User:Eleanorg/1.2/RWR/Lecture notes 25 Jan

25 Jan Reading Writing Research

Milgram's obedience to authority experiment

• BW film of the original experiment, showing the version where 'victims' are in adjacent room, with scientist in same room
• The scientist and 'learner' are actors. Actual volunteer is the 'teacher' who watches the 'learner' get strapped into the electric device and recieve instructions on how it will work.
• Teacher is told that shocks may be painful, but aren't dangerous.

• Degree of obedience dropped for each of the following variations:
  • victim in another room, only pounding on wall at 300 volts
  • victim in another room, always audible
  • victim in same room, a few feet away
  • victim in same room, having to be physically pressed onto electric plate

• Location of scientist was also varied; volunteers were 3 times more likely to obey when the scientist was in the same room, compared to giving instructions by phone.
• Experiment was replicated in run-down premises with no visible connecting to Yale. Only a small drop in obedience was noted.
• When one 'teacher' broke the experiment and refused to continue, 90% of volunteers also then refused.

Stanford Prison Experiment

• Student volunteers divided into 'prisoners' & 'guards'
• Volunteers 'arrested' at their dorms and kept in prison 24 hrs; guards did 8hr shifts and went back to their studies.
• Some prisoners became traumatised and had to be released, but no one voluntarily quit.
• Experiment was scheduled to last for 2 weeks, but effects were so rapid it had to be shut down within six few days.
• The scientist leading the experiment wasn't neutral on the outside, but was participating as a prison warden.

How Little We Know of the Neighbours, by Rebecca Baron

Film tracing use of photography in surveillance, from Mass Observation to CCTV.

• Paul Martine - well known early 'candid' photographer, using new portable cameras. Surprisingly informal images of 1890s society.
• Francis Galton - father of Eugenics, used photography in taxonomy of 'inferior' races. Made composite photos of undesirable groups - eg, racial groups or 'criminals'.
• Henry Fox Talbot anticipated the use of photo evidence in criminal cases right from the start
• Alphonse Bertian: devised a classification system for photos of criminal suspects. Police inspector and amaeteur anthropolgist. Devised system of fontal & profile pictures. Also photographed crime scenes.

DDR/DDR by Amie Seigel

Documentary made after having access to the Stasi archives. From her website: "DDR/DDR 2008, HD, 135 min., colour/sound

One in a series “ciné-constellations,” feature-length associative visual essays. Dream-like and propositional, works in this series mirror shared concerns of voyeurism, psychoanalysis, memory, surveillance and modernist architecture. These films engage in a self-reflexive inquiry into non-fiction film practices, including objectivity, authority and performance."

• Discusses similarity of early film camera to a gun. "Was cinema always deadly from the start?" Cinema always defined in terms of 'shooting'.
• Stasi film called "shooting lesson", with men jumping out and aiming guns at the cameraman. Is the 'shooting' done by the man with the gun, or the man with the camera?
• Stasi was East Germany's biggest employer during GDR
• Interviews with east germans talking about the difficulty of meeting West Germany when the wall came down. "Anti-fascist protection wall" served as a projection screen onto which all evil was officially projected onto the west.

• "Operational psychology" - Stasi studied pscyhocology in order to break down dissidents and in use of interrogations, etc
• Links between psychoanalysts (gathering intimate data), stasi, film-makers.
• "The Sons of Great Bear" & sequels: GDR-made Westerns in which the Indians, not white cowboys, are the heroes - likened to the other kind of 'reds', good communists, while white settlers are likened to capitalist, imperialist Western countries (USA etc).