Jungian Archetypes in Film

Why do we forget some films as soon as they are over, but others stay with us a lifetime?

From femme fatale to Frankenstein, there is no art form that expresses the magic and the mystery of Carl Jung’s archetypal psychology better than film. We sit in the dark with anonymous others and watch the fantastical images and age-old stories. Like dreams, films can be both personal and collective. From The Trip to the Moon (1901) to Star Wars, technology allows us to move into the world of our imagination, a leap that Jung would say is every bit as dramatic as the physical landing on the moon. Jung saw fantasy as a form of energy—the potential in all of us to fulfill our lives. And this can be expressed so beautifully in film.

Jungian Archetype in Film, from producer/writer/film editor Julia Vickers, is a thirty-minute documentary, the first part of a series exploring film from a Jungian perspective. It recently won the Best Editor award from Toronto International Women’s Film Festival 2020 and was a semi-finalist for Best Documentary (short form) in the San Francisco Indie Short Festival 2020. 

This introduction to Jungian archetype covers some of the primary archetypes: The mother, anima/animus and the shadow. We see the archetypal images come alive in clips from the Wizard of Oz, She (1965), Frankenstein (1932) and Moonstruck and through interviews with these Jungian-oriented analysts and film scholars: John Beebe, Luke Hockley, Michael Conforti and Gita Moreno, who is both a sandplay analyst and the great-granddaughter of the author of Wizard of Oz. They give a lively and profound analysis of how movies bring us to a greater understanding of ourselves and what it means to be human.