Morbid Anatomy Movie Night · “Kind of Blue” with Special Guest Filmmaker Mark Kidel

Sunday, June 7, 2026
3pm ET (NYC time)

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Oracle & Joanna’s Psychopomp Salon ($15/mo) and above levels.Eligible members will receive a viewing link in their Patreon inbox on the day of the event. Become a member here.

“Kind of Blue” (1994)—a film by Mark and Susan Kidel and James Hillman—defends the notion that being blue isn’t to be avoided at all costs, but embraced, as the Ancients and pre-scientific philosophers and healers had done, realizing that going “down” offered a pathway to wisdom and wholeness, an experience of life in which darkness suffering had as much of a place as light and well-being. 

Arising out of the writings and lectures of James Hillman—and threaded around an interview with the renowned and iconoclastic archetypal psychologist—the film evokes the melancholy mood with the help of a rich variety of images—works of art by Rembrandt, Munch, Picasso, Giorgone, Cranach, Dürer and others, and the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Bartok, Bach, Beethoven, Geoffrey Oryema, and the Irish ulleiann piper Liam O’Flynn. There are allusions to mythology—Saturn and Innana in particular—and contributions from two manic depressive writers, Jenny Diski and Trevor Preston, who talk about the way in which their times with the ‘black dog’ have nourished their sense of the world and their creativity.  The film won a Royal Television Society Award and has been used for many years as an adjunct to the work of psychotherapists across the world.

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Award-winning writer and director Mark Kidel is recognized as one of the world’s leading documentary film makers on the arts and music.  He works mainly in the UK and France and his work is often made in collaboration with the BBC, ARTE France and ZDF ARTE (Germany). Recent films include and feature docs about Cary Grant (Becoming Cary Grant, Official Selection Cannes 2017), Elvis Costello – both audience successes for Showtime in the USA - and a film about Englishness with the writer Martin Amis.

Mark’s films include a feature-length portrait of Ravi Shankar and a much-acclaimed personal history of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Grierson Award 2006).  Apart from several films on African and African-American music, his subjects have included the video artist Bill Viola, painter Balthus, the pianists Alfred Brendel and Leon Fleisher, the architect Norman Foster, the artist and film-maker Derek Jarman, musicians Ravi Shankar, Boy George, Rod Stewart, Robert Wyatt, Joe Zawinul and Tricky, the choreographer Karole Armitage, the 20th century composers Varèse, Xenakis and John Adams. He has also made highly ground-breaking cinematic film essays on melancholia, the poetic and scientific takes on the human heart, and a series on architecture, symbol and myth – that draws heavily on the history of art and cinema.  

Mark has also written widely about music as well as film and visual art. He was the first rock critic of the New Statesman and contributed to many publications including The Observer, The Guardian, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect and The Arts Desk. He is a co-founder with Peter Gabriel of WOMAD, the world music festival.

He is currently developing a film about the way that users experience the buildings of British architect Norman Foster, and feature doc about Giacometti’s 30-year relationship with the much under-rated English artist Isabel Rawsthorne. He has just finished writing a book about his father’s long-premeditated voluntary death.

He offers Tarot readings – mostly using the Leonora Carrington Marjor Arcana, and is exploring approaches to transgenerational healing that involve drawing and collage. 

 More at https://markkidelfilms.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kidel.