Brainwash: History, Cinema and the Psy Professions
A workshop to be held on the 3rd and 4th of July 2015
Birkbeck Cinema
43 Gordon Square
WC1H 0PD London
United Kingdom
The full programme and free registration for this event
can be found here:
The history of cinema, like the history of
psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychotherapy, percolates with Western
suspicions that our minds are susceptible to covert, even unconscious
manipulation. Cinema and psychoanalysis—two essential exponents of subjectivity
in the twentieth century—have been celebrated as royal roads to the
unconscious, catalysts for our dreams, and means of self-discovery and human emancipation.
But cinema and psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, have also been castigated
for their special capacity to tap the unconscious, and as tools for mind
control, even as they have depicted and shaped understanding of what it means
to have or to manipulate a mind.
In this workshop we ask whether the Cold War obsession
with brainwashing was a break with past narratives and anxieties over mental
manipulation and suggestion. We consider how far cinema, television and video
have been caught up in this history of hidden or coercive persuasion, and how
far they have changed the terms of debate. What forms of human experimentation
inspired interest in brainwashing, and vice versa? And how and why did depictions of automatism
on screen so often connect to fears of the ‘psy’ professions?
In addressing these questions we revisit some iconic and
obscure brainwashing sagas of the past. By re-examining Cold War films and some
of their precursors, we invite discussion of the representation of coercively
altered states of consciousness—the dangerous spell that film and 'the talking
cure' have been said to exert.
_Workshop Programme_
3 July:
Raymond Bellour (Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique): Cinema and Hypnoses: Mabuse as an example Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck,
University of London): From Momism to The Feminine Mystique
Maya Oppenheimer & Rod Dickinson (University of West
England): Re-enacting Obedience:
laboratory on film Jelena Martinovic (Geneva University of Art and Design):
Depatterning desire: Aversion therapy on film
Laura Marcus (University of Oxford): Flicker Marcie
Holmes (Birkbeck, University of London): Flickering lights: mind control on
screen
4 July:
Ian Christie (Birkbeck, University of London): The Soviet
story: From interrogation to confession Ana Antic (Birkbeck, University of
London): Cinema and education: Building the new communist person
Erik Linstrum (University of Virginia): Interrogating The
Interrogator: Cyprus, the BBC, and the performance of violence Gavin Collinson
(BBC) Brainwashing on the Box: Depictions of brainwashing on British TV
Daniel Pick (Birkbeck, University of London): Suddenly:
Some thoughts about assassination at the cinema Simon Schaffer (University of
Cambridge): Manchurian automata
The full programme and free registration for this event
can be found here:
For more information about the Hidden Persuaders Project
please visit our website: http://bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders
Follow us on twitter: @HPersuaders