Due to severe weather conditions, including heavy snow, ice accumulation, and high winds, all Kansas City Public Library locations will be closing early at 4 p.m. Saturday, January 4 and remain closed Sunday, January 5.
Food Takes Spotlight for ‘Searching the Psyche' Films in 2025
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
The beginning of a new year can spark a fresh start to try an unfamiliar hobby or set health and wellness goals. It also provides an opportunity for self-reflection.
In January, the Searching the Psyche Through Cinema film series returns with a focus on food and our relationship to it as a way of understanding ourselves.
“Food couldn’t just be a cursory element (in the series). It had to be truly central to the relationships and the conflict,” says film critic Trey Hock, an assistant professor of filmmaking and photography at the Kansas City Art Institute.
This year’s schedule at the Plaza Branch includes The Taste of Things on January 19, Julie and Julia on February 2, Babette’s Feast on February 16, and Big Night on March 2.
A psychoanalyst or psychologist and a film critic moderate a question-and-answer session with the audience following each film.
“Because of this dynamic between these two disparate disciplines – people who are looking at the film as a film, and people who are looking at the film as a representation of relationships – (the film series) seems to inspire back and forth,” Hock says.
Searching the Psyche Through Cinema launched nearly 20 years ago. Tom Poe, associate professor of Film and Media Arts at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who died in 2016, spearheaded the series with the Greater Kansas City and Topeka Psychoanalytic Center.
Poe served from 2002-2008 as UMKC Communication Studies department chair, and organized several film series for area institutions. He also helped create the Film Society of Kansas City and the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (now known as Kansas City FilmFest International).
In 2006, when the Searching the Psyche series started, screenings in the Kansas City Art Institute's Epperson Auditorium were followed by a discussion about “the psychoanalytic underpinnings of modern film theory and its application in interpreting works of art," as The Kansas City Star described.
The series alternated between KCAI and UMKC’s Royall Hall, and then, in 2009, moved to the Library.
Hock says he met Poe through the Kansas City Film Critics Circle, and Poe tapped him as a panelist. For the last seven or eight years, Hock has also helped curate the selections with psychologist and psychoanalyst David Donovan.
Previous themes have featured directors, such as David Lynch and Joel and Ethan Coen, as well as genres, like rom-coms and science fiction, and films adapted from books. This year’s series explores food in various ways.
Hock describes Babette’s Feast as an “expression of care for a community or a group of individuals.” In Julie and Julia, he says, an individual reaches understanding “through their experience cooking through Julia Child's incredibly famous cookbook.” And in Big Night, as Hock describes it, food is an “interesting and varied expression of ambition.”
“Food is such a profound expression,” Hock says, “nourishing and artistic and community building.”