and speculations are not, I think, out of order: The Fortune Teller did not “click” for me until I imagined Hill identifying himself with the washerwoman, in which case, one can imagine the fortune-teller as Hill-the-washerwoman’s anima—she guides his ego to the “sea.” From this point of view the man’s appearance in the film signals Hill’s yearning for, and acceptance of, a male lover—whom he meets face-to-face by emerging out of the same sea in which we first saw the man submerged. The imagery suggests both birth (in this case, the emergence of Hill’s homosexuality) and the alchemical operations solutio and coniunctio—the latter the culmination of the entire alchemical opus, signaling the union of opposites, frequently imaged as sun and moon, or male and female. The importance of solutio is signaled by the alchemical directive: “until all be made water, perform no operation.” “Basically, solutio turns a solid into liquid....Water was thought of as the womb and solutio as a return to the womb for rebirth,” is how Edward Edinger describes it. 23 Here the womb is Hill’s own alchemical filmmaking, into which he was first born in his mother’s nap room. At the psychological level, he is now capable of birthing himself, the proof of which is his “child,” The Fortune Teller.
The Fortune Teller is the last
film Hill entirely “quotes” in Film Portrait
, even though the major portion of his life as
a filmmaker occurs after 1932. Obvious reasons come to mind,
especially the fact that the other films are available
elsewhere. Less obviously, but more psychologically significant,
they are less integral to his individuation, his film
portrait. The Fortune Teller, on the other hand,
stands at the center.
What Hill does pursue in the latter
part of Film Portrait is his alchemical
view of film. He states this in voice-over in a scene
of himself editing, introducing it with Rembrandt’s famous
etching of Faust in his laboratory, looking at a magic, mandalic
mirror. Hill wittily compares himself with Faust-as-alchemist
through a similarity of outfits, but without naming Faust
as such, or following up the comparison in any full way. Rembrandt’s
etching is reproduced in Jung’s “Individual Dream Symbolism
in Relation to Alchemy,” although Hill probably first saw
it elsewhere, given its fame.
24
Hill is not the first filmmaker to use
the editing room to declaim self-reflexively on the nature of
filmmaking. He undoubtedly knew Dziga Vertov’s 1929 meta-documentary
The Man with a Movie Camera, in which Vertov’s
wife is shown editing, cross-cut with shots of the
shooting of the shots she is editing, the very shots themselves,
and temporal manipulations of them, e.g., freeze frames.
A comparison of Vertov’s and Hill’s
respective goals in these editing room scenes
reveals their deep and deeply significant theoretical
differences about the ontology ands functions of film.
Perhaps their one agreement is that film is a machine-art;
however, they draw radically different conclusions about
the significance of this fact. Vertov’s goals include: to give
image to a sophisticated dialectic materialist theory of reality
and of film; to reveal the filmmaker as a machine worker among
machine workers—especially as the worker whose instrument allows
him to reveal to all workers their interconnectedness; and, to
demystify the filmmaking process by showing that it is a machine-process
that places a rational, dialectic logic drawn from the
material world upon an equally material representation of
this world. That is to say, in this view, film itself is essentially
a material object, with the capacity to represent the material
world’s essential logic. As a Marxist theory, Vertov’s film theory
sees the cultural, social, and psychological spheres as epiphenomenal
upon the material world, and as governed by the same logic.
Hill’s “kino-pravda” qualitatively differs
from Vertov’s. For Hill film is still magic, and the filmmaker’s
function is “not unlike the magicians.’” Hill shows himself editing
not to demystify the process, but to honor the mysteries contained
in it. Most crucially, his alchemical vision of film breaches any
philosophical materialism, in which the psychic realm is epiphenomenal
upon the material one. For Hill, as for Jung, psyche’s relationship
to matter is decidedly more complex, and includes the view that the
psyche must first be considered on its own terms, sui generis, and,
if possible, like to like. Hill would additionally agree, I believe,
with Hillman’s observation that “in alchemy, consciousness is united
with matter from the start.”
25
MacDougall’s non-alchemical characterization
of the “double nature” of film comes to the same conclusion from
different premises.
In Film Portrait this unification
of the material and the psychological realms
manifests itself in a series of unions of opposites,
i.e., in examples of the coniunctio. For example, Hill’s
technique of drawing colored stick-figures upon familial black-and-white
photographs in the early part of the film can be thought
of as unifying the familial world’s face (or persona) with
expressions of Hill’s own psychology and artistic vocation,
thus generating a third thing, a coniunctio, which is in neither
aspect alone. This particular coniunctio implies others,
especially the unification of the imaginative possibilities expressed
in the stick-figure animation (the world of the puer) with
the limitations set by using photographs shot by others in the
family (the world of the senex).
