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Auteur Film Directors As Contemporary Shamans

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Auteur Film Directors As Contemporary Shamans Jung Journal Culture & Psyche ISSN: 1934-2039 (Print) 1934-2047 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujun20 Auteur Film Directors as Contemporary Shamans Cathleen Rountree Ph.D. To cite this article: Cathleen Rountree Ph.D. (2008) Auteur Film Directors as Contemporary Shamans, Jung Journal, 2:2, 123-134, DOI: 10.1525/jung.2008.2.2.123 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.2008.2.2.123 Published online: 01 Feb 2013. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 284 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ujun20 FILM into and a means of arming other realities. Auteur Film Directors When using the medium of film to shift attention from a consensus reality, directors as Contemporary as shamans expand their consciousness and the consciousness of their community by oering Shamans blueprints for spiritual development. Jacques Maritain describes this process of creative intuition as e imagination is not a state: it is the Human Existence itself. [e] soul spiritual unconscious, [which] plays —William Blake (Bachelard 1988) an essential part in the genesis of poetry [art] and poetic inspiration. us a place is prepared You are a paje [shaman] like me. in the highest parts of the soul, in the primeval —An Amazonian shaman to director trans-lucid night where intelligence stirs the John Boorman, during the lming of images under the light of the Illuminating Emerald Forest (1985) Intellect, for the separate Muse of Plato to descend into man, and dwell within him, and become a part of our spiritual organism. e Divine Lineage (1955, 74) God teaches us through moies. Maritain further expounds on the meaning —Arturo Ripstein (1997) of the Illuminating Intellect as a “spiritual sun ceaselessly radiating, which activates everything e practices of shamanism and lmmaking in intelligence, and whose light causes all our require a high level of sensitivity to maintain ideas to arise in us.” is phenomenon he calls contact with the spirit or invisible world—the “the birth of ideas.” However, he adds, this world of inner vision. Both lmmakers and profound occurrence happens beyond the area shamans need a heightened accessibility and of our awareness, for it remains “unconscious or responsiveness to the inner landscape of the scarcely perceived in the process, at least for the self as well as to the physical and emotional most part.” He elucidates that this is a process of cartography that surrounds them. Like shamans, illuminating “these very images, without which most filmmakers have enhanced powers of there is no thought” (73). Hence, it is a small seeing, hearing, and dreaming, and move easily step to say that the unconscious Illuminating between dierent realities without experiencing Intelligence contains, organizes, and conducts the boundaries to which many of us habituate images, which in turn, are the source of all ourselves. eir eorts are remarkable, even creative and artistic acts and accomplishments. heroic. And, as they have developed their talents Like Prometheus, the mythic Greek god who and cra, a world unlike any other (literature, brought fire to humanity, shamans were painting, sculpture, or photography) has been considered re-bringers. And each lmmaker extended to us, the viewer/participant. (for instance, the inventors of cinema itself, Shamanism does not rely on a belief or the “Lumiere” Brothers) has the ability to be adherence to any doctrine. In the hands of like Apollo—a god of light—or like Lucifer— creative and technically skilled lmmakers, the a fallen bearer of light, a demon of shadow value of shamanism can become an entry point and darkness. , 2008, . 2, NO. 2, 123–134 123 JUNG2002_09.indd 123 4/28/08 1:38:05 PM 124 2:2 / 2008 e connection between the archaic disci- Still, most modern auteur filmmakers, like pline of shamanism and the modern art form shamans, are engaged in their work because of cinema spans great distances in time and of the redemptive power of imagination itself. differences in cultures, but the functional As Oliver Stone suggests: similarities between these two are striking and The act of imagination, the act of seeing signicant. Largely unconscious, spontaneously beyond yourself, stepping outside your produced parallels between various symbols ordinary, small, mundane life, living a larger and images have been and are currently utilized life through [movies]—that can only help you by both worldviews. Each, shamanism and in your everyday life. If you can preserve the cinema, shapes reality through a form of ritual. imagination, it’s a wonderful thing. It will make As Jung observes, “e primitive mentality your life so much more joyous, less painful. It does not inent myths, it experiences them” was the retreat to a walled world, an imaginative (1980, CW 91, ¶261). world, that allowed me escape and freedom. e primary functions of the shaman are (Breskin 1992, 22) that of healer and seer, and as such, he or she is able to foretell a future outcome well before it Auteur Directors as Wounded surfaces; the primary sense of the lmmaker is Healers that of vision or, to use Maritain’s expression, an “Illuminating Intellect,” and lms oen are . happy people never make phantasies, only disconcertingly prescient. A director thinks in unsatisfied ones. Unsatisfied wishes are the pictures, hence Wolfgang Giegerich’s statement, driving power behind phantasies; every separate “Image is thought represented in form” (1998, phantasy contains the fulllment of a wish, and improves on unsatisfactory reality. 