Morbid Anatomy Movie Night · “The Heart has its Reasons” with Special Guest Filmmaker Mark Kidel

Sunday, July 19, 2026
3pm ET (NYC time)

FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon members at Memento Mori ($5/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.

“The Heart Has Reasons” (1993) explores different ways of imagining the human heart—contrasting science and medicine’s idea of this essential but fragile organ as a pump or a piece of machinery that can be fixed, with the image of the heart common to all cultures, as the seat of courage, love and the soul. The film’s main contributor is James Hillman whose essay “The Thought of the Heart” inspired Mark and Susan Kidel to make a documentary that was included in a Channel Four (UK) series about cardiac disease, a film that would take viewers on an less conventional journey, bringing together artists, musicians, writers with a heart surgeon who acknowledges that medical students are taught from the outset to put their “hearts” or their emotions to one side.

The film is thought-provoking, at times very moving and often funny, as humour nourishes the heart as much as beauty in its various forms. The film is a rare and enchanting example of a take on the human body that embraces poetry alongside science, and opens up different pathways to healing,  an approach that makes the person well though the work of the imagination, not just the skill of the heart surgeon with his scalpel and is technology. Other contributors include psychologist and writer Ginette Paris, Liz McCormick, a psychotherapist who specializes in clients with heart disease, a tattooist and a heart specialist.

___________

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.