I was a teenager when I first saw the film Black Narcissus, its impact on me was dramatic and it has continued to be one of my favourite films. It is now regarded as a cinematic classic and one of the greatest British films ever made. Released in 1947 Black Narcissus is a psychological drama about the emotional tensions of jealousy and lust within a convent of Anglican nuns in a remote valley in the Himalayas, the nuns are tormented by their past lives and find themselves increasingly seduced by the sensuality of their surroundings. The film is sumptuously shot in Technicolor by Oscar winning cinematographer Jack Cardiff. It was written, produced and directed by the British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who also gave us the The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death. The cast include Deborah Kerr who plays Sister Clodagh the Sister Superior, who is attempting to forget a failed romance at home in Ireland, Kathleen Byron who plays the mentally unstable Sister Ruth and David Farrar who plays the local British agent Mr Dean with his roguish charms, all bare chest and hairy legs, he makes quite an impression on the nuns particulary Sister Clodagh and Sister Ruth.
The film draws out the dramatic tensions between the world of the senses, desire, sexuality, emotion, pleasures of the body and the longing within us to escape, transcend the world of pain and suffering into the realm of spirituality or spirit. The film also offers us a study in repression. As the story unfolds and the steady, ordered life of the nuns start to unravel we glimpse through haunting flashback scenes a painful failed relationship of Sister Clodaghs. The film alludes that her reason for joining the religious order is in someway a response to this event. The other nuns start to also experience an eruption in their psyche, which begins to effect their behaviour. One nun who is in charge of planting a vegetable patch for the nunnery is compelled to plant beautiful flowers instead. Reason and order begin to give way to feeling, the dream world and the senses.
Carl Jung once said “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” If we look at this in relation to our own lives, anything in our experience that we deny or repress, thoughts, feelings, emotions, all have power over us. If we can allow these aspects of ourselves to be made conscious, then we are less likely to be in the grip of these forces and their potentionaly descructive influence. A useful image to imagine is of trying to hold a cork down in water, by its nature the cork wants to move towards the surface and we in our desire to resist It have to engage a lot of energy to constantly try and hold it down.
As students of yoga & meditation we may be drawn to Spirituality. The dictionary defines Spiritual as ‘relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things,’. It alludes to transcendence, moving beyond the mundane and material world, to something or someone concerned with higher matters. Personally I am not very keen on the word spiritual, as I feel it encourages a potential tendency for aloofness, seeing spiritual practice as escape, cut off from our lived experience and engagement with the everyday world. Sometimes this tendency can lead to a desire to repress aspects of ourselves such as our sexuality and our relationship to our bodies as we see within the Black Narcissus.
Maybe it would be more helpful to stop trying to transcend the world, but make our way through it, acknowledging all that it means to be human and holding any spiritual perspective we may have lightly.
Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
Carl Jung