The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

As for the likes of Irving Kristol and "Professor" Richard Pipes, the words "please kill me" sprang to mind...

Come to think of it, where exactly does Pol Pot fit into all this?

But yes, a beautiful, confident piece of documentary making, that got me feeling all 'ahh, the BBC'.

I liked this assessment in the Times today:

If 'The Power of Nightmares' had been drafted as a play, it would be hailed as a dazzlingly thought-provoking drama. As a book, its thesis would become a debating point on talk shows round the world. Even in the form of a here-are-the-facts documentary, it is so artfully crafted, so engagingly argued, so playfully illustrated, that you happily reserve your questions and reservations until the final credits start rolling.

Here is a talented, intelligent film-maker enjoying himself and showing what you can do with an hour of television. It is deliciously spliced together, seasoned with deftly chosen archive footage from an improbale palette of sources: everything from clips from episodes of 'Perry Mason' and 'Gunsmoke', to American prom dances and Egyptian television commercials.

Apparently it was going to be trailed as long ago as the weekend before last, but they pulled back on it because of Ken Bigley.

X-post. Ahh, cool. I haven't read that.

I did like his book "Russia Under The Old Regime", so was slightly disappointed to find out he was in with all the neo-cons in the '70s. Although he did have one very annoying habit of referring to all medieval people of Scandinavian origin as "Normans".

I can't remember what the Mitrokhin Archive says about Soviet sponsorship of teroorism, but there was something. Possibly supplied by The Spy Who Came In From The Garden.

A torrent for the episode, if anyone is interested.

In the end, it was strangely calming, rather than depressing. All this will pass.

Tonight's episode was very poignant, and made me sad.

I second that. I downloaded the last two episodes last Saturday and watched them, very powerful. It's sad that there's great documentaries such as this and The White House for Sale airing on UK television, and most people in the US won't get an opportunity to see them.

Also, things that weakened his argument, such as Madrid, were kind of skipped over a bit too lightly.

Kerry seemed shoved in just in case.

Quibbles aside, top-notch television. I may even go for a month without complaining about my licence fee.

It is strange that I had never heard those people swearing as the planes hit the towers.

The cumulative effect was a kind of political version of James Burke's Connections series from the '70s. OK in shaggy dog conspiracy terms but didn't really pinpoint whether it was just the expected cocktail of bilateral incompetence, stubbornness and stupidity which led us to our current pretty pass rather than a Conspiracy as such.

I too totally agree with PJ Miller. I don't recall Madrid being mentioned at all. I couldn't get the idea out of my head that while it's fine to criticise the hysteria created by the neo-cons, (that Disney video!!), you can understand why the likes of Britain have to at least be on their guard against the kind of thing that happened in Madrid - even if we acknowledge the programme's main point that there is no such thing as monstrous Al-Qaeda.

This was the third part, part 1 was all about Afghanistan

great use of music, mind.

a) didnt really explore what Bin Laden's motivations were for trying a new policy of attacking america, going against what other islamic fundamentalist gorups were interested in (eg toppling central asian regimes*).

b) kept on repeating how the neo cons "grand mission" was some titanic battle of good vs evil, that seemed a bit suspect. are these people really solely driven by moral purpose, no matter how extreme or well, silly, that moral purpose is?

c) er i tcant think of another. but i sort of inherently dont believ things on tv when people make somewhat grandiose claims, whether they be blair, bush or some dude intoning opposing views over loads of tiny clips. it was kinda eisenstein-esque, and well, his aim was kinda totally "manipulate the viewer, worry bout factual issues later".

* interesting becasue in 2000 i was in debate with loads of russian politics students, and they savaged us about Chechnya, along the lines of "Russia is under the threat of Attack by a islamic super state, chehcnya will be the first to fall to them". We (ie a few brits) were all like, "WTF? Islamic fundamentalism? whats that? whats the issue here? quit being so paranoid!". a year later, it became a bit clearer what the idea of a threat from islamic fundamentalism might mean.

I think the current election results put this theory pretty firmly to rest, at least w/r/t "unity."

although if you ask me, chechnya is now about "you killed my brother/son, now i kill you" from both sides.

ok but russian paranoia can be viewed in relation to the number of bombings, kidnappings*, and other related incidents that are loosely connected (or are supposed to be) with Chechens**, that have plagued russia especially the south and moscow (hint: dont go there on holiday right now!) for the last 5 years. I nearly got blown up a few years back*** (i was 30 mins too early) so its kinds weird for me.

*yes i know these are not often actually really anything to do with the war, just get rich qucik schemes, but it is an easy thing to associate with other worse crimes if you want to hate on the chechens!

** I think "Chechmes" means "anyone south and east of Kislovodsk" nowadays in russia

*** Okhotny Ryad 1999. Gas explosion or bomb? apartment bombings: FSB or chechens ?!?! ooh the mystery!!!

Also inspired was using the audio from what seemed to be one of the phone calls from one of the planes used on 9/11 over the top of footage of Bush, Blair and Bin Laden in the intros to the programmes. It sounded completely unreal. If, indeed, that is what it was. In fact, that shot of Bin Laden at the start of the three programmes was possibly the best thing about all of it.

http://img114.exs.cx/img114/638/power-of-nightmares.jpg

And that not only did the programme show the amateur footage of the plane crashing into the World Trade Center, but that the 'FUCK! SHIT! WHAT THE FUCK?' exclaimations weren't cut out.

(and i'm sure alan knows this by know, but the recurring eno piece was "in dark trees")

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/davis200410211043.asp

michael ledeen is quoted:
"The situation at the CIA in the '70s was very similar to what's happened over Iraq. The CIA was busy saying that the Soviets weren't involved in international terrorism. This at a time when the PLO actually had training camps in the Soviet Union."

The Soviet Union also provided training for certain terrorist
groups on its homeland, as well as spearheaded training in the territory of its Warsaw Pact allies. The Soviets sponsored terrorism
as part of an overall strategy designed to destabilize Western
Europe/NATO by supporting international and Western revolutionary
movements whose insurrectional activities would have helped
expand the communist block and further Soviet aims. In fact, a
former senior officer of Soviet Military Intelligence stated that
"ideological sympathy with the Soviet Union is unnecessary: anyone
who helps destabilize the west is our friend."

