Kind of Blue: James Hillman on Melancholia & Depression

Psychologist James Hillman (1926-2011) was a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst and the founder of Archetypal Psychology. His writings and lectures, often controversial even among Jungians, were always provocative and original. This short BBC film, made in the early 1990s, presents his views on depression and melancholia, which strike sharp contrasts to conventional medical/psychological positions. An anthology of his writings, A Blue Fire, by Thomas Moore, provides an excellent introduction to this extraordinary mind. When Mark Kidel first pitched the idea of a film essay on melancholia, commissioning executives at the BBC and Channel Four responded negatively: "It would be much too depressing". The down side of life fits uneasily into the escapist 'infotainment' that characterizes so much factual TV. But the resulting film proved a unique success, winning the 1992 Royal Television Award for the Best General Education Documentary, and being shown at festivals, seminars and conferences ever since. The film evokes melancholia and psychological darkness with the help of music from Liam O'Flynn, Beethoven and Miles Davis -- with images from Goya, Rembrandt and Picasso -- and with a variety of local landscapes (Berrow Beach, the gardens of Dodmarton House, and a pond in the woods near Failand). But the film's main contributor is James Hillman, the Archetypal psychologist and author of such books as "The Soul's Code"and "Healing Fictions". Hillman speculates "that if you're not depressed, you're abnormal -- because the soul knows about the trees that are destroyed, the ugliness that is spreading, the chaos of the culture in many ways..... And somehow if you're not in mourning for what's going on in the world, you're cut off from the soul of the world. In that sense I would think an underlying depression is a kind of adaptation to the reality of the world." Depression "opens the door to beauty of some kind." Another contributor, Jules Cashford, says that "Melancholy brings us to a place where we can see more clearly the essences of life."”