MOVIE REVIEWS : Glimpses Into the Mind’s Eye of Jung

After his seminars, Carl Jung held informal luncheons on a sunny patio just below an arterial roadway through Switzerland. Often, the table’s serious conversation was interrupted by gusts of laughter--Jung’s own. In “Remembering Jung” (at the Nuart), Laurens van der Post, the urbane author, anthropologist and Jung biographer, remembers that drivers would sometimes stop to find out who on Earth was laughing, the sound was that primal and arresting.

Audiences may get some picture of Jung as this kind of life force from Susan Wagner’s two films with or about the eminent Swiss psychiatrist. Van der Post’s partisan and useful “Remembering Jung,” substantially from a 1978 BBC interview, is sparked by that writer’s own spirited language and insights: comparing the two eminent, opposing analysts of their day, Van der Post calls Jung “a New Testament phenomenon,” Freud an Old Testament one.

Wagner’s hourlong companion piece, “The World Within: C. G. Jung in His Own Words,” uses new segments from a long, familiar black-and-white interview with Jung circa 1957. Jung speaks in the clearest, most down-to-Earth language: Considering the perils of contemporary life, he says, “We think we can live today with no myth and no history . . . that is a mutilation of the human being.”

What’s extraordinary is how approachable Jung seems in these conversations; it’s hard, somehow, to imagine Freud this unthreatening or this intimate.

Although Jung presents his ideas with the greatest clarity, the filmmakers don’t quite trust us to absorb them on our own. Didactically, they print the core of Jung’s words for us to read before he says them onscreen; it creates a sort of learning echo effect. Wagner surrounds these excerpts with an affectionate, cluttered film collage, rushing water, mandalas, clouds, lightning and sun-streams, and the sudden visual non sequitur of a cow being paraded through a cobblestoned Alpine village. This last may have more meaning for the filmmaker--or for the Swiss--than for audiences, no matter how empathic.

Among “The World Within’s” values is grand, informal footage of Jung at the stone tower he built himself, at Bollingen, outside Berne. Photographed puttering about at the water’s edge, Jung commented that at his tower retreat, he cooked, he drew water, he used kerosene lamps to read by: “These acts make a man simple . . . and how difficult it is to be simple!”

One only wishes the lives of Carl Jung and Bill Moyers had been more congruent: what interviews those two could have made. In the meantime, these tantalizing glimpses are just that; Jung’s rich, controversial life, his work and his world remain, provocative and as yet untapped on film.

The program is at the Nuart, Sunday to Tuesday, and on Saturday and Sunday noons, beginning Nov. 3.