"A typical member of the Palestine Liberation Army (PLO) selected
for training behind the Iron Curtain received an orientation brief on
expected conduct while undergoing instruction, as well as ideological
orientation prior to departing for Moscow. Upon arrival he was
greeted by the PLO representative there and arrangements were
made for further travel to the individual's ultimate training
destination."

"Pipes, perhaps the world's leading expert on Kremlin ideology, is left looking an amiable dunce. British viewers, unaware of his distinguished career, will be none the wiser". Oh, please, what misleading and condescending rubbish. I like that the article paints Britain as a nation of uninformed roobs, being propagandized by Moore and Chomsky.

First of all, the question of ideas. That is, is there anything at all, we talked about this a little off the record, is there anything at all to the Straussian Connection ?

Wolfowitz : It's a product of fevered minds who seem incapable of understanding that September 11th changed a lot of things and changed the way we need to approach the world. Since they refused to confront that, they looked for some kind of conspiracy theory to explain it. I mean I took two terrific courses from Leo Strauss as a graduate student. One was on Montesquieu's spirit of the laws, which did help me understand our Constitution better. And one was on Plato's laws. The idea that this has anything to do with U.S. foreign policy is just laughable.

Listening to the snippets on the Amazon page for 'Another Green World', it sounds more like 'Big Ship' to me.

Tuesday 23.20 BBC2

Wednesday 23.20 BBC2

Thursday 23.20 BBC2

Q&A from the series producer Adam Curtis here - note: Will the programme be shown internationally, in America or online?

We are very keen that the programmes are made widely available including in America and although the main networks have shown little interest

-- Stevem On X (stevem7...), January 20th, 2005.

Answers
no DVD release planned because of the range of footage required to clear. a great shame as it seems that this is something everyone should see.
-- Stevem On X (stevem7...), January 20th, 2005.

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the musical choices are really good, he (and his team) just knows his shit. i have no idea how they pull that kind of thing together -- how much footage has to be gone through to find the 'right' bit -- if you think about how many diift news orgs cover the same stuff. it's the avalanches of facumentary!
-- Miles Finch (poptha...), January 20th, 2005.

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i need the torrents, and bad
-- Stevem On X (stevem7...), January 20th, 2005.

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Here y'go:
The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

-- Richard C (avoid8...), January 20th, 2005. (tracklink)

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I've been taping it.
playing brian eno throughout - classik!

It overlaps a bit with his other series on freud. that theme of society and its control reappears.

x-post

the bit I couldn't figue out was in the first part where that neocon wz trying to distort the threat of the soviets: "if there is no evidence for weapons doesn't mean it isn't there" like it was really logical, sensible thing to say. The conviction he had in that. It wasn't like he wz trying to concoiusly create a myth to fool the people so much just that he wz really paranoid but i need to watch it again.

-- Julio Desouza (juli...), January 20th, 2005.

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why that didn't show up in searching i don't know
-- Stevem On X (stevem7...), January 20th, 2005.

Is Century of the Self available anywhere? I only saw the first ep.

Adam Curtis on Cannes and "Last Days

I still feel that Curtis didn't spend enough time talking about who benefits from these official nightmares, and how.

Music

* Title theme: "The Big Ship" on Another Green World by Brian Eno
* Incidental: "Becalmed" and "In Dark Trees" on Another Green World by Brian Eno
* Incidental: Soundtrack from "Citizen Kane", film score by Bernard Herrmann, 1941.
* Incidental: Soundtrack from "The Ipcress File", by John Barry
* Incidental: Soundtrack from "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion", by Ennio Morricone
* Part 1 credits: "Baby, It's Cold Outside" by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer
* Part 2 opening: "Also Sprach Zarathustra"
* "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle" (possibly by Singer-Gene Autry; Music-Joseph Lilley;Lyrics-Ranke Loesser, c1942)
* Afghan war: "Colours" by Donovan
* Part 3 credits: "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" by B.J. Thomas

Living in no TV land, I have never seen it.

i haveta say, the 'AQ doesn't exist' line looks a bit thin now. i was never sure why leo strauss was such a big figure in the show. is he more important than, i dunno, hayek or milton friedman?

or

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050620&s=bergen

It still amazed me about Kissinger, how rational and beacon-like he was presented as being, but then I don't know that much about him and so the 'convenience' of this series results in one wanting it to consist of twelve hour-long parts or something.

Neocon motto: "Occam's Razor is booooolsheeeet, plus Occam sounds suspiciously Arabic"

"In fact, the Islamist terrorist threat to the United States today largely emanates from Europe, not from domestic sleeper cells or, as is popularly imagined, the graduates of Middle Eastern madrasas, functional idiots who can do little more than read the Koran. Reid is British, Al Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui is French and the 9/11 pilots became militant in Hamburg. The attacks in Madrid last year that killed 191, and the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, demonstrate that men animated by Al Qaeda's worldview have recently conducted significant acts of terrorism in Europe, a trend that is likely to accelerate as continued heavy Muslim immigration into Europe collides with widespread racism to create a population of alienated Muslims who often feel that no matter how much money they make, or how long their families have been in the country, as Pakistanis in London they are never quite British, or as Algerians in Paris they are not quite French, or as Moroccans in Madrid they can never be really Spanish. These are not powerful nightmares; they are a reality, a view that Curtis may finally come around to when a significant terrorist attack is carried out in London, which British authorities regard as inevitable."

maybe but with so much to condense into under 3 hours there's only so much you can mention, and considering how contrived Qubt's and Strauss's ideas were or rather how badly they were put into practice...

I should hold off until I see the final episode though clearly.

Why does this thesis now look thinner than it did before? Because bombings have happened on British soil?

alba -- yeah, because the attacks have continued. also, i've never really seen AQ presented as a command-and-control organization like the IRA. but cell-like structures are hardly unusual -- FLN and the french resistance both had them. so does the cia, in some ways -- agents don't know other agents. there's no contradiction between being pyramidal (which AQ is -- money comes from somewhere!) and cell-like.

The third episode again repeats a lot of what's gone before, steve. But at the end, it has interesting stuff about Blair et al. being obsessed with the verdict of history, in the sense of being neurotic about not having dealt with something (ie. Islamist terrorism) that later is shown to engulf our society. An obsession with the worst case scenario. Fear of getting it wrong isn't a motor of confident and successful leadership.

