Mass influence is one of the key themes of the Hidden Persuaders project. I was interested in exploring some sites of mass influence in our recent history. My series of three films, on cigarette advertising and non-smoker activism, Beatlemania, and the smartphone, expose and interrogate some old and new anxieties about this influence on others and on ourselves.
(1) The Stuff that Screams are Made of
The Stuff that Screams are Made of looks at the phenomenon of the vocal crowds of fans around the Beatles in the early 1960s. The title phrase was coined by Bob Wooler, compere of Liverpool’s Cavern Club which hosted the band in its early days, but also proposes to examine the scream itself and its function. The passionate reactions of the mainly young women who watched a concert or encountered the musicians in public caught media attention as well as a good measure of disapproval and some alarm. The film documents the moral panic that ensued, with a lively roster of fans, academics and practitioners which includes the writer Linda Grant.
Credits:
With warm thanks to
Linda Grant, writer
Judy Keen, headteacher
Dr James Kennaway, University of Groningen
Karen McPherson, consultant
Dr Martha Newson, University of Kent and University of Oxford
Professor Daniel Pick, Birkbeck University of London
Lucinda Worlock, voice coach
Additional thanks:
Daniel Pick, Naomi Richman, Ian Magor, Charlie Williams, Emily Fairhead-Keen, Liccy Deverell, Kate Ford, Bartek Dziadosz
Newsreel extracts (under fair dealing):
British Pathé: The Beatles Welcome Home to England (1964)
British Movietone: The Beatles receive their MBEs: Beatlemania Scenes (1965)
BBC Archive: ‘#OnThisDay 1964: New York was coming down with a severe case of Beatlemania’ 10/02/2021 (archive.org)
Found footage:
‘The Beatles – Recovered Archives Vol. 3’, Raseraa (YouTube)
‘Live, television: It’s The Beatles 3.45pm, Saturday 7 December 1963’, Unreleased Beatles HD (YouTube)
‘The Beatles – All My Loving (rare!)’, krivcov_fedor (YouTube)
‘Beatle Fans Get Interviewed (1964)’, LHM (YouTube)
‘Beatles Hysteria in Australia, 1964’, vk3ase (YouTube)
‘As Boys Grow’, Pacific Productions, 1957 (archive.org)
Film extracts:
A Hard Day’s Night, dir. Richard Lester, 1964
A Day Trip to Carnaby Street, London 1968 courtesy of Mackenzie Rough, Mackenzierough (YouTube)
Texts:
Dr Bernard Saibel ‘Beatlemania Frightens Child Expert’ Seattle Daily Times 22/08/1964
William Sargant The Mind Possessed: A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism, and Faith Healing (London: William Heinemann, 1973)
Audio:
Bell better mic off axis2 by jameswrowles (freesound.org)
‘David Noebel speaks on the Marxist Minstrels’ Christian Crusade Recordings, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1968 (archive.org)
Ambient power chord by Khoon (freesound.org)
Further reading:
Barbara Ehrehreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs ‘Screams heard ’round the world’, Chicago Tribune 14/12/1986
Virginia Nicholson How Was it For You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s (Penguin, 2019)
James Kennaway Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease (London: Routledge, 2016)
AJW Taylor ‘Beatlemania: A Study of Adolescent Enthusiasm’, British Journal of Social and Cultural Psychology 5 (Sept 1966)
Bob Spitz The Beatles: The Biography (Little Brown & Co, 2005)
HP links
Andreas Killen ‘Grey Walter in the age of brainwashing’ (Hidden Persuaders blog, 2017)
http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/grey-walter/
Film by Lily Ford
Support from
Hidden Persuaders, Wellcome Trust, Birkbeck University of London
(2) Notes from the American Air Wars
The tobacco industry in the second half of the twentieth century is a rich site for the study of hidden persuasion, whether in its advertisements, its government lobbying, its science funding or its campaigns and debates in the public sphere. Notes from the American Air Wars takes one such debate, between clean air activist Clara Gouin and Tobacco Institute spokesperson Connie Drath, and contextualises it with the help of historian Sarah Milov, author of The Cigarette: A Political History (2019). The film draws on clips from the vast public reserve of old cigarette commercials, on the words of social observer and author of The Hidden Persuaders (1957) Vance Packard, and on documents disclosed by the industry in the Master Settlement Agreement of 1998.
