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May Meeting w Special Event
The View from Roma: Contemporary Observations on Matriarchal Consciousness
with
John Beebe, MD and Francis Lu, MD
Saturday, May 11, 2019
2:00 – 7:00 p.m.
St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church
101 Gold Mine Drive
San Francisco, CA 94131
Includes a full-length viewing of the film Roma
Suggested donation: $15. Includes hearty refreshments..
Parking allowed for church events in Diamond Height’s Safeway parking lot.
#52 Muni bus stops at the corner of Gold Mine Drive and Diamond Heights Boulevard
View from Roma: Contemporary Observations on Matriarchal Consciousness with John Beebe, MD and Francis Lu, MD
Includes a full-length viewing of the film Roma.
From the beginning of his career, Alfonso Cuarón has distinguished himself as a director of cinema by his astonishing ability to place people and telling images of their situations on the canvas of the wide screen. There is probably no filmmaker alive who has a more unerring knack for composing individual shots and then creating movement within them so that the story is told from inside the situation rather than in a logocentric way that privileges cause and effect, motivation and consequence. Cuarón has specialized in letting meaning emerge from image.
Roma is an autobiographical film. The title refers to the district of Mexico City where Cuaróngrew up in a dysfunctional family struggling to keep its emotional head above water, saved by the steady matriarchal presence of their Mixtecan maid. The watchful eye of Cleo, the domestic worker, becomes the consciousness that informs Cuaron’s camera in this, his masterpiece to date. The film won him three 2018 Academy Awards, for direction and for cinematography, as well as receiving the Oscar for best foreign language film.
Viewed from the standpoint of analytical psychology, Roma give us a chance to see what Erich Neumann first called “matriarchal consciousness” in action. This aspect of the feminine is not the Great Mother of the unconscious, nor the compensatory mother complex of the neurotic adult unconsciously reacting to the abandonment of the psyche by patriarchy. Matriarchal consciousness is, rather, a true alternative to patriarchal consciousness, one equally capable of individuation, that is, of evolving its own insights and learning how to navigate psychological reality with holistic vision. This consciousness has the psychological integrity to consider the needs of the whole and the instinctive agency to act upon what it knows.
In this daylong presentation, Dr. Beebe and Dr. Lu hope to foster our own mindful viewing of Cuarón’s new classic, so that the shared experience of watching can become a collective meditation on contemporary prospects for the soul in a world increasingly one-sided and abandoned to its fate. To enable us to see Roma as Cuarón intended, we will show the film in its entirety on 4K Blu-ray video projection and 5.1 sound equipment brought by Dr. Lu.
Dr. John Beebe is a Jungian analyst and past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. His books include Integrity in Depth and Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The reservoir of consciousness. He is co-author, with Virginia Apperson, of The Presence of the Feminine in Film.
Dr. Francis Lu is the Luke & Grace Kim Professor in Cultural Psychiatry, Emeritus, at UC Davis. Since 1987 he has led 35 seminars at Esalen exploring film and the transpersonal.
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