What's wrong with repeating things? Have you investigated al Qaeda at first hand yourself? No - you are repeating other things (that it is "cell-like" etc.) And that's fine.

alba -- yeah, i can see that but there are links between the cells, example: funding, and training camps. 'follow the money' and that.

I'm ever so hungry.

xpost

But overall, as a society, we didn't. Not enough to do anything about it. And I'm thinking about how eugenics was such a respectable and popular notion among intellectuals etc.

Really? Most of the literary intelligentsia seem to have been pretty much on the Right.

really? orwell, connolly, isherwood, auden, day lewis, spender, fucking leavis, greene, green, the left book club...?

Just a little humour there, to lighten our load.

Prospect is £4.50! Is the rest of it any good? Last time I got it it was Billy Bragg and Gordon Brown talking about Britishness. I thought it poor.

I like the Carey book, but it's about a slightly earlier generation.

Sure, mainstream politicians in england were culpable, but the popular movement here was big -- in France, it had real potential (although things got fucked-up over Spain). In any case, the popular movement against fascism in Western Europe was far more of a genuine presence than, say, the Stop The War movement is now. People like Stafford Cripps in the Labour Party were sympathetic, and it definitely formed cadres for the reformed Labour Party of 1945.

I've heard there is a guy in the US called Al Nino, and people periodically ring him up and complain about the weather.

Animal Liberation Front = ALF. Alf seems a pretty cuddly British name.

episode 3 i thought was the weakest... i almost thought the doc should've gone right up to sept. 11 and no further, as all the post-9/11 stuff seemed quite rushed, and most of it i'd seen before. also weak: when it suddenly became about the UK--i know this is a bbc doc, but i didn't get ANY sense of how britain got involved, or how neo-conservatism got a foothold there (while neo-c's ascension in the states was clearly and patiently spelled out). it seemed like an abrupt change.

also interesting that the word 'oil' wasn't used once in the program. obv i understand that curtis wasn't taking the syriana approach and that he didn't want to open a whole other kettle of words... but it still begged the question.

also: century of the self is available on archive.org, in mpeg4 format. that's next on my list!

The only thing I haven't seen by him (I think) is his one off documentary abot WWII and how history is written. If anyone knows where I can get it I'd love 'em forever.

I think the film is just composed of stuff culled from the three episodes.

someone else also posted the first episode in 6-8 minute segments. the section with young 70's rumsfeld is on the third segment.

and as elvis mentioned, archive.org still has a 4.4 GB complete download.

have only finished episode 1 so far. I think I'm going to space my viewing out to one per night.

the use of Charles Ives' music was devastating for me. I usually hear joy, pride, strength, courage in the way he used dissonance, but in this context it's all just monstrous.

Now the machine has betrayed you once, I think they best policy would be to not set it next week.

Internet Archive (plays fast or download)
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

follow episode 1 up with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C5XuylNFLo

:-)

[/i]Curtis has a remarkable feel for the serendipity of such moments, and an obsessive skill in locating them. 'That kind of footage shows just how dull I can be,' he admits, a little glumly. 'The BBC has an archive of all these tapes where they have just dumped all the news items they have ever shown. One tape for every three months. So what you get is this odd collage, an accidental treasure trove. You sit in a darkened room, watch all these little news moments, and look for connections.'[/i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

how exactly does he do this? i mean he cant go through every single tape each time he makes a new doc, does anyone know his technique? does he keep a database of all interesting potential scenes?

is he working on anything now? i recently watched his 1996 doc about nick leeson & barings bank, such a fascinating well-made doc, i can't believe it hasn't been repeated recently.

i just started watching the 1st series of Mad Men and it seems kinda...informed by Century of the Self, somehow. maybe it's just that the production design reminds me of Curtis's archive footage.

I wonder if this will come to London.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jun/20/it-felt-like-a-kiss

Got tickets for the 9th, really looking forward to it. If it's a critical and commercial hit then no reason why it should not play elsewhere (a bit like Albarn's Monkey opera did after debuting at the MIF) - I imagine that Punchdrunk could adapt the staging for different venues?

looks awesome!

Can't say I'm keen - Albarn and Kronos, especially the latter, just can't stand anything they touch.

I hope the future interweb stuff gets broadcast on TV.

The entire run is completely sold out already up here.

NI and myself saw the first night preview of IT FELT LIKE A KISS last night and chatted to the great man! I'd love to say more but i won't spoil the surprises.

it was just the most incredible thing. when i left i was a gibbering mess. ive set up a group on facebook for people who've 'done' it.

at the end curtis was saying it wouldn't be transferrable to tv because of all the copyright issues. i wish i could've recorded my brain for the 3 hours i was in there last night.

Wow - super excited for this now. Roll on the 9th! Seeing Kraftwerk tomorrow at the MIF too as "filler" until then...

sold out too fast. gutted.

MIF so far has been an absolute bobby dazzler - Kraftwerk were *awesome* and It Felt Like A Kiss properly ace too. Just got back from it and still mulling over the whole thing. I probably read too much beforehand so was ready for some of the setpieces (which removed a bit of the thrill), but as a whole it was so immersive and exciting: brilliantly conceived and staged, and the central film was amazing.

The reviews I've seen have a bit of a downer on the final section, but I enjoyed this part the best esp. the "do this" area and the final enforced separation from the rest of the group. Would really like to go through it again tbh to be able to spend more time nosing around the rooms and the "clues" etc.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/07/it_felt_like_a_kiss_the_film.html

brilliant, been waiting so long for this

Bill A, and anyone else who went to IFLAK in Manchester, there's a facebook group here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=98110067894

apparently it's been put on in London and Moscow - if anyone's even slightly interested, buy a ticket the moment they go on sale!

I watched this this morning and am sort of shaky from it - it wasn't even that it was in-and-of-itself powerful, but it was exhausting because i kept having to try and work out what connections I was supposed to be drawing and whether I thought they were appropriate connections or conspiracist nonsense.

argh when i say 'this' i mean 'it felt like a kiss'

main problem i have with it is that the music is so great i zone out of whatever point he's making and enjoy it on a 'incredibly awesome 50 min music video' level. which is great, but means im gonna have to watch it again *properly*. i guess i need curtis himself to explain things more directly - at least an article by him would be good.

watched the trap again this week and was surprised to see he reuses quite a bit of footage in IFLAK

he reused a fair amount from Power of Nightmares in the Trap as well.

