Suzanne Wagner Mercurius Prize Lifetime Achievement Award
The Mercurius Prize Committee
Presents the
Mercurius Prize Lifetime Achievement Award
to
Suzanne Wagner
This award is given in recognition for your lifetime achievement in creating films that preserve our knowledge and experience of C. G. Jung in the two full-length outstanding films you produced, A Matter of Heart and The World Within.
Matter of Heart is a compelling portrait of Carl Gustav Jung, whose extraordinary genius and humanity reached far beyond the realm of psychiatry into redefining the essential nature of who we are as human beings and what we hope to become. More than a linear biography, the film presents a fulsome perspective on this humanist, healer, friend, and mentor through the skillful interweaving of rare home movies, archival footage, and a wealth of interviews.
In The World Within, you featured images of the unconscious as film-viewers were given a glimpse into Jung’s Red Book long before it was published. The film was a reflection on what Jung wrote about his encounter with the unconscious: “… the images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them or a shrinking of ethical responsibility deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.”
Beyond that, you and George Wagner went on to produce a remarkable video series that reveals Jung through the remembrances of those who knew him. Featuring thirty interviews with individuals who were friends and colleagues of Jung, Remembering Jung presents a rich composite portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most influential figures, whose insights and theories are being rediscovered by universities, religious institutions and individuals in search of meaning in a fragmented culture. Offering an intimate view of Jung’s prodigious creativity and humanity, Remembering Jung is also an engaging and broad-ranging introduction to his ideas and their practical application. Candid, provocative and inspiring, these interviews are a fascinating oral history of the early days of psychoanalysis and a rich repository of insights into a number of fundamental issues. Heeding Jung’s observation that “biographies should show people in their undershirts,” the participants expose both Jung and themselves in all of their frailty, foibles and fullness.
Our Association looks to films for signs of Mercurius, the guide of souls and the agent behind moments and processes of creative transformation that moves from lower to higher, from less valued to more precious, from unconscious to conscious. As a film-maker, you were inspired to go from idea and possibility to visual/cinematic reality. The film-viewer is changed because of your inspiration, gaining greater consciousness and knowledge through being exposed to Jung’s words and those of his followers. It is to honor the incredible contribution you have made by collecting this precious film footage and these many interviews for the preservation of the foundation stone of Jungian psychology that we offer you this Lifetime Achievement Award.
Thank you for your life’s work!
Sincerely yours,
Murray Stein, President of the Mercurius Prize Committee
April 5, 2023