An introductory note by Mark Kidel

The seven films that my former wife Susan Rowe-Leete and I made, in collaboration with the writer and psychologist James Hillman, originated in a friendship that grew out of a weekend that I’d organised at Dartington Hall in the early 1980s, when the great American post-Jungian and archetypal psychologist ran a three-day workshop in which he and Pat Berry explored the presence of animals in myths, dreams and fairy-tales.

I’d originally been introduced to James Hillman’s work by the artist Susan Hiller and later encouraged to read him by a Cornish friend Alan Bleakley – poet, surfer, therapist, critic of archetypal psychology and latterly one of the key moving forces in the development of the Medical Humanities.

My reading of Hillman’s articles led me to develop ideas of a film about melancholia (“Kind of Blue”) a film defending the notion that being blue was not to be avoided at all costs, but embraced, as the Ancients had always done, realising that going “down” offered a pathway to wisdom and wholeness, an experience of life in which darkness and suffering had as much of a place as light and well-being. No-one wanted a film that TV execs thought would depress audiences. It wasn’t until making another Hillman-inspired film “The Heart Has Reasons” - which explored different ways of imagining the heart, contrasting the mechanistic vision of medicine with the archetypal image of the heart as the seat of courage, love and the soul - that an enlightened commissioner at Channel 4, Gwynn Pritchard, offered to back “Kind of Blue”, which went on to win a Royal Television Society Award.

Both films were essays, as much as straight documentaries, underpinned to a large extent but not exclusively, by long interviews with Hillman, a rich tapestry of images, great soundtracks and interventions from carefully chosen contributors, some experts and some not, the latter having something to say that connected to the themes in a personal way. These were films were enormous fun to make. The heart film tapped into my increasing interest in psychosomatic illness, a theme I’d explored in two international conferences I ran at Dartington. The film on melancholia, while drawing on Hillman’s own work, also resonated with my own journey in and out of depression, and a family heritage haunted as well by the black dog. Susan’s interest in art therapy and practice fed into the process as well, not least in her role in finding images and locations to evoke the melancholy mood. Susan and I had a fabulous time searching for images – for both films – in the rich open stack library of the Warburg Institute in London.

At the time we met, James was attached to the Dallas Institute, following his leaving the Jung Institute in Zurich of which he was the increasingly controversial Director of Studies. While he was in Dallas, musing on aspects of the City, he wrote a brilliant essay on ceilings, the basis for a lecture to a group of Dallas architects. It was one of his wonderful attempts at thinking outside the box, in this case the tropes of architectural history and criticism, bringing to the ceiling an archetypal vision and an eye for the soul of the world. He ranged from beautiful painted baroque ceilings, perfect images of heaven, to the ugly and utilitarian ceilings of the contemporary office, bedecked with ventilation pipes and fluorescent tubes.

Susan and I wondered after reading the piece on ceilings, if there might not be scope for making a series of films about the archetypal resonance of major architectural features. It was one of those ideas that instantly ‘zinged’. Sometimes, you just know that something will work. We sketched out a series of six films, with doors, staircases, windows, bridges and towers. We brainstormed a few times – it was thrilling - and the idea become increasingly appealing. These were indeed essential elements in our environment: they have specific practical use, they’re all around us. And yet we walk through the built environment often unconscious of what these architectural elements awaken in us. We take them for granted. All of them, though, are key elements in art, and perhaps most of all in classic cinema. Not surprising, as they’re all in a way mirroring aspects of the psyche. The more we thought about the possibilities offered by such an approach, the more exciting it seemed, as if the archetypes themselves – elements of the soul in the world, or the anima mundi as James liked to call it – were calling us and asking for attention.

When we approached Hillman, he was instantly enthusiastic. We worked together - Susan, James and I - on figuring out how best to explore each of the architectural archetypes. Next, we had to persuade the BBC. This is the kind of adventurous series that could never be done today. No presenter or celebrity on screen, an original approach to a subject and ideas that went way off-piste. With the support of Clare Paterson, a commissioning editor with enough imagination to see the series’ potential, we managed to get Alan Yentob, then Controller of BBC2, on board. It helped that I knew Alan from my time in BBC Music and Arts in the 1970s, and that he knew my work. Alan was a visionary and he was immensely supportive, gave the films a decent budget, and put them out at 9pm. They say now that with Alan gone (he died in 2025), an era of broadcasting is well and truly over. Without people like Clare and Alan, the architecture series would never have been possible. This is TV of a bygone era.

We hired a marvellous young researcher, Sophy Morland, who had worked on “Kind of Blue”. She found the best contributors, who brought life and humour to a series that could have been dry and academic: from a broad-shouldered door-man and bouncer at a London night club, to the mythographer and psychoanalyst Jules Cashford, one of the engineers of the then half-built Severn Bridge, to Boris Johnson’s painter-mother Charlotte, a self-confessed voyeur, who’d painted people having sex seen through the windows of a New York hotel.

We exchanged faxes with James, full of ideas for locations, paintings and movies in which the features we were focusing on spoke loudly of their archetypal significance, from obvious ones like the bridge in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” to the skyscraper in “The Fountainhead”. It turned out that some of the most classic directors – Hitchcock and David Lean stood out - consistently built their narratives around the archetypes of architecture. The films were edited by a brilliant former collaborator of ours, Dave McCormick, assisted by Helen Garrard, who brought to the films a marvellous lightness of touch. I was busy editing “Kind of Blue”, with Bristol editor Andrew Findlay, at the very same time as the architecture films were being cut by Dave. It was fortunate that Susan was available to work with Dave and Helen in a cutting-room nearby as I was mostly with Andrew tackling melancholia.

All of the films were sensitively shot by Director of Photography Alistair Cameron, who not only had an excellent eye, but put everyone around him at ease.

The films had a mixed reception: some critics took against James Hillman from the start, and others loved the way in which he enabled the audience to look at the world in a poetic and archetypal way. The Daily Telegraph critic lambasted James for what he felt were ridiculous ideas about architecture, and then apologised when he saw “Kind of Blue”, recognising that he’d got him wrong. “Kind of Blue” and “The Heart has Reasons” have continued to be used by therapists, until this day. “The Architecture of the Imagination” is used in the teaching of architecture as well as psychotherapy, the world over. It is heartening to know that Hillman’s ideas are still reaching an audience today.

All these films, and the inspiring collaboration with James Hillman, nourished my own imagination, not least, in recent years as I develop a practice with the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I feel immensely fortunate that I was able to be involved in such original and creative work for television.