Watching It Felt Like A Kiss again this morning. Still superb, formally his best film by some distance imo

Is it online somewhere? Still haven't been able to see it.

hi Col1n! I think the BBC was streaming it but probably not to overseas viewers. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find a torrent (or fragments on Youtube), but I could always mail you a copy if you want to contact me off-list. Alternatively, are you on K4r4g4rg4 or any such sites?

Ah:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfIFeqScJz8

and so on...

Oh no audio!

try here instead:

http://www.greylodge.org/tracker/

Thanks Adam! Not on Karagarg@, don't really fuck with torrents unless I have to.

Yes, I see. I'm never sure about the ethics of torrenting (is this a word?) hard to see stuff, myself. It's not talked about much?

There is a ton of Adam Curtis's stuff available for download from archive.org. My favorites are "The Trap" and "Century of the Self." I tried watching "It Felt Like A Kiss on an airplane, on my ipod, and that was the wrong way to watch it. It put me in a funk. I had to listen to so much Real McCoy to recover.

I'm not so worried about the ethics -- most of the stuff I would want is more or less out of circulation. I just hate watching anything longer than half an hour on my computer.

will 'power of nightmares' ever get a u.s. dvd release, i wonder? watched the first part of it in a college class a couple years ago and thought it was fantastically well done.

FAO Curtis stans (kurdistans?!): he has a new show coming soon. According to Charlie Brooker's twitter:

1) It is called 'All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace'.
2) Twitter shows up in it.
3) It'll be on the TV quite soon.

Have really enjoyed his blog posts, but nuff excited for another series.

Adam Curtis on the death of Bin Laden

read headline, clicked back to this thread

ok went back in

he's kind of getting a lot worse as time wears on

When communism collapsed in 1989, the big story that had been hardwired into citizens of western countries – that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force – came to an abrupt end.

now... was communism a 'story', or was it on some level an actual historical reality?

sorta don't see what the omg what an asshole thing is with trying to sort out historical/cultural narratives

like there's a GOP narrative of People Are Being Taxed to Death! which is bullshit, but if you show me a guy whose taxes are a burden that doesn't validate their narrative & undermine any detailing of it

he's a broken record on some things

kinda baudrillardwave solipsism

do i have to point out the obvious and say curtis has a big narrative he puts on everything?

manipulation of sheeple with invented narratives employing a corruption of freud -- something like that

of course he does, everybody who believes in narrative as a functioning trope knows that they have to work within that framework, except for Joan Didion who believes that narratives are inherently broken

it's not the narrative that's the problem, it's the rehashed version of False Consciousness

It was a story born in the US and Britain at the end of the second world war – the "good war". It then went deep into the western imagination during the cold war, was reawakened and has been held together over the last 10 years by the odd alliance of American and European politicians, journalists, "terror experts" and revolutionary Islamists all seeking to shore up their authority in a disillusioned age.

Barack Obama seems to be rejecting this story already. The Europeans still cling to it, though, with the return of "liberal interventionism" in Libya, but it is anxious and halfhearted.

lol yes, obama's nascent pacifism is certainly striking, and the europeans are making all the running in libya.

wish someone would put to rounds in curtis' head :D

xpost. i think he is referring to Obama's rejection of the terminology of the "war on terror" and the use of fear-based explanations for pretty radical policy changes etc.

so... curtis just wants better PR? he's got no problem with using massive military resources to destroy the organisation called al-qaeda - which he maintains either doesn't exist or isn't important - as long as you don't use the precise term "war on terror"? instead you say:

We quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Al-Qaeda - an organisation headed by Osama bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and was committed to killing innocents in our country and around the globe. And so we went to war against Al-Qaeda to protect our citizens, our friends, and our allies.

not really a decisive rejection of the notion of a "good war" against an evil enemy. and what the fuck is he on about re: libya? the "liberal intervention" couldn't take place without the US.

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

that trailer induces the traditional blend of mild queasiness and actual excitement, but i think this might be the series that proves that he is actually quite genuinely mad.

Wiki tells us where the title comes from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace

im all for him just being mad and letting it hang out, kinda

leads to some cool sound-image combinations, drawing random connections between things

what i will not abide is him writing ostensibly serious comment pieces/being quoted as an authority/etc

while the soviet union was certainly as evil as states get, it's disingenuous to pretend that U.S. leaders didn't exaggerate the soviet threat for political reasons, increasingly so in the late '70s and early '80s and arguably even from the beginning of the cold war.

the first half of the article anyway is OTM.

back back back! new show starts in 90 minutes on BBC 2.

looking forward to some prize bullshit

Great filmmaking, incoherent premise. It's so hypnotic though - it's like trying to argue with a lava lamp.

The "at the same time, fifty years later" schtick does get annoying.

more annoyed by his usual 'there was this idea that...' routine. his o-level history practice essays must have come back scrawled with WHO? WHEN? (etc) in frenzied red ink

only saw bits of it but seemed fun -- as docs on the financial bubble/crash go, this at least had some imagination and ideas, even if you don't subscribe to them, and i often don't with adam curtis

wouldn't take it straight, which is why i think he gets misfiled (by himself, sure) as an authority rather than a creative artist

Must check this out, DG hates it so I'm bound to love it.

j/k <3 DG :-)

well a big part of it is laying into alan greenspan, and he's jewish, so i'm sure you'll love it

j/k <3 StanM :-)

a few lols to be had from his peers giving him/the show a bit of a ribbing on twitter. feels like this is the show where the Curtis backlash is going to kick in, as his stuff is now so identifiably 'him' it almost lends itself to piss-take/parody. after the It Felt Like A Kiss movie i think everything he does now can only be a bit of a comedown. IFLAK is easily one of the top few pieces of non fiction tv/film making i've ever seen.

Hmmm. xpost

after the It Felt Like A Kiss movie i think everything he does now can only be a bit of a comedown

hmm idk. 'the trap' is definitely his worst.

The Trap was before IFLAK. Actually, even if it was afterwards, that comment wouldn't really make sense.

i thought it felt like a kiss was aight but not a career high... i dunno. there's a fair bit of repetition in his work, which is ok, but i just felt 'the trap' was (strident and) repetitive within the series itself.

I think I read your full-stop as a semicolon.

