Jung and Film: ‘Duende”

Patricia Llosa’s Duende is a short film that circumambulates the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s small masterpiece “The Theory and Play of the Duende,” an essay overflowing with insights and themes of relevance to every student of Carl Jung. Many cultural historians are familiar with duende but hitherto most psychologists are not.

“Duende,” an untranslatable word from Roma folk culture of Southern Spain, describes a small mythological figure, a powerful and mischievous imp or demon who slips in through cracks. At the same time, it means something like “soul,” as in our souls, but also as in “soul music,” an evocation not of the ghostly but the embodied artistic genius of oppressed people.

Lorca’s essay is a kind of rhapsodic catalog of the Duende, which he describes as a dynamic, a dark, possessing power that originates in the earth, a buried spirit of black sounds, an intimate of death. The highest possibility for an artist is to be possessed and struggle with the Duende; at that moment comes a smashing and transcendence of form, and the eruption of spontaneous creation.

Winner of the GRADIVA AWARD from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. This is a fundraiser in support of the work of the C.G. Jung Foundation. Your ticket payment is a donation which can be made in various amounts. Please give generously. Ticket prices per person: $25, $35, $50, $100.