The unconscious, memory, perception, hypnosis, projection … Vital psychological phenomena that come into play during the cinematic experience. This selection of educational films from the HFA’s collection features scientific studies that are also on another level, cinema stripped down to its psychological essence. After all, engagement with any film is always a kind of psychological experiment. In these cases, the experiments either use film for its illustrative and documentary powers, or in the instance of Fighting Triangles, the film is the test itself.

Film offered added dimension and veracity to the teaching and testing of science, and psychology professor Lester F. Beck (1909 – 1977) was on the forefront of its possibilities when he began making—or at least “preparing”—films on topics like visual apprehension and hypnosis in the mid-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 simplicity and direct framing, this test engages the audience almost as much as its photogenic, hypnotized subject.

Beck was famous for the study and practice of hypnotism, which is the core technique used in Unconscious Motivation (1949), the superstar of this group. Again using the simplest means of production, Beck creates a fascinating, hypnotic film. Apparently unfolding in real time, the film virtually demonstrates the whole therapeutic process—from problem to resolution—in less than forty minutes. The audience witnesses a minor, repressed trauma healing through therapy, which in this case consists of talking, hypnosis, word association and dream interpretation. It is also just a rare nonfiction film of this vintage, depicting the two guileless stars trying so hard, with extraordinarily open minds, to solve the central mystery: why do I feel bad?  The unfolding narrative is suspenseful, surprising, surreal and by the end, incredibly satisfying as they successfully unpeel the onion and their revelations are "televised." Apart from its obvious psychological richness, the film can also be seen as a testament to the symbolism within dreams and the creativity of the unconscious mind. The process the two subjects undergo also suggests the mechanisms involved in engaging with art, literature and, of course, cinema. Unconscious Motivation and another film by Beck, Human Beginnings (1950), were even included on a bill with John Huston’s Battle of San Pietro at New York’s Cinema 16 in 1950.

A remake of an earlier educational film Obedience (1962), Moral Development (1973) involves a kind of social hypnosis. The film details the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiments in which—under the guise that it is “a learning and memory experiment”—one person is instructed to shock another unseen person in an adjacent room when their answer on a test is incorrect. The original experiments have recently been criticized for their dubious ethics and the apparent coercion of some of the participants. Regardless, as a film, it is as chilling as any great horror movie, and the association with the war in Vietnam—which had only recently ended—is inescapable. Featuring complex protagonists who evolve over the course of the film, this psychodrama even includes a necessary twist at the end.

In 1944, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel made a very short, animated film of moving shapes. This is purist cinema. Shapes are just moving around, but it is virtually impossible not to project judgements, desires and a storyline onto them. With such raw materials, the perceived narrative is not about the shapes, but a reflection of the viewer’s own psychology and memories. Scientists found that viewers construct their own individual interpretations of events; there is not one common narrative, but innumerable permutations—sometimes with imagined voices or sound effects.

Interacting with a film is a complex process that each of these films explores and exposes directly or indirectly. By the end of this program, you may feel that your reactions and reflections are part of the test conducted (and in the case of Fighting Triangles they are). Among his many interests, Lester Beck was also fascinated by spectatorship and audience psychology; this preoccupation features in his famous sex-ed film Human Growth (1947), which includes the students’ reactions to the film, and it is the focus of the directly titled Photographing Audiences (1954), a film unfortunately not in the HFA collection. In educational films, the audience’s response and receptivity is, in a way, more crucial than in films made for entertainment. Minds are at stake. The creators want more than superficial revelation. 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. – Brittany Gravely