It Felt Like A Kiss watchable here (via iplayer, so probably uk only):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/it_felt_like_a_kiss/

It's available for download on archive.org (as is most of his stuff).

So the first part of this was v poor - the connections are often reaching as expected but the collage just wasn't as good as in some of his past series.

Low point was possibly the quote from msg board rant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts

I quite enjoyed this article, simultaneously trolling UK Uncut and laying bare the limitations of his approach by applying it to people who are - I assume - fans of his work.

saw the rest of the first ep and it definitely went downhill and sped up, getting very garbled. says things like 'for the first time in human history everyone believed everything would be stable forever...' it's almost as if he takes what people say at face value. or takes thinkers like ayn rand to be saying something radically new and different -- when it translates to a belief in low taxes and unregulated markets, it's not as if the rand-ness is that significant. it wasn't all bad though.

man he shd check out some of the 18th century Parliamentary debates on Income Tax and get his mind proper blown

no amusing video footage of the Earl of Bute tho

He's incredibly irritating.

Missed part 2, does that Observer article cover the same ground? i.e. californian hippies fail at recreating the earth in a greenhouse, lol who gives a shit.

i'm with hm, he's much better appreciated on the level of absolute style and take no notice of the polemicism

I don't find his style that engrossing, just seems like standard stock footage playfulness. I have not seen IFLAK tho.

He's got a really irritating habit of authoritatively and wrongly conflating a wide spectrum of views - "scientists believed", "hippies believed", "psychologists believed", "economists believed, "scientists discovered that ", "psychologists discovered that " etc - as if there was one convergent view across these groups. This invariably conveniently sets an inaccurately summarised 'philosophy' that Curtis says completely misled politicians. (Not that they are completely blameless - presumably the point of the Lewinsky footage in the first episode is that Clinton was so distracted by the Lewinsky episode that he ignored urgent messages from economists that could have saved the world from doom.

wish someone would tabulate exactly how many people i kill with each consumer electronics purchase

well y'know that sort of is how the economy works but best not to think about it too hard unless u wanna wind up making cut-up documentaries for a living

monday night is genocide night at the G household

the final thought: we have comforted ourselves that we are automatons directed by genes to avoid responsibility for our actions that have caused great suffering.

or words to that effect.

total balls. who the hell has been comforting themselves with this? (ok maybe John Gray, the dick.)

Best made episode of the series, but yeah that conclusion was ridiculous and typically wrong use of 'we' by Curtis.

ah super, a cogent argument in defence of Free Will.

Just caught up with the last episode. On balance, I felt this was spectacular bullshit, full of nonsequiturs, duplicitously vague applications of "we" and stories that deserved their own docs (esp Rwanda) and were insulted and muddled by being chucked in the blender with bits of Burial and slo-mo footage of people dancing. By the end, the alleged central thesis had become utterly meaningless. If this argument were put into a written essay it would be laughed out of a GCSE class. But hey, it sure was pretty.

There was enough material for about twenty hours of television in the last episode alone. As an exercise in explaining the course of events, it would be laughable - there's no way you can summarise the causes for the wars in Rwanda and Congo in four minutes apiece - but as an exercise in providing a set of interesting things for viewers to go and find out more about, it had a purpose. I think the overarching polemical point was fairly weakly structured but, again, it gives us something to think about when the show's over. There's not much on television that can make the same claim. Also, Pizzicato 5!

What annoyed me the most, aside for the use of 'we believed' and 'scientists thought' throughout, were the sections that seemed to bend fact to fit the theory. The idea that the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan demonstrate that organic displays of people power without hierarchy are doomed to failure, for example, ignores the fact that they were never organic and always had a hierarchy. There were too many occasions like that for it not to come across as a little dishonest, rather than misguided or constrained by format.

His name was Adam Curtis, and his programmes followed a radical new path. He would show that history, far from being something supported by facts, was something quite different. This was a radical new form of documentary, in which the very idea of not pulling a fast one was simply not a problem.

At its heart was some cool slo-mo footage of people dancing intercut with Alan Greenspan and the Pizzicato 5.

j/k - love him really

I thought this one was great and pretty entertaining. I couldn't get through a couple of his past shows. I feel like the haters don't really "get" adam curtis. Approaching his work like it's some kind of cogent political essay seems kind of silly to me.

oh, and alba lol and otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

but this was a fantasy

I never got around to saying why wk's thing about not "getting" Adam Curtis was an undeserved get-out-of-jail-free card but this parody does it for me.

some lols in this, though i'm surprised that the most obvious Curtis phrase/meme didn't pop up; just before a sudden shift in the narrative you get "and then (name of person) ..*made a discovery* ...".
there's always some random fellow somewhere who's making a discovery in Curtis stuff.

might do a version of the Lewinsky "Suzanne" bit but with "Suzanne" slowed down to the same rate as the actual footage

A lot of his appeal seems to overlap with Malcolm Gladwell's - cool little stories about incredibly important people and things you probably haven't come across before, eg "In a laboratory in southern California in 1963 an eccentric young scientist named xxx made a remarkable discovery." I'm sure if you didn't know who Ayn Rand was, for example, then the first part of Loving Grace was a blast if only for telling her story vividly. But Gladwell, though prone to false connections and oversimplifications himself, has way more narrative focus. And the downside of this technique is that the more the viewer knows about a particular subject, the shabbier and more misleading this skimreading of it seems. It was the Rwanda section of Loving Grace which made me lose my patience with Curtis because it's something I know about and he was mauling it.

what did he get wrong abt rwanda?

(i think it's obvi that he's giving very partial versions of events in every case)

n e ways thought the third ep was the best thing he's done in a minute

But this was a fantasy!

hahaha

"but in reality!"

came here to post this

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3272903211813223143

classic material

I haven't seen that series. Should I start from the beginning?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a strange and brilliant phd student in cambridge made a fascinating discovery.

Going the Full-Carmody: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/09/the_curse_of_tina.html

psyched. read the first bit while listening to floyd cramer's 'on the rebound', to get ready.

Why we have become so possessed by the ideology of our age that we cannot think outside it.

except i, adam curtis

Ha. Obviously undeterred by The Loving Trap-style mockery, he's going the "full Curtis" here:

It is a rollicking saga that involves all sorts of things not normally associated with think tanks - chickens, pirate radio, retired colonels, Jean Paul Sartre, Screaming Lord Sutch, and at its heart is a dramatic and brutal killing committed by one of the very men who helped bring about the resurgence of the free market in Britain.