26
Hill’s coniunctio of the temporal and the eternal at the film’s end achieves his alchemical solution to the issue he raises in the film’s beginning scene. As I suggested earlier, it also presents his attempt to balance the puer-senex polarity of “Eternal Youth and Father Time.” The result has what Hillman calls the “puzzling paradoxes of their connection”—especially in Hill’s notion of the “eternal moment.” How does this crucial coniunctio take place?
Hill, as filmic-alchemist
of modern times, sits at his editing table. He imagines
the unedited footage on his left as the future, the edited
footage on his right as the past. Might we not imagine the
footage in the synchronizer as the present, he muses in voice-over?
This proposition is not as simple as it sounds, insofar
as matter and consciousness are both present in this hypothetically
present film-tense. Hill’s image of the present is neither
materialistic nor mechanistic, nor can it be reduced to
those levels and retain his meaning. Consciousness is already
part of the “double nature” of the film running through the
synchronizer, and present, as well, in the editor’s work upon
it. Hill is hinting that the consciousness used in filmic creativity
allows one to manipulate the “normal” chronological temporal
register, e.g., by reverse-motion, stop-motion, and the editing
together of shots taken at widely separated times. Such a notion
is unexceptional in film theory, where it falls under the distinction
between filmic time and time registered outside the film experience.
More exceptional, especially
when seen as an alchemical coniunctio, is Hill’s
subsequent, explicit claim that the “only real and valid
present is the eternal moment seized and set down once and
for all—that is, the creation of the artist.” This claim for
the unifying of time and eternity into the “eternal moment”
through artistic creativity manifests puer psychology’s desire
to transcend history, especially in the context of Hill’s further
statement that “in the cinema, time is annihilated.” The paradoxical
aspect of Hill’s two claims resides in his sure senex-knowledge
that film is also and inescapably a temporal art —of which his
temporalizing of the editing process is but one dimension. Thus,
whatever annihilation of time the film artist’s creativity achieves
necessarily happens in time.
Evidence exists that this coniunctio
of Father Time and Eternal Youth remains unstable at
the conclusion of Film Portrait. Hill’s case for Eternal
Youth is certainly more passionately pressed. Father Time’s
case is present, but largely implicit. We have in this case an
instance of what Edinger calls a “lesser coniunctio”: "The lesser
coniunctio is a union or fusion of substances that are not yet thoroughly
separated or discriminated. It is always followed by a death or mortificatio.
The greater coniunctio, on the other hand, is the goal of the opus,
the supreme
accomplishment....The experience of the
coniunctio is almost always a mixture of the greater and lesser
aspects." 27
I am suggesting intuitively that Hill,
as he neared Father Time’s ultimate claim upon
him and his creativity, sought a coniunctio with this
Father, but that it remained unstable—because his puer’s
coniunctio with the maternal unconscious remained the stronger
factor in his personality. Edinger’s observation is suggestive
in this regard: " The lesser coniunctio occurs whenever the ego
identifies with contents emerging from the unconscious. This
happens almost regularly in the course of the analytic process.
The ego is exposed successively to identification with the shadow,
the anima/animus, and the Self. Such contaminated coniunctios
must be followed by mortificatio and further separatio."
28
In Hill’s situation, there appear to
be two lesser coniunctios influencing one another: the
stronger (puer-mother) adding to the instability of the
weaker (puer-senex); the weaker attempting to redress the influence
of the stronger. Here Edinger’s observation that a lesser coniunctio
is always followed by a death lends deeper poignancy to the
image of Hill and a woman swimming in the Mediterranean, about which
I spoke earlier. There, I echoed Hill’s voice-over faith that “this
is a wonderful time, when everything is still to be accomplished
in film”—the sea providing a symbolic image of the creative matrix
(hence its “maternal” character) from which these accomplishments
will arise. Now we can view this same sea as the realm outside of
time, under whose surface Hill is about to slip in death, reclaimed,
as we all are, by the source of our life and creativity.
Although I cannot pursue this line of thought here, I would suggest that artists of a specific type—those whose creativity arises from an especially permeable membrane between the conscious and unconscious minds—suffer a particular danger in the lesser coniunctios of the two, because of their very understandable conscious tendency to identify with the unconscious source of their creativity. As a consequence, Father Time’s claims upon them (i.e., their aging) will come as a surprise, and, ultimately, as a tragic blow. The unconscious, having been for so long the nourishing partner to their creativity, finally does not save them from the limits of life within time. The strongest expression of this dynamic that I am aware of in film occurs in the life of Federico Fellini, but it also appears to inform Hill’s life. 29 This line of thought leads to the thesis that the lives of at least this type of artist will be characterized by repeated lesser coniunctios, which will be in ultimate conflict with time—but which will also be the source of their creativity . Their individuation will be marked by their struggle against time in the service of further creativity. In this regard, their individuation will involve a fight against the sense of limitations Jung took to be essential to the very definition of individuation:
The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the ‘self’; it is manifested in the experience: “I am only that!” Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious....In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination—that is, ultimately limited—we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then....Uniqueness and limitation are synonymous. 30
One of the dangers of the lesser coniunctios about which Edinger spoke is the forgetting of this fact. So, about artists of Hill’s type, we can say that their particularly colored artistic vocation yields a particularly colored individuation.
