Shock Room screening

When:
22 August 2017,

6pm-8:30pm

Where:

Theatre Auditorium, The University Club of Western Australia 

*Due to popular interest, this event has been relocated from the Case Study Room

Cost:
Free
Audience:
General Public, Faculty/Staff, Students, Alumni

Book a seat


Be a University Club Member for the night. By attending this event you have exclusive access to the University Club’s award-winning dining outlets on the night of this talk. Whether for a casual drink and bite to eat in the Club Cafe and Bar before the event, or a more formal dining experience in the Club Restaurant, your ticket gives you access to the University Club for the night.

Details and opening hours:
  • Club Cafe (kitchen closes 7pm)
  • Club Restaurant and Lounge Bar (Dinner: 6pm-9.30pm)
For bookings, or further information call University Club Reception on 6488 8770, or visit the website https://universityclub.uwa.edu.au

Shock Room: We do as we’re told. Or do we?

A film screening followed by Q+A panel session with Director Professor Kathryn Millard, Professor Carmen Lawrence and Dr Nin Kirkham, UWA.

A compelling new feature documentary, Shock Room breaks open Stanley Milgram’s dramatic ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiment and forces us to re evaluate its conclusions. In the wake of the Holocaust, Milgram wanted to understand why people inflict harm on others. In 1962, he staged his experiment. Under the guise of participating in a study on memory and learning, participants were asked to inflict apparently lethal shocks on a fellow human being. Milgram later famously claimed that 65% of us will blindly follow orders.

My Lai, Rwanda, Enron, Abu Graib, the Deep Horizon Oil Spill, the News of the World phone hacking – ‘I was only following orders’ is  through history. But extensive research from Sydney filmmaker and self professed Milgram obsessive, Kathryn Millard, reveals that Milgram ran more than 25 versions of his experiment, filming only one. And that, overall, the majority of people actually resisted.

Fifty years after Milgram’s original experiments, Millard, with a team of filmmakers and psychologists, re-staged Milgram’s experiments in Sydney, Australia, with actors using director Millard’s unique immersive realism technique. Shock Room combines dramatisations, animation, archival film and interviews with psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher, providing new insights about  how and why people refuse to inflict harm and the conclusions of the world’s most famous psychology experiment.

Millard’s feature length documentary reveals the creative consequences of the impact of art on science … and science on art. challenges us to look beyond our initial perceptions, and to open doors to new ways of supporting others.

Professor Kathryn Millard is a writer, filmmaker and dramaturg. Psychology, mental health, popular fallacies and the afterlife of images are recurring themes in Kathryn’s body of work which spans award-winning feature dramas, documentaries and hybrids. Major credits include the feature documentaries Shock Room and The Boot Cake, the feature dramas Travelling Light and Parklands and Light Years about Australian photographer Olive Cotton. Awarded writing fellowships by the National Film and Sound Archive, Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Varuna Writers’ Centre and Screen NSW, Kathryn was Visiting Fellow in Film Studies at Yale University 2012. In her monograph Screenwriting in a Digital Era (2014) Kathryn finds the seeds of innovative screenwriting in the experiments of the past. On new projects, she continues to revisit landmark psychology experiments and explores the history of colour film in Australia. Kathryn is Professor of Screen and Creative Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Professor Carmen Lawrence teaches in the School of Psychological Science, Faculty of Science, at UWA. Carmen’s research focuses on the forces that drive significant social change as well as exploring our reactions to change.

Dr Nin Kirkham teaches philosophy in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Business,Law and Education, at UWA. Nin’s research area is normative and applied ethics, with a particular focus on issues in environmental ethics and bioethics.

This event is a collaboration between the UWA School of Social Science, the School of Psychological Science and the Institute of Advanced Studies.