No wonder he gets so many commissions if his pitches are that good. It's a well-told story. I knew the Shivering Sands story already but didn't know much about Smedley.

"I want to suggest that the Hug has become a part of the modern problem of not being able to imagine any alternative to the world of today. The Hug is no longer liberating, it is restraining"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/10/the_curse_of_tina_part_two.html

aha, the killer final conclusion:

"If we can be taught to hug we can just as easily learn to march and chant."

well I'm seeing Loving Grace tom'w

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace

anyone else want to weigh in?

IIRC the consensus around here was that it was even less convincing than usual but still very entertaining.

I rewatched it last week and enjoyed it more. But yes...stretching.

This is good:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/01/the_years_of_stagnation_and_th.html

^^ also, the following the post about cruise ships, and the history of the owners of the Costa Concordia. Includes a v. funny 60s ALan Whicker clip
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/01/were_all_in_the_same_boat_-_ar.html

At first sight the search for peace and stability in Iraq, and the search for physical and mental fitness in the extreme contortions of modern Yoga seem to have absolutely nothing in common.


But curiously they do.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/11/while_the_band_played_on.html

a fair point well expressed here

but this was a fantasy

what a great use of the bbc archivists' time

hang on, music changes the way we feel about the images we're seeing?

it's true tho, the final scene of andrei rublev is subtly different when set to bbbbbounce by the blackout crew

oh you guys..

But in amongst all this new-found self-confidence among the pets of Britain there were still the ghosts of the old rigid owner-pet power structure

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/blogadamcurtis/posts/HEAVY-PETTING

i can't even

the kind of self-parody i could get behind tbh

also looking forward to seeing all these videos of dogs

but this was a fantasy

― woof

in reality, pets had been learning to post on forums

tbf i think the bit I posted was curtis-does-curtis for lols.

a radical new form of lol

where should i start with this guy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x1bX3F7uTrg

I would say The Mayfair Set: it's a bit more tightly focused than the later work, & the narrative's a bit cleaner, though it keeps going to odd interesting places. Full of fascinating slightly monstrous sorts - Goldsmith, Aspinall etc.

good grief charlie brooker has a lot to answer for xp

thanks woof

Did you guys know about this: http://www.mif.co.uk/event/massive-attack-v-adam-curtis

It Felt Like A Kiss a few years ago was hands down the most mind-blowing few hours of my life. Can't wait for this one.

the financial journalist in the second episode (Christopher Fildes) is amazing. 'I and other people in the financial press were willing dupes'. Can't be said enough. Very good documentaries - nothing more plainly connects the switch from paternalistic (the paternalism of a grotesque controlling father) to unmediated unapologetic-yet-duplicitous socially destructive greed, which is also the recent history of the Tory party.

YOU THINK YOU ARE A CONSUMER BUT MAYBE YOU HAVE BEEN CONSUMED

Haven't watched these clips yet but I do love his TITLES.

The cuts may be right, or they may be stupid - but the astonishing thing is how no-one really challenges them.

orly

I think that one of the reasons for this is because a lot of the power that shapes our lives today has become invisible - and so it is difficult to see how it really works and even more difficult to challenge it

difficult to challenge yes, invisible no. these days there are probably as many people trying to pull the wool away from our eyes as trying to pull it over.

finished the mayfair set. a little shrill perhaps, but interesting.

and p.s. hmm, the treatment of mohammed al fayed was a little bit ... euphemistic. i'm not saying it was explicitly racist. that is for other people to say.

blimey ..this is dire

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/interactive/2013/jul/08/adam-curtis-massive-attack-what-is-reality

Seems to have been taken down.

What was that, Bob Six?

It says "This article was temporarily taken down on Monday 8 July 2013."

Was an except of a poem/text that went with a video installation he did with Massive Attack in Manchester. Several b/w pics, maybe a video clip (couldn't see, was on my phone), quite long, didn't read, just scrolled and saw bits and pieces here and there - do you know what reality is, nicolai ceaucescu and his wife were shot, that's about all I remember :-/

More info without the actual excerpt: http://m.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jul/07/adam-curtis-massive-attack-review

it's had a few sniffy reviews up here even from the Curtis fanbase. a fair few people walked out of the opening night supposedly; spending 2 hours standing up (with no bar!) in a darkened warehouse on a Friday night hasn't gone down to well with folk expecting a more traditional 'gig'.

£36 a pop too.

(SPOILER)

liz fraser's in it.

yeah, it's pretty disappointing, esp if you went to It Felt Like A Kiss a few years back. spoke to AC afterwards and he said he's working on turning the current thing into TV production for the BBC but there's a bunch of legal issues to get past so it might never happen (will prob end up on his blog though). He's also working on a new documentary series about massive institutions and how they're broken - including the BBC - *for* the BBC.

http://www.latitudefestival.com/line-up/artist/alan-moore-mitch-jenkins-adam-curtis

"RD Laing challenged the psychiatric establishment in the 1960s THATCHER THATCHER DEATH WE ARE ALL PROSTITUTES something about prozac"

"but this was an illusion."

Got tix for this off the back of Curtis's involvement rather than Massive Attack, looking back upthread seems nuts that It Felt Like A Kiss was 4 years ago. Generally hit a lot of the MIF events, but with recent Babby A we could only really organise childcare for one proper evening event.

I read quite a lot of the mealy mouthed early reviews and was ready to be underwhelmed, but in the end came away feeling like it was something of a triumph - the immersive nature of the film screening was really effective and MA's involvement was understated yet powerful, takes a bit of grit for a band to avoid playing almost any of their own material and the covers were mostly great. I felt like Liz Fraser was a bit underutilised, but god hearing that voice live was a treat and the Russian pop song super beautiful. Could spend a long time going round the plughole of what Curtis is actually saying, and picking his argument apart, but during the show I was swept up into it and enjoyed it very much (same went for Mrs A and friends we were with). The Saturday night crowd laid into some thunderous applause at the end, and didn't see any walkouts from where we were. The Mayfield Depot was a v interesting and cavernous space to stage it in too, odd to think that such huge structures still lie derelict in the heart of the city.

