Dick’s laboratory at the Institute of Psychology was now little more than a public-relations bureau, and Cleo told me that he had secretly borrowed bench space in a colleague’s lab so that he could return to original research. Sometimes he would sit there for an hour, in this shrine to his younger self, unable as yet to come up with an original project. Then he would return to his own laboratory and become the reluctant fugleman of popular psychology, feeding news of the latest breakthroughs to his coterie of TV producers. I admired Dick and regretted that I had always encouraged him to think of the media world as his true laboratory. Sometimes, when I asked him about his own research, he became almost testy.

Later, wandering around the wide corridors where the out-of-competition films were screened, I was surprised by the variety of documentary films being produced, only a fraction of which would ever reach the general public. Zoos, schools of dentistry, agricultural research stations, international hotel chains, hairdressing colleges, and a consortium of undertakers and embalmers all had active film units.

In the glowing half-light the shirt-sleeved delegates stood by the lines of monitor screens, watching studies of the nose-wheel housing of the Boeing 707, the stress fractures of ice-hockey players, the life cycle of the cane toad, the architecture of brothels. As I turned from a close-up of an exposed nasal septum to another about the curing of sable skins the two seemed to merge in my mind. Were all these films moving in their reductive way towards the same undifferentiated end? Drained of emotion and value judgement, the lens of the scientific camera anatomised the world around it like a patient and pensive voyeur.

The medical and psychological films showed the process most clearly at work. In the competition section of the festival I watched Dick introduce the afternoon’s programme on the theme: “Aversion therapy—desensitisation in the perception of sexual imagery.” The three films described work in Sweden, Japan, and the United States with habitual sex offenders, in which these doomed and gloomy men were exposed to endless images of their notional victims—small children, vulnerable women, racial targets, and fellow sex offenders. Doses of emetic drugs, surges of electric current, noise, and other aversive conditioning supposedly turned the subjects against the objects of their desire.

As the succession of harrowing images passed by, I looked away from the cinema screen to the members of the audience. For the most part documentary filmmakers and professional psychologists, they gazed at the screen with the same steady eyes and unflinching expressions of the men in the Soho porn theatres or the fans of certain kinds of apocalyptic science fiction. Whenever the criminal subjects winced with pain or vomited into their sick basins, ripples of appreciation would move across the audience at some particularly striking camera angle or expository close-up, as the Soho patrons might have applauded a telling crotch shot or elegant anal penetration.