The Film
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter....Spring
begins with the opening of a wooden gate which stands by the
landing stage on the edge of the lake. The crossing of this
threshold is repeated at the start of each season or segment of the
film. A young boy is living with a Buddhist monk on a small
monastery in the middle of the lake, where everything that they
need for daily life must be brought to the island by rowboat. The
seasons in the title represent the ages of this young boy as he
develops from childhood, through his teenage years, to a 30 year
old man fleeing from a crime, then a middle aged monk and finally
as an older monk who repeats the cycle when he takes care of a baby
boy abandoned by its mother.
In the first section of the film there are some
wonderful examples of how the young apprentice is taught empathy
and compassion. On one occasion, after the master finds him
tormenting a fish, a frog and a snake by tying stones to them, the
master ties a small rock to the apprentice’s back at night and
tells him that he must carry this burden until he can free the
creatures that he tormented. The lesson that the apprentice learns
from this teaching stays with him for the rest of his life,
represented visually as a repeating motif throughout the film. As a
teenage apprentice, he encounters a young woman brought to the
monastery by her mother, who is seeking help from the older monk
for symptoms suggestive of depression in her daughter. As the young
woman begins to improve, romance develops between the two teenagers
and the apprentice is consumed with lust. When the young woman
departs the monastery, the apprentice cannot bear the separation
and leaves the monastery too, stealing a statue of the Buddha from
his master. In the following chapter, the master catches sight of a
newspaper report telling that the apprentice has fled after killing
his wife. Soon, the apprentice arrives back at the monastery
seeking asylum. What follows is an interesting scene in which the
older monk tries to manage the young man’s anger and help him to
process the unbearable feelings that he is experiencing. As this is
in process, the police arrive at the monastery to arrest the young
man. After a period in which we imagine he has served his sentence,
and the older monk has ended his life in a ritual manner, the
middle-aged apprentice returns to inhabit the monastery alone and
to devote himself to his practice. In this section of winter, he
seems to use physical exertion as a means of processing the things
that he has done wrong in his past. It is in this cold winter
landscape, in which the lake is literally frozen over, that a
mother, who conceals her identity, delivers her baby boy to the
monastery for the cycle of master and apprentice to begin
again.
Relevance to the field of Mental Health
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is
increasingly used in therapeutic practice and for anyone interested
in learning about mindfulness, Spring, Summer, Autumn,
Winter....Spring offers the viewer a useful resource. The film
gives some very good examples of the therapeutic benefit that can
come from complete absorption in a task and how this may reduce
anger and arousal. It demonstrates the struggles that people may
face during their lives in dealing with the obstacles that they
encounter and shows the positive effect that acceptance of a
situation may have on an individual. But the stunning setting of
this film also gives us the ability to understand the role of
stillness and focus in meditative practice by offering the viewer a
chance to become totally absorbed in the breathtaking natural
beauty of the lake and its surrounding hills as the scenery changes
through the seasons.
To learn more about Mindfulness Based Stress
Reduction (MBSR), there is an excellent lecture
recorded at Google, in 2007, in which Jon Kabat-Zinn outlines
some of the science surrounding his MBSR programme. In a shorter
interview filmed in 2010, Kabat-Zinn outlines his more
recent and general reflections on mindfulness. For further
information on the application of mindfulness in current
psychiatric and psychological practice, there is much information
available at the website of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, a UK
based charity working with the therapeutic use of mindfulness to
prevent depression and enhance the emotional quality of our lives.
Founded in 2008, within Oxford University’s Department of
Psychiatry, the centre is involved in training, education, clinical
and neuroscience research in the field of mindfulness. Two members
of the centre, Mark Williams and Danny Penman, have recently
published a book entitled Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to
Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Includes Free CD with Guided
Meditations). There is also a good introductory article called
Mindfulness in psychotherapy: an introduction by
Chris Mace, Consultant Psychotherapist, in Advances in Psychiatric
Treatment (Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (2007)13:
147-154).
It is also significant to note that The UK’s
National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has
recommended MBCT as a cost-effective treatment for preventing
relapse in depression. The book called Mindfulness-Based
Cognitive Therapy for Depression (Segal, Williams, Teasdale),
published in 2002, has contributed significantly to advancing the
evidence-based therapy for recurrent depression.
I would recommend this film to anyone
interested in understanding the role of mindfulness based therapy
in mental health.
• More information is available about
this film at IMDB, as is a short trailer.
• Spring, Summer, Autumn,
Winter....Spring is available to buy, although it has recently
become unusually expensive, at
amazon.co.uk or it can be rented.
• Minds on Film is written by Consultant
Psychiatrist Dr Joyce Almeida
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