I And Others

The documentary asks how independent a person really is in their own judgement. To get at it, it sets up a series of experiments and keeps the camera on the subjects. In one, people are shown two pyramids, one black and one white; when everyone around them says both are white, the person says it too. Those taking part did not know what was happening. The film says that wanting to be like everyone else is natural in a child. In an adult it describes the same thing as a withdrawal of personality. That description is the film’s own language and it has a hard edge. The work was made in the Soviet period and was read at the time as an indirect criticism of the system. Feliks Sobolev directed the fifty four minute film, completed in 1971.