There remains the need to
provide brief alchemical amplifications for several symbols
that appear in Film Portrait prior to Hill’s
own mention of alchemy. Their presence evidences an alchemically
resonant sensibility at work throughout the film, not
just in its conclusion. I have already argued for this
notion in interpreting as alchemical Hill’s use of superimposed
abstract, expressionistic, and impressionistic imagery
in The Fortune Teller. The further examples
are: Hill’s fascination with green; his childhood desire
to live within an emerald; and the Queen of Hearts and Jack
of Spades drawn in The Fortune Teller . These instances are
not optical techniques, but symbolic contents evident also
in places other than film, to which one goes for amplification.
Amplification, one must always remember, is the search for functional parallels; it is not the piling together of every recorded meaning for a symbol—which would result in a species of hermeneutic vertigo. 31 Its aim is to enlarge the intuited significance of a symbol with functionally parallel material, while maintaining the attitude that one has not reduced the symbol by this process to a wholly known meaning—which Jung defines as a sign, or semiotic unit. 32 It proceeds by trial and error, with intuition, but not devoid of logic.
Hill’s statement that
he can hardly begin to explain the extraordinary
power the color green exerted on him as a child tips us
to its symbolic function in his life. Reinforcing this
is the accompanying expression of his desire to live inside
an emerald. Within the body of the film itself a clear and
witty amplificatory hint exists that both the color and the
gem function to connect the child to the unknown and the unconscious:
when all else failed, he tells us, his nurse could get him
to sleep by showing him the Irish flag.
The following small sampling
of traditionally assigned meanings appear to
be functionally parallel with Hill’s symbolism, and
to amplify it. 33
The emerald has been held to be the stone of occult
knowledge, and the jewel of clairvoyance, fertility, and
immortality. The alchemists regarded it as the stone of
Hermes, and considered its light capable of piercing the most
closely guarded secrets. Hermes is the god who presides over transitions
across borders; from a depth psychological view this includes the
membrane between the conscious and unconscious minds, whose permeability
so early and profoundly impressed itself upon Hill.
The Holy Grail was a chalice
carved from an enormous emerald. The emerald
is taken to be the expression of the seasonal, cyclic
renewal of nature, and in this sense a symbol of spring—as
against the deathly, regressive forces of winter. (Here
sounds a parallel with the puer-senex dynamic in Hill’s childhood.)
It is thought to be moist, watery, lunar—as against the sapphire’s
dry, fiery , solar character. The Romans connected the emerald
to Venus. (Here sounds a parallel with the puer-senex dynamic in
Hill’s childhood.) It is thought to be moist, watery, lunar—as against
the sapphire’s dry, fiery , solar character. The Romans connected
the emerald to Venus. (Here sounds a parallel with the puer-mother
dynamic.)
Green is thought to be the
color that mediates opposites, e.g., blue/low/cool
and red/high/hot. It is the color of hope and immortality
—”the eternal youth promised to the Elect.” In China
its qualities are taken as yang, feminine, centripetal. In Orphism
green is the light of the spirit which at time’s beginning made
fruitful the primordial waters. In many mythologies, green
deities of annual renewal winter underground, where they are
regenerated by chthonic red, e.g., “Green” Osiris and “Red” Isis,
and “Green” Persephone and “Red” Hades—or the puer and the mother/Mother.
The alchemists described their secret fire (“a living and radiant spirit”), capable of reconciling opposites, as a “green translucent crystal, malleable as wax, saying ‘this was what nature used under Earth for whatever art created, since art should be bound to copy nature’.” 34
Lastly, in respect to
green, consider this extraordinary entry from the
diary of a recovering schizophrenic: "As I became better,
I felt myself slipping into a wonderful peaceful state. My
whole room was green. I felt as if I was in the depths of some
pool. It was as though I was back in my mother’s body. I was
in Heaven, in my mother’s womb."
35
The parallel with Hill’s
healing discovery of his artistic vocation in
his mother’s nap room—his “green” room—points to the
transpersonal character of the symbolism in both.
These traditionally assigned
meanings for green and the emerald appear to
parallel and amplify the functions the color and the
gem serve in Film Portrait, as symbolic harbingers of
Hill’s individuation through an artistic vocation. The gradient
of this individuation is marked from early on by a cluster
of associated qualities: an early and creative attachment
to the feminine (in women and in himself); an early sense of
living apart, while being initiated into the secrets of the unconscious;
an early sense of mystery per se, especially as carried within
colors and translucent solids such as glass, and allied with
beauty; and a senex-puer-mother triad whose tensions would lead
him into the alchemically resonant task of unifying opposites.
