Perhaps transformation into art is one way of dealing with the overstimulation of modern life. Art binds chaotic impressions into form … Perhaps film emerged when it did because it was just the therapy people needed to bind into manageable form the chaos of modern overstimulation.

Watching a movie at the cinema involves a similar containment: attendance at a special place set apart from daily life and always in darkness, staying for a length of time bracketed by the time taken to screen the film, and – like church but unlike therapy – all done in the company of others as a collective experience, all eyes trained in the same

It is my contention that cinema now constitutes both a site and a vehicle for our projections, especially the projection of archetypes of the collective unconscious.

You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. (Jung 2009: 265)

Berry reckons that, ‘the act of filming creates or perhaps releases the “psyche” of the subject. The scene is no longer simply nature, but art …we are magnetized by it’

films are works of the imagination – even early documentaries, like those of the Lumière Brothers or Mitchell and Kenyon, have to be imagined before planning to shoot, so that the effect of the film (not the effect of ‘reality’) may be achieved.

Crying at the movies, I have come to understand, was a way for me to begin to feel the pain of my father's death … It was as though the sadness I had buried when I was nine years old lay deep within my psyche, waiting for its shadow image to appear in the dreamlike space of the movie theater.

One analyst told me of a client who grew up in a family where no one was allowed to watch anything except cartoons. It was as if the whole family had not grown up. When she was depressed, the client watched cartoons all day. She eventually confessed how she would be terrified to watch a romantic comedy; the idea of going to the video store and

Film is a surface art and in it whatever is inside is outside.