114). e shaman’s vision is primarily an “inner” —Sigmund Freud (1961) one and her or his “seeing/healing” cures both internal and external injuries (psychological As a counterpoint to Freud’s notion of an and physical). By analogy, the alchemical individual’s need to “improve on unsatisfactory lmmaker heals wounds of the mind, heart, reality,” Jung developed his notion of “active soul, and body. Witness Norman Cousin’s imagination”—a place between consciousness theory in his book Anatomy of an Illness as and unconsciousness in which we consciously Perceived by the Patient: Reections on Healing attempt to contact and dialogue with imaginal and Regeneration, that the laughter induced by gures and concepts that oer insights into watching comedies such as Laurel and Hardy unconscious behavior and states of being. Mary and the Marx Brothers helped cure his cancer Watkins, author of Waking Dreams, describes (1979, 39). this process as “the spontaneous movement of e healing that takes place communally thoughts and images [that] begin to emerge (through a process of initiation, transformation, into awareness” (2000, 222). The path to and enlightenment of self and community) artistic self-knowledge and understanding begins with each individual—from the encompasses both Freud’s “phantasies” and screenwriter to the director to the actor to the Jung’s active imagination. spectator. As in the shaman’s cave, in the cinema Many directors pursue their art form because we discover a concordance between lm itself they cultivate seeking their own know-ledge as a and our human metabolism. Even if a movie form of pleasure, as in Aristotle’s notion of “art as seems totally lacking in any higher purpose, the learning and the notion of learning as pleasure” relaxation factor of “entertainment” alone can (1981, 295). Others may unconsciously attempt be construed as an opportunity to forget our to heal themselves from traumatic childhoods or troubles, which in itself is a form of “healing.” other inter- or intrapersonal diculties. ese JUNG2002_09.indd 124 4/28/08 1:38:05 PM Cathleen Rountree, Auteur Film Directors as Contemporary Shamans 125 formative experiences shape the way a person feel the loneliness and ostracism of starting thinks and imagines; they become part of one’s over with yet another new group of children, psychic DNA, as it were. who could be particularly withholding from, Freud’s quote at the beginning of this even cruel to, newcomers. In addition to seeing section directly links a fantasy life to a means himself as “gangly and homely, and cursed of escape from an unhappy existence. Jung’s by an oversized lower lip” (and disliking his “active imagination,” a state of conscious name because he thought it was a girl’s name), reverie, takes fantasies to a deeper level Coppola felt a longstanding sibling rivalry with through many directors’ use of painting, his older brother, August, who was considered cartooning, music, puppeteering, and, of the prize in the family: handsome, intelligent, course, filmmaking. For examples of the and talented (Schumacher 1999, 7). ecacy of these theories, we will examine the Coppola was bedridden for the entire year childhoods of several directors: Francis Ford of 1949, during which time his imagination Coppola, who was bedridden with polio; became a cornucopia of expression. He described Martin Scorsese, who suered from asthma; himself as “a lonely, ugly duckling, sad and sick French auteur, Francois Truaut, who was and thinking” (Breskin 1992, 9). Many decades emotionally and physically abandoned by later, reecting on this period, he depicted it as his parents and became a juvenile delinquent a growing experience when he said: “I think (before movies “saved” his life); Swedish any tough time you go through any real crisis director, Ingmar Bergman, who suered from where you break down, then survive, leaves you childhood neglect and abuse; and the above- in a far dierent place from where you were. referenced Oliver Stone, a veteran of the generally,” he said, “I feel that people who have Vietnam War, who experienced various forms been traumatized tend to develop levels and of physical and psychological woundings. All wrinkles that really add something to them” have undergone some manner of psychic and/ (Schumacher 1999, 9–10.
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