On a tenuous note, we'd also been for a meal at Zouk in Manchester beforehand and Daddy G was in there, dining solo, on some kind of grilled chicken starter and then steak in a "lonely guy thinking baout things" mode.

Adam Curtis on MI5:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER

Watch the film before you read Curtis on the people featured:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/ONES-PRIVATE-LIFE

Enjoyed the Whicker documentary.

It was interesting to see Elizabeth Jane Howard, as I'm just reading her autobiography and just finished the part covering her marriage to Peter Scott.

oh Adampaws

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/02/adam-curtis-interview

i sort of like the general ways this guy's mind works (esp. his emphasis on how right-thinking decisions can have disastrous or just bizarre unintended consequences, or his general chaos theory of world civilization) but the actual films (or videos) strike me as kind of 'roided out and glib. i'm not sure if i'm expected to take them as righteous muckraking or a kind of craig-baldwin-esque video theater and i don't think the confusion is particularly educational.

He turned out to be engaging and personable, veering frantically one from one topic to another,

this basically describes his films

yeah a sort of ADD thing. What I thought was a bit 0_0 in that interview were his pronouncements on music, I mean who knew that Rihanna might be making better records than the Arctic Monkeys? SCALES FALL FROM EYES

also it kind of figures that he's one of those britishers who confuses "the state of music" with "the type of music that gets covered in the UK music press"

"i am so tired of how ALL OF MUSIC is just looking backwards, viz. savages"

britishers seem to get all up in arms arguing about music that they would be perfectly within their rights to be ignoring like everybody else

he also reminds me that punk rockers (and post-punk non-rockers) are among other things late baby boomers. that punk was a trend WITHIN baby-boom culture, not against it. 'cos just sub out a few words and he could just as easily be saying, "music isn't original anymore. remember when we had STEPPENWOLF?!"

also i get the feeling from his work that he's both sententious /and/ misanthropic, which is kind of a toxic combo.

(as some ILX posters habitually remind me)

What people are yearning for now is some kind of romantic visions of something beyond our present condition, and that would be good music.

thanks, prof!

it's kind of endearing that the best he can come up with is Massive Attack, lol 1992 grandad! But then again, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that a middle aged bloke is a raging rockist.

he's a rockist in popist clothes

so you might say he's a pop-rocksist

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X17saFn9hgw/T9djDVKtd_I/AAAAAAAABEM/uZKjhY6eYqo/s1600/PopRocks_square600.jpg

Curtis should have probably kept his mouth shut but reading you on this has made the supposedly offending comments a lot better.

It could've been a more disciplined and coherent attempt to map music to what is happening but at least he is making the attempt. At least that whole thing of music as thermometer is present.

I'm not going to criticise his musical ideas when he's brought me the soundtracks to those films.

But the truth about the elite was much stranger and more unsettling.

takes an odd turn towards the end.

good(?) article

yes, tho' I like the anecdotal George Davis/Lambton stuff more than the big thesis, and haven't had time to watch the videos yet.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/mar/11/bbc-iplayer-revamped-adam-curtis

Curtis will make three iPlayer-only films exploring themes of hypocrisy, deception and corruption in contemporary Britain – Out There, At the Mountains of Madness and Dream Baby Dream – available from July.

Have any iPlayer-enabled Britxors seen this yet?

i wonder if they were ever up on iPlayer in July? they're not there now if so. i never recall hearing anything about them.

oh, ok - I can't tell, I'm not in Britain myself.

I wondered if the third documentary will be related to this bit from the Massive Attack thing, since "Dream Baby Dream" is the Suicide track that's playing:

http://vimeo.com/76571554

there is this blog entry from 25th july

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/NO-FUTURE

Long! Thanks for the link.

Bitter Lake. January 15th.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/TRAILER-TRASH

lol @ the kanye cue

love this guy but the title card that says BUT THEN // EVERYTHING BECAME CHAOTIC AND UNPREDICTABLE is self-parody. politicians invented a radical new kind of chaos, but in order to do this etc.. anyway def gonna be worth watching for the footage.

if you can get ahold of it, Afghantsi by Peter Kosminsky is an amazing portrait of the the bewildering pointlessness of the Russian experience in Afghanistan

There's an interview in the Guardian today - http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jan/24/adam-curtis-bitter-lake

Bitter Lake is up at 9pm UK time tomorrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM

His segment on the Charlie Brooker end of year review was incredibly dumb.

Anybody seen Bitter Lake yet?

I half watched it whilst cleaning up the pad for a flat inspection. Seemed engaging. Lots of Burial!

yeah, watched this now. i think the first thing to say is that he's a genius at compiling and presenting footage. the documentary presents a post-war image of afghanistan that's totally compelling. mainly the film adheres to a structure where there's chronological post-war footage+narrative in the Curtis style, and contemporary-ish Afghanistan footage without narrative, tho that structure is confusingly not always adhered to, which gives the film an almost impressionistic feel.

there are all sorts of remarkable bits - ones that stick in my mind are an electrifying Afghan village speech about how they are not Taliban but Afghan's and how they will kill the British and if they British kill them their ghosts will rise from the sands of Afghanistan, valerie singleton with an afghan hound waving to the Saudi King, an english art school teacher explaining conceptual art and Marcelle Duchamp and urinals to an understandably completely bemused room of Kabul women, the Texan socialite describing her meeting with the mujahideen, all interspersed with brutal gunfights and the textured images of artillery sites and night vision. there's a dancing leitmotiv. i don't know what that's about but it kind of works as a sort of abstract thread of continuity (he possibly links it to the fluttering bird trying to escape through the window).

but then there's a narrative thread and that's where he's complicated - or rather the authoritarian smoothness of his delivery means you have to be constantly vigilant for complications and possibly hidden ideology underneath.

