"Hollywood is a conscious coloniser" says Stephen Hughes, producer of Voyeurs and Visionaries, a major four part series on Radio 4 examining the effect that film has had on society, culture and psychology.
Each programme takes a different area that film has changed in some way, from politician's rhetoric to the way we think and express ourselves, and presents a compelling study of the power behind the moving image, hence Hughes's forthright comment. But how does a series about a visual medium work on radio? Hughes explains, "we try to paint a picture through using the power of words. We can't use clips because of copyright, so we've used music instead. Music is very evocative so in some ways I think we actually gain back a stronger cinematic sense for the listener."
Hughes, a huge film fanatic himself, worked closely with presenter Francine Stock, throughout the series and the first issue on the agenda was to find out more about the effect of film on society. "Basically, not that much seems to have been written that actually deals with this," Hughes says. "I think there may be a worry in academia that if the effects of film are discussed you get into dangerous territory and they don't want to get embroiled in the arguments about the violent effects of film."
However, Voyeurs and Visionaries also avoids this long running debate. Hughes explains that "we feel that film has an effect on us personally and wanted to examine how it has changed us in both a social context and psychologically." He confesses that he also found the making of the series frustrating as well as enlightening. For two hours of programming, Voyeurs and Visionaries packs a lot in but, as Hughes says "we can't cover everything of course. Sadly!"
As pre-production on the series went on, both Hughes and Stock found that the direction of Voyeurs and Visionaries was taking on a life of its own. "We started off thinking we were going to name movies that changed the world, but in the end went more into the psychological effect than sociological," Hughes explains. Instead of focusing on the social effects, they found little proof that there's a 1:1 relationship between film and social change. He spoke to Ken Loach about Cathy Come Home and Loach is apparently convinced that, although it changed legislation and kick-started awareness, "these changes would have happened anyway. It sped up the effects and was responsible for raising the profile of the issue, but that's all." Costa Gavras, also interviewed for the series, was of a similar opinion regarding his film Colonel's Coup and "likened it to graffiti, he said he didn't care if it changed people's opinions." But doesn't this simplify this issue? Hughes firmly disagrees and cites research that is currently going on at the University of Kent looking at cognitive psychology and "the way we engage with characters (not issues), that's what seems to be happening now."
Voyeurs and Visionaries also looks at the controversial idea that post traumatic stress disorder is a new phenomena and is "absolutely linked to the cinema." Dr Peter Burn of University College London was interviewed for the series and talks about 'flashbacks' and other film-related language that people now use to express themselves. Hughes is firmly convinced that "we have movies going on in our heads all the time, we 'film' everything we do - that in itself is a shift in our memories, we're not editing things anymore." This is fascinating stuff, but this alone could make for a series. Voyeurs and Visionaries is only two hours long in total, were Hughes and Stock constantly faced with difficult editorial choices? "Absolutely" cries Hughes. "Its such a big subject, one of the first things we did was have a key question for each programme but then sometimes an interviewee would bring another angle to it and we'd have to take that into account too." He explains that the series doesn't tackle propaganda for instance but instead looks at how "western imagery and rhetoric have been used by George Bush in the Gulf War, why we have a president that talks in this bizarre language and why it works. We haven't looked at music either, but that in itself is a whole different series, we can't really talk about that as well."
Hughes confesses to being a big fan of early cinema and the series reflects this by incorporating the influence of this era of film-making through the analysis of the close-up shot. He explains that there is a convincing argument "that this (shot) is connected with celebrity, we only see the face, not in any other context. There's a false intimacy that has an effect on our psyche and on the wider society in that we think we know them, but we ask what has this done to us as viewer and what has this done to them as performer?"
As for Hughes himself, being a radio producer and a film fan, he admits that he is very attentive to the use of sound in the cinema, "I guess it's intuitive as part of the layers of being a radio programme-maker...but most of the time when I'm at the cinema, it's vegging out, it's about emotion, and having strings pulled, that's part of the pleasure." And what has he enjoyed most about making the series? He pauses for a moment. "The discovery of the visual memory, that we have been completely affected by cinema, finding out that some of the stuff that you think is intuitive has actually been affected by film."
Elizabeth Hyder
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