Film Screening: Every Man Has His Breaking Point: Reagan, Brainwashing, and the Movies

Every Man Has His Breaking Point: Reagan, Brainwashing, and the Movies (2017) tells the story of Hollywood’s attempt to capture the realities of North Korean indoctrination techniques in the almost-forgotten movie Prisoner of War (1954), featuring future U.S. president Ronald Reagan. The midcentury movie’s fate illuminates the evolving meaning of “brainwashing” in Cold War America, as well as the power of film to shape our collective memory. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Phil Tinline.

Phil Tinline is a London-based documentary maker whose work focuses on the impact of ideas. Over the last thirteen years, he has made over 150 documentaries for BBC Radio, on such subjects as disinformation, geopolitics, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and the death of the postwar settlement. He has made films for BBC TV about the rise of South Korea, small-town American film noir, Ronald Reagan’s last movie, and how Japan remembers World War II in its cinema. From 2011 to 2017, he was the executive producer of BBC Radio 4’s investigative history series, Document, which regularly broke stories from the history of the intelligence services. In 2015, for one of his documentaries, he staged a scientific test of subliminal advertising on an auditorium full of volunteers.