So very, very happy to introduce our next speaker now, Adam Curtis. It's a great pleasure to introduce Adam again. He was participating last year in our marathon. He was the great finale. And again today, it's the great finale of these two days of marathon. We will have Adam Curtis presenting two films. Adam is such a big influence on many artists. His documentaries have an enormous impact on the art world related to memory and history. He's using these extraordinary archives of the BBC.

As he told me in a conversation, he sits on top of the world's biggest, richest and most wonderful archive, a record of the past more than 80 years. And this whole idea of memory and archive is an important topic of many of the films. Curtis makes political and historical documentary films for the BBC, including The Marshall Set, The Century of the Self on the Freud Dynasty and the Management Strategies of Mass Consumerism, all in 2004. The Power of Nightmares on the Politics of Fear.

There is also the trap. What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom 2007 on a modern concept of freedom and all washed over by machines of loving grace in 2011 on how computers have led us into a simplified machine vision of the world. His films have won many awards, including six BAFTA, and we recently collaborated together on a retrospective of all his films at Eastlakes in New York. But his work, in the context of the outworld, kept emphasizing that I should not call him an artist, but a journalist.

It's important to make that point again tonight and be sure through films which he will introduce. On the one hand, it's one of the parts of the living that related to memory, the living that is in three parts on the desperate edge of now. You have used me as a fish long enough. And The Attic, the film being shown here, is the second part. I think you have used me as a fish long enough. And then the second film he's going to show us is the first film ever made on Scientology.

A very, very warm welcome to Adam Curtis. Thanks very much. Thank you for inviting me. I'm obsessed by politics and power. It's a journalist thing. So what I want to talk about tonight is how memory or human memory got mixed up with politics and power in the recent past, a bubble in the Cold War. It's what I want to talk about in this short time is the story of what was known as brainwashing. It's a very recent idea.

It was actually invented in 1951. At the heart of it is the belief that science somehow had found a way to wipe human memories and replace them with new implanted memories, which means that human beings could become essentially like automatons, robots manipulated by those implants. I want to tell the story of that. It's a phenomenon is a paranoia and the fear of the Cold War. But as a result of some rather disastrous experiments, basically by the 1960s, that idea of brainwashing was shown to have been found to be untrue.

Basically, scientifically, you couldn't do it.

But that's not the end of the story, because what then happened to the idea of brainwashing and the idea of changing people's memories and mind control mutated into something very, very strange, which is it's become to possess.

Our imagine, I want to argue, has come to possess our imaginations today. It's a powerful belief that people, individuals, minds, can be manipulated and controlled by cults, strange, new religions, odd, odd, extreme political parties. We see things through that prism. And I want to try and show how that has happened. And what I want to argue is that although there is actually no scientific evidence now for the idea that brainwashing can actually happen, that we're actually far stronger, far more sophisticated as human beings than that.

It's it's got very deep into our social conditioning, if you call it, you might call it, which has led us, all of us liberals, conservatives, whatever you want to say, to be very suspicious and fearful of new ideas, of new ways, of looking at the world. It's become a sort of block. And I want to just tell the story of how that has risen up and then come back to that idea of it being, in a way, a form of censorship.

Now, just briefly to tell you the brief history of the origins of the idea of brainwashing, it was actually invented by a journalist, American journalist called Edward Hunter back in 1951 during the Korean War. And if we could just show the first still, he wrote a book called Brainwashing, actually, and it was all about how prisoners in the Korean War, American prisoners of war were making extraordinary confessions, which were totally unexpected and also going on camera and saying they believed in communism.

Hunter argued that what this was really a result of was this thing called brainwashing, that the Chinese and the Soviets, he said, had found a way of actually removing people's memories and replacing them with other memories. This is what The Manchurian Candidate that film was about. He was the first man to argue this. It became very, very powerful as an idea in the Cold War.

And then the CIA decided, well, if the Chinese can do it and if the Russians can do it, can we do it? So they decided to set out to do it. And they then found this man, very ambitious psychologist called Ewen Cameron, who was up in an institute in Montreal. And he had also become fascinated by this idea of brainwashing for very different reasons from the CIA.

He had an idea that you could somehow make new kinds of beings if you could get rid of the terrible memories that from their past that was causing them such pain and such neurotic angst. If you could wipe those and replace them with new memories, they could become better, happier new kinds of people.

Now, the CIA didn't quite see it like that.

What they wanted was people who could become new kinds of weapons, who could have implanted memories. They could send them off to the Soviet Union. They could do all sorts of spying sort of stuff, but would never be detected because their memories, which were shaping and controlling them, they thought were real. So these two people came together and they set out to do these extraordinary experiments, which Cameron called psychic driving. And I just want to show you a section from the film that Zorich talked about that I made about this.

It's it's about how those experiments happened, what he tried to do, how he tried to actually and he did successfully wipe the memory as an individual who I interviewed, wiped her memories completely. What he found it very difficult to do was to then put new memories back, and that's where it began to go wrong. So if we could just show the first clip, please. As you can see, the experiments ended, I mean, she was only one of quite a lot ended in complete disaster because what they found is they just couldn't put new memories back, that the idea was scientifically untrue.

And the CIA people and the defense establishment I've talked to about it realized that this was just rubbish and that what they what they were being sold by psychiatrists was a simplified view of the relationship between a human being as a memorizers that human beings almost like recording machines into which memories are slotted and then new ones can be doing so. They gave up on it, but a lot of psychiatrists didn't. They were there, unambitious, like psychiatrists, and they still believed in it.

And what then began to happen was that they were going to get another chance to apply that theory of brainwashing to something completely different, because at that time in America, end of the 60s, what was emerging were what were called new charismatic religions, fringe religions, all sorts of new movements coming out of the hippie street people movement to people in San Francisco.

What these religions did was take a lot of the children of the middle class and the upper middle class of America away from their parents and take them into a completely new world. Some of them were straight religious groupings, like there was, I think, what was called the Jesus people. Others were crazy religious, like essed or above all, the one became most notorious with Scientology. What the parents were shocked by was how their nice, well brought up hippie children, but still nice hippies suddenly transformed it into completely alien beings.

There was a massive movement amongst rich, well, well connected parents to try and stop this. What was happening was it was almost like their children were being taken away from them and turned into something else and believing something else and never wanted to come home. They just stayed with these new they weren't they were called new religions at that point, although the parents made a lot of noise about it, they didn't really have much effect until in the wake mostly of the Patty Hearst kidnapping and then the Jonestown suicides in 1978.

The.