High School Girls in Trouble: “The Gossip” 1955 Centron Corporation

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Supertitle: “Discussion Problems in Group Living”

“High-school students experience (and discuss) the damaging effects of gossip.”

see also: “Gossip” 1953 Sid Davis

Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

Gossip is idle talk or rumour about the personal or private affairs of others. It is one of the oldest and most common means of sharing facts, views and slander. This term is used pejoratively by its reputation for the introduction of errors and variations into the information transmitted, and it also describes idle chat, a rumor of personal, or trivial nature.

Gossip has been researched in terms of its evolutionary psychology origins. This has found gossip to be an important means by which people can monitor cooperative reputations and so maintain widespread indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity is defined here as “I help you and somebody else helps me.” Gossip has also been identified by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist, as aiding social bonding in large groups. With the advent of the internet gossip is now widespread on an instant basis, from one place in the world to another what used to take a long time to filter through is now instant.

The term is sometimes used to specifically refer to the spreading of dirt and misinformation, as (for example) through excited discussion of scandals. Some newspapers carry “gossip columns” which detail the social and personal lives of celebrities or of élite members of certain communities…

Etymology

The word is from Old English godsibb, from god and sibb, the term for the godparents of one’s child or the parents of one’s godchild, generally very close friends. In the 16th century, the word assumed the meaning of a person, mostly a woman, one who delights in idle talk, a newsmonger, a tattler. In the early 19th century, the term was extended from the talker to the conversation of such persons. The verb to gossip, meaning “to be a gossip”, first appears in Shakespeare.

The term originates from the bedroom at the time of childbirth. Giving birth used to be a social (ladies only) event, in which a pregnant woman’s female relatives and neighbours would gather. As with any social gathering there was chattering and this is where the term gossip came to mean talk of others…

Centron Corporation was an industrial and educational film production company. Founded in 1947 in Lawrence, Kansas by Arthur H. Wolf and Russell A. Mosser, Centron would come to the forefront of the industrial and educational film companies in the United States. Centron competed with large companies on both coasts to become one of the top producers of industrial and educational films. The company was known for its high quality films, coming in on time and under budget. Centron won many awards for its films and claimed an Oscar nomination for the documentary Leo Beuerman. In 1981, Wolf and Mosser sold Centron to the Coronet division of Esquire, Inc.

Harold “Herk” Harvey was the principal director at Centron. His 1962 feature Carnival of Souls was produced with several people associated with Centron. John Clifford, a Centron screenwriter wrote the script for Carnival of Souls.