Synopsis
How are the questions about happiness designed and used as key tools to evaluate the quality of our life? The desire to shift how we read and interpret our socio-economic moment and the space we inhabit in light of emotional and behavioural parameters is evident at the political level. The Gallup World Poll, one of the foremost companies specializing in public opinion polls, is the source of the data behind the rankings released in the highly publicized World Happiness Report and is the producer of the provocative yearly Global Emotions Report. This film closely observes the processes and the people behind the design and execution of the World Poll, which Gallup calls the largest listening device in the world.
A word from Tënk
Now, Please Think About Yesterday, produced by the Canadian Centre for Architecture as part of the exhibition Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism, contends with the challenge of objectively recording data on happiness.
Conceptualized by curator Francesco Garutti and directed by filmmaker and artist Erin Weisgerber, the 22-minute documentary explores the architectural, technological, and human infrastructure required to make numerical sense of people’s feelings around the world—specifically, the systems behind the multinational analytics company Gallup’s annual World Happiness Report.
In the dead of winter in landlocked Omaha, Nebraska, inside Gallup’s angular glass-and-steel operational headquarters, call centre employees recite questionnaires about happiness and punch in responses from zero to ten; cleaning staff windex conference tables; and the leaders of the company’s World Poll outline their decades-long project to quantify and predict the trends in emotional well-being. Visible from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the executives’ offices, the Missouri River flows briskly by, chunks of ice drifting along like points in an unrelenting stream of data calling out for interpretation.
Masterfully shot by cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko (who also lensed the Cannes Audience Award–winning Universal Language), the film’s ultra-sharp close-ups of employees in their cubicles, along with its sterile set-pieces of Gallup’s corporate interiors, seem to question the aspirations of data-driven research to quantify emotions. At the same time, the scale of Gallup’s operations, and its commitment to producing the World Happiness Report for 100 years, make its work a crucial endeavour in documenting eras of change. Today, access to the technologies of modern life is increasingly widespread, but emotional well-being and security feel ever more unevenly distributed.
Joshua Frank
Documentary filmmaker
