28th February 2026
Mark and Susan Kidel with James Hillman
Two Films: The Architecture of the Imagination: The Window and The Tower
1. The Architecture of the Imagination: The Window (1994)
Focusing on a recurring trope in cinema - itself a framed opening on the world - James Hillman’s exploration of windows is as rich as the rest of the series in film clips, from an obsessive sexually-motivated voyeur in Patrice Leconte’s Monsieur Hire, one of many films to play with the window as way of sampling the lives of others, with a measure of anonymity, to Miss Havisham’s heavily draped window in David Lean’s Great Expectations, and the moment that Pip finally draws the musty curtains open to expose the elderly woman to the light. In paintings of the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit, beamed down to Mary by a celestial dove, travels through windows. The figure of a woman at the window, a favourite of painters, evokes both interiority and a longing for contact with the magic of the external world. Ghosts and vampires, as in “Nosferatu” appear at windows and we use curtains or shutters to keep them out. The late artist Charlotte Johnson (mother of Boris) talks of her voyeuristic tendencies, and the erotic chase that peering at others from window to window can facilitate. As frame for reality, a vehicle for penetrating light, and a fulcrum for the imagination, the window is rich in archetypal associations.
2. The Architecture of the Imagination: The Tower (1994)
In a film that darkly anticipates 9/11, with a final sequence, introduced by the Tarot image of The Tower being destroyed by celestial lightning, and followed by a series of high-rise buildings being blown up, this episode describes the hubris that comes with over-reaching for Heaven, seeking the protection of a super-sized building, cut off from the earth. A surprising cast of characters includes a lonely man who dwells in a tower that rises up above Southall’s Asian-dominated streets, a New York writer who senses the total isolation and unreal lives of those who dwell around her high up in skyscrapers; and a scholar, expert on the Virgin Mary - often imagined as an impregnable fortress - visits a 16th century tower near Ipswich in which a nobleman locked up his daughter so she could learn the seven arts away from the distractions of the world. The skyscraper in King Vidor’s film of super-élitist philosopher Ayn Rand’s classic novel The Fountainhead offers an image of over-reaching ego – once again the excessive promotion of the individual at the expense of the collective, begging to be destroyed, as was the Tower of Babel, and the towering buildings in Fritz Lang’s dystopian and vision of authoritarianism, Metropolis.
At: The Cube [off top-left of King Square], Dove Street South, Kingsdown Bristol BS2 8JD and Online, Saturday 10.30am-12.45pm
ONLINE TICKET BOOKING
INHALL TICKET BOOKING
