PSYCHOLOGY IN THE CINEMA OF THE AMERICAN CLASSROOM, 1930S-1970S
77MIN
The unconscious, memory, perception, hypnosis, projection … Vital psychological phenomena that come into play during the cinematic experience. This selection of educational films from the Harvard Film Archive’s collection features scientific studies that are also on another level, cinema stripped down to its psychological essence.
Psychology professor Lester F. Beck was on the forefront of film’s educational possibilities when he began making films on topics like visual apprehension and hypnosis as early as the thirties. One of the earliest that survives is Photographic Studies in Hypnosis: Abnormal Psychology from 1938. Though sound would have perhaps enhanced its authenticity, the film is charming and mysterious as a silent with intertitles. With its simple, direct framing, this test engages the audience almost as much as its hypnotized subject.
Apparently unfolding in real time, Beck’s Unconscious Motivation (1949) virtually demonstrates the whole therapeutic process—from problem to resolution—in less than forty minutes. The narrative is suspenseful, surprising, surreal and by the end, incredibly satisfying as the subjects successfully unpeel the onion and their revelations are “televised.”
A remake of an earlier educational film Obedience (1962), Moral Development (1973) details the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiments in which one person is instructed to shock another unseen person in an adjacent room when their answer on a test is incorrect. The film is as chilling as any great horror movie, and the association with the war in Vietnam—which had only recently ended—is inescapable. This scientific psychodrama even includes a little twist at the end.
In 1944, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel made a very short, animated film of moving shapes—in effect, purist cinema. Shapes are simply moving around, but it is impossible not to project judgements, desires and a storyline onto them. Thus, the perceived narrative becomes the reflection of the viewer’s own psychology.
Interacting with cinema is a complex process that each of these films explores and exposes directly or indirectly. In films like these, the audience’s response and receptivity is crucial. Minds are at stake. Each viewer, with a unique lifetime of being and learning, is a co-creator, and even more so when the earnest, unpretentious films actively invite each psyche to take a close look into the mirror. – BG
Curated by Brittany Gravely.
Photographic Studies in Hypnosis: Abnormal Psychology
Directed by Lester F. Beck
US 1938, 16mm, b/w, 9 min
From the Harvard Historical Scientific Instruments Collection.
Fighting Triangles: Social Perception AKA The Heider-Simmel Illusion
Directed by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel
US 1944, 16mm, b/w, 1 min
From the Harvard Historical Scientific Instruments Collection.
Moral Development
Directed by Tom Lazarus
US 1973, 16mm, color, 28 min
From the Psychomedia Collection.
Unconscious Motivation
Directed by Lester F. Beck
US 1949, 16mm, b/w, 39 min
From the Harvard Historical Scientific Instruments Collection.