Beyond childhood, and precisely at the time of Hill’s emergence
as an artist of symbolically expressed psychological depth, the
Queen of Hearts and Jack of Spades drawn in The Fortune Teller
functionally parallel this latter task in Hill’s individuation.
The common playing deck Hill uses in The Fortune Teller derives from the “minor arcana” of the Tarot. That the drawing of Tarot or Tarot-based cards is open to a Jungian hermeneutic has already been made clear by Richard Roberts, who co-authored Tarot Revelations with Joseph Campbell:
The common attitude towards Tarot, prototype of modern playing cards, is that Tarot is fortune-telling, and therefore, utterly bereft of value. However, in Tarot and You I note that “Tarot is above all a symbolic system of self-transformation” comparable to what Jung terms the “individuation process”....Proceeding on that, I created the Jungian Spread....so that the connection may be seen between inner formative factors and outer life events. This procedure is valid not only from the point of view of Jungian psychology, but also from that represented in the Emerald Tablet, an eighth-century touchstone of Hermetic wisdom, in which we read, “As Above, so Below”; or, from the psychological standpoint, “As within, so without.” 36
Insofar as alchemical work is a projection onto matter of transformative processes occurring in the unconscious mind, it shares with Tarot readings the capacity to reveal the deep psychological relationship between inner and outer worlds. Hill’s use of Tarot-based cards in The Fortune Teller can reasonably be interpreted, therefore, as another means, functionally parallel to his use of specific optical techniques, for making sensible this relationship.
Campbell suggests the
psychological significance of the minor arcana’s
face cards in the same study:
But is it not strange and interesting that each of the four suits should culminate in face cards representing figures of the nobility? Knave, Knight, Queen, and King! This would seem to me to suggest....that ascent along any of these lines may lead to spiritual realizations of equivalent value and importance; such values being represented in figures of the nobility, since the cards were the playthings rather of the nobility than of priests. 37
Taken as symbols of Hill’s
inner transformation during this emergence of his
mature creativity in film, the Queen of Hearts and Jack
of Spades point to a “spiritual realization” involving a
coniunctio of the masculine and the feminine, in which the
latter is ascendant over the former.
In common playing cars
the Cups suit of the minor arcana becomes the Hearts;
the Swords become Spades. The “as within, so without” significance
of Hill’s use of these suits shows forth in the traditional
belief that the Cups and Swords symbolize the two paths, through
heart and spirit, that an individual must take in quest of
initiation. The Cup suit has to do with “celestial fecundating
Water, the life of the psyche linking created beings to the godhead,”
and also “the seer’s chalice, female receptivity, the Mother.”
38
The Swords, on
the other hand, refer to the realm of air, and the “spirit which
penetrates and gives matter form by creating that agglomeration
which will become the human being.” Also, it refers to the “magician’s
sword, shaped like a cross, recalling the fecund marriage
of male and female principles; also the penetrative action
like that of the Word or the Son.”
39
The suits missing in Hill’s first drawing are the Rod (Diamonds), traditionally the realm of the Father, and the Shekel (Clubs), the Earth realm. In a second, larger drawing of four cards—10 of Hearts, and the Aces of Diamonds, Clubs, and Hearts—the Father’s realm appears, but not that of the Earth.
This brief amplification
of Hill’s use of the Queen of Hearts and Jack of
Spades in The Fortune Teller offers further evidence
for the predominance of the mother(and anima)-son tandem
in Hill’s individuation and artistic creativity. It has
both inner and outer manifestations, e.g., the mother can
appear inwardly as the unconscious matrix of Hill’s creativity—along
with the anima, which bridges that matrix and the ego,
and outwardly in his sexuality. Crucially, in both spheres,
it is this tandem whose transformations etch the deepest path
in Hill’s psyche.
Lest it be thought
that we have eliminated by this hermeneutic amplification
the mysteries inherent in Hill’s vocation, individuation,
and artistic creativity, let me rephrase an earlier point:
amplification does not seek to eliminate mystery; it
seeks to amplify it, by garnering something intuitively
about its meaning. Mystery and meaning are not mutually exclusive
within a symbolic attitude; and no other attitude more fully
mirrors the reality of the psyche.
• • •
This essay was first presented in a shorter version at the Jacobson Symposium, Creighton University. I want to thank Professor John Hollowitz for the invitation to do so. I also want to thank most heartily M.M. Serra at the Film-makers’ Coop for providing a copy of Film Portrait during the writing of this essay, and during the symposium. Lastly, I want to thank Lenore Olmstead for pointing me to Tarot Revelations.
• • •
Don Fredericksen is
the director of the undergraduate program in film at Cornell University,
and a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist.