INHALL: Mark and Susan Kidel - FILM: The Heart has Reasons

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 through the work of the imagination, not just the skill of the heart surgeon with his scalpel and his technology. Contributors include the Brazilian musician Nana Vasconcelos, the lutenist Anthony Rooley, the jeweller Slim Barrett and the artist Robert Mason. Others include psychologist and writer Ginette Paris, Liz McCormick- a psychotherapist who specialises in clients with heart disease- a tattooist and a heart specialist.

Mark Kidel is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer and critic working in France and the UK, and specialising - not exclusively - in music and the arts. He has written a great deal about music and visual art, participated in the creation of the WOMAD world music festival, and run conferences, seminars and lecture series at Dartington Hall.

In 1976, frustrated by what he saw as television's increasing superficiality and the professional pressure to make formulaic films to please as wide an audience as possible, Mark left the industry to work for the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon. Mark was director of the "New Themes for Education" international and cross-disciplinary conference held at Dartington Hall from 1984 to 1986. The conference included the exploration of the experience of illness and brought together people from the worlds of medicine, psychology and the arts, and led to Mark and Susan Kidel co-editing The Meaning of Illness (Routledge, London, 1986).

In 1984 Mark invited the post-Jungian writer and psychologist James Hillman and therapist and writer Pat Berry to Dartington to run a weekend seminar on animals in myths, dreams and fairy tales. Following this, Mark, James and Susan collaborated on seven films based on Hillman's ideas. In The Architecture of the Imagination (1994) Hillman explores the rich and archetypal ambiguities of such images as The Door, The Staircase, The Window, the Tower and the Bridge. The first four films were shown last year at the Cube. The other two films are Kind of Blue: an essay  (Winner of a Royal Television Society Award in 1995, also shown last year) and The Heart Has Reasons. 

Becoming Cary Grant explores the actor’s LSD therapy in the late 1950s. Recent films explore the French artist Fabienne Verdier, the English sculptor Bridget McCrum, and Elvis Costello.

Susan Kidel, formerly Susan Rowe-Leete, collaborated with Mark Kidel and James Hillman on all the films being screened at the Cube. She was also the co-editor of the collection of essays The Meaning of Illness (RKP 1995). She is a psychotherapist, psychospiritual coach and artist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kidel 
https://markkidelfilms.com/