Credits:
Thanks to Professor Sarah Milov, University of Virginia
Author of The Cigarette: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2019)
Additional thanks to:
Ian Magor, Naomi Richman, Daniel Pick
GASP documents courtesy of Clara Gouin
Print media retrieved from the Tobacco Industry Documents Library,
University of California San Francisco
Audio recording of Vance Packard at UCLA, January 1966 by UCLACommStudies (YouTube)
Television excerpts:
Smoking and Health, prod. The Tobacco Institute, 1972
Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, NBC, 08/02/1976
The Feminine Mistake, dir. Charles Mittman, 1977
Film excerpt:
1984 dir. Michael Anderson, 1956
Found footage:
American Fashion and American Department Stores, Montgomery Ward, 1950s (archive.org)
ALCF Arthur H.Virtue Home Movies Clips 916168 and 097908 (archive.org)
Cigarette and public health commercials taken from the public domain
Further reading:
Sarah Milov The Cigarette: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2019)
Allan M. Brandt The Cigarette Century (Basic Books, 2007)
Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (Reaktion, 2004)
Links –
Nothing Exists Until You Sell It dir. Bartek Dziadosz (2021) on Vance Packard and the history of advertising
Film by Lily Ford
Support from
Hidden Persuaders, Wellcome Trust, Birkbeck University of London
(3) Onlining
The final film, Onlining, tackles the tangle of anxieties that arise from living in our contemporary connected society. Smartphone use, data gathering and performative social media pressures are examined by writer Timandra Harkness, author of Big Data: Does Size Matter? (2016), and historian Charlie Williams (Queen Mary University of London). The film also makes use of resources generated during the life of the Hidden Persuaders project: an interview filmed in 2015 with the late Zygmunt Bauman, in which the renowned philosopher and sociologist addressed the idea of brainwashing as a functional component of modern life, and a film made by Misty Scrimgeour and Esme Ramlal when they were Year 12 students as part of the project’s outreach programme with Camden schools in 2018.
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Credits:
Thanks to:
Dr Charlie Williams, Queen Mary University of London
Timandra Harkness, author of Big Data: Does Size Matter? (Bloomsbury, 2016)
Interview of Zygmunt Bauman conducted by Daniel Pick in 2015 for the Hidden Persuaders project and filmed by Bartek Dziadosz
Additional thanks to:
Ian Magor, Daniel Pick, Naomi Richman, Bartek Dziadosz, Stanley Passmore, Benjy Williams, Idris Williams, Lucinda Worlock
Film extracts:
Logan’s Run dir. Michael Anderson, 1976
THX 1138 dir. George Lucas, 1971
1984 dir. Michael Anderson, 1956
A Computer Glossary dir. Ray Eames, Charles Eames, 1973
American Look (Part III), Handy (Jam) Corporation, 1958 (archive.org)
The Social Dilemma, dir. Jeff Orlowski, 2020
Film by Misty and Esme, dir. Misty Scrimgeour and Esme Ramlal for the Hidden Persuaders outreach project with Camden schools, 2018
Commercials extracts:
‘1984’ Superbowl commercial for Apple computers, dir. Ridley Scott, 1984
‘Ask More’ Google Pixel phone commercial, dir. Ian Pons Jewell, 2017
‘Make it Stand Out’ Squarespace website commercial, dir. A. Nilsson, 2017
‘Be Brave’ Athene financial services commercial, dir. A. Mokri and D. Henegar, 2016
Found footage:
‘Stampede for Rare Pokemon at Central Park New York’ (2016), TeraMagio (YouTube)
[Ingress] Intel Map (2019), MasterWikie (YouTube)
Audio:
Phone short buzz by richwise (freesound.org)
Vance Packard, January 1966 by UCLACommStudies (YouTube)
Old Macintosh Startup Sounds by Doonantubes (YouTube)
IPhone notification sound effect (ping/ding) by SoundsAreUs (YouTube)
Texts:
Shoshana Zuboff The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books, 2019)
Byung-Chul Han Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Futures, 2017)
Further reading:
Timandra Harkness Big Data: Does Size Matter? (Bloomsbury, 2016)
Shoshana Zuboff The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books, 2019)
Byung-Chul Han Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Futures, 2017)
Links –
Interview with Zygmunt Bauman
http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/zygmunt-bauman-on-brainwashing/
Outreach programme info and films
http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/outreach/
Nothing Exists Until You Sell It dir. Bartek Dziadosz (2021) on Vance Packard and the history of advertising
Film by Lily Ford
Support from
Hidden Persuaders, Wellcome Trust, Birkbeck University of London
Epilogue – Crowds
Fear of the crowd materialised around Europe during the French Revolution, I discovered from speaking to historians Eli Zaretsky and Daniel Pick (in a conversation which forms the preface to these three films). A desire to examine mass influence and crowd behaviours was one of the drivers in the formation of the social sciences in the nineteenth century, and of psychology and psychoanalysis in the twentieth century.
Lily Ford is a filmmaker and historian. She wrote her PhD and first book, Taking to the Air, on the cultural history of flight in Britain. She co-founded the Derek Jarman Lab at Birkbeck, producing its first feature-length documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger in 2016. She has made several research documentaries for the Hidden Persuaders project (among them Chasing the Revolution: Marie Langer, Psychoanalysis and Society, 2021), as well as others funded by the AHRC, the Paul Mellon Centre and the Leverhulme Trust. She teaches filmmaking with the Derek Jarman Lab and is interested in the evolving form of the digital essay film.
