ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the first episode of the three-part documentary series Magnetic North, its presenter, the writer and cultural critic, Jonathan Meades, visits the famous chalk cliffs on the island of Rügen. Famous not least, that is, because of their depiction in a famous painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, his Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. Meades’s suggestion is a compelling one, and it prompts us to ask why these figures should be turning away from the forest. To this question Meades has already given one possible answer, in his portrayal of the forest as a location of the primitive, the primordial, or the archaic. And what Meades has laid his finger is something essential about the archetypal dimension of time – recall his remark about an ‘atavistic memory’, which sounds almost Jungian – and its relation to the psyche.