The opening lines are classic Curtis - at almost every line your brain's screaming HANG ON HANG ON:

increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense

what's this increasingly? typical curtis ahistoricism, with added unfalsifiability. abuse of thought grammar too - can you have 'increasingly' where you also have 'nothing'? It's a form of high Gallic style. and you have to be rock solid that the patterns of your prose map somewhere on to the patterns of your facts. With Curtis that relation is a continuous three-card trick of misdirection between statement and fact.

events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain

us! we! no-one! his communal identifications are weird and unhelpful. 'they' is usually politicians and the 'establishment' and often the media, though that's a difficult area for him. we is... I don't know, a less 'informed' version of him? This is deliberate though. What it looks like to me is that this is part of his desire for 'new stories', and by that he doesn't mean journalistic stories, that make sense of detail and expose news stories, but a new set of binaries (we, them) that can be used as a new form of political rhetoric. there's a good, if intemperate and not always otm critique here. right-wing trash in a left-wing guise is his contention, via associating Curtis with post-Marxist libertarianism of Frank Furedi (in fact i think i read this about the time of the Brixton Mao Zedong Memorial 'slavery' story). His question about who you are co-opting when you say 'we', and then looking at Curtis's fellow travellers, is fairly persuasive. Though sometimes I think the piece sometimes confuses Curtis's fascination for approval.

It is a theory that goes a long way to explain Curtis's shameful underanalysis and simplification of the '70s and '80s economic situation in Britain - a place where you would have thought his ideas of political stories being sold to a populace would have an awful lot of weight. Again, the shift of power from manufacturing to finance isn't wrong, but it's misleadingly glib. (Another dreadful bit of glibness in the documentary is where he basically goes 'some left wing students came back from the states to Afghanistan and, by mixing their ideas with Soviet ideology, started a revolution'.)

those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality

i'll just about allow that? i mean this is not how the relationship between government and 'the people' is traditionally represented, but certainly they have an interest in creating a rhetorical world where their world view and actions are seen to be justified and in fact the right course of action. it's not really a maieutic relationship though is it? and i'm not sure anyone really sees it as such. this is more about what Curtis thinks his stories, or future stories should be doing.

That said, the first chapter of Daniel T Rodgers' The Age of Fracture is a close analysis of presidential speeches since WWII, and there's a couple of things in there.

There had not always been so many words. Surrounding public figures with a nearly endless sea of rhetoric is an invention of the twentieth century. Presidents, in particular, once talked in public far less often than they do now. Thomas Jefferson's rule that presidents should communicate to Congress only in writing remained the norm until Woodrow WIlson broke it in 1913. ... Jeffrey Tulis counted a total of about a thousand presidential speeches delivered over the course of the nineteenth century, almost the number that Jimmy Carter gave in his four years in office. Even in the twentieth century, the stream of words that presidents have issued has grown dramatically. Franklin Roosevelt gave less than three hundred speeches of all sorts during the New Deal's first term – vastly more than Lincoln (who gave seventy-eight) but far below the thousand-speeches-a-term rate that Reagan, GWH Bush, and Clinton all chalked up.

The point here I guess is that there is some sense that a suffusion of national political rhetoric, defining identity, has increased, and has become more easily transmitted to everyone via the media. If you add neo-con Irving Kristol's dictum into the mix -

"What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived,"

and

In the generation after 1945, the assumptions that saturated the public talk of presidents were the terms of the Cold War. In language and setting, a sense of historically clashing structures dominated the presidential style. Urgency and obligation were its hallmarks. The Cold War political style clothed the events of the moment in high seriousness; it bound them into a drama of global struggle; it drew leaders and nation into tight and urgent relationships. It formed a way of articulating public life in which society, power, and history pressed down on individual lives as inescapably dense and weighty presences.

then you get something not too far from what Adam Curtis is saying. In fact the chapter goes on to chart a decline in Cold War rhetoric with Reagan in the '80s. for those that raise an eyebrow at that, the argument is that he moved away from metaphors of crisis, to fairly consistent national ones of 'unbounded dreams' that avoided specific reference to foreign policy.

The bit in the documentary where the text on the screen says "At the end of the 20th century, faced with a complex world, politicians retreated into simple stories of right and wrong, moral fables of good versus evil... so they did what President Reagan had done - they ruthlessly simplified the complex struggles around the world'

is just self-contradictory and ignores too much that's been similar throughout history for it to hold any water.

but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow

I *think* what he's implying here is how Cold War manichæan rhetoric can't make sense of middle-east/oil alliances. he does create his own complications with his focus on 'rhetoric' though - the complication of the middle east alliances based round oil is far more easily understood in terms of material requirements than rhetoric. Here the confusions he talks about, the lack of sense, are created by his own insistence on stories as his model of interpretation.

this is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense
and how that led us in the west to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world.

Yeah, i'll just about allow it. it's more about why binary oppositions of 'good' and 'bad' were terribly misguided when it came to afghanistan on a military/tactical level, and compromised because of the Saudi oil alliance on the political level. Curtis elides political rhetoric with military tactics (that's part of his 'we'/'they' thing - this was 'their' story, this is why it went wrong. I don't think James Meek's article Worse Than a Defeat says any different *really*, but the detail of his argument is crucial, which is that UK military eagerness to justify themselves and spending led them to go along with misguided political aims - that's the link between political rhetoric and military tactical error. And there were people who knew it at the time, as Meek says:

The most clear-eyed and honest assessment of what was going on came from the NCOs, the corporals and sergeants ... They understood quickly, and weren’t embarrassed to say, that the people attacking them were local, not outsiders; and that all the British army’s efforts were being drawn into self-protection.

And that really is one of the main assertions of Curtis's film - troops, UK troops especially, made a mistake about who was attacking them, because. blinded by an oversimple analysis of the 'Taliban' and democratic good versus terrorist evil, they couldn't see they were attacking locals. But that's a detailed argument that Curtis turns into a grand political statement of stories increasingly ceasing to make sense and becoming destructive on a global level. (Incidentally, the source of the evidence for this argument for both Meek and Curtis is Mike Martin, who features in both article and film). Meek's article is more detailed and interesting, but they are basically aligned.

David Kilcullen's book Out of the Mountains puts that tactical failure at another level as well:

For various institutional reasons, governments, military forces, law enforcement agencies, and even (perhaps especially) university faculties tend to prefer theories of conflict framed around a single threat—insurgency, terrorism, piracy, narcotics, gangs, organized crime, and so on. This approach—which results in well-known concepts like counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, counter-piracy and so on—might be fine in a binary environment, where one government confronts one threat at a time, but in the real world—the world of complex, adaptive social systems such as cities, trading networks, and licit or illicit economies—there never has been, and never will be, a single-threat environment like this.

These are stories that make sense! Institutional slowness to adapt, hidebound former experts relying on old models, the slowness of published theory and education to catch up with fast changing global warfare. It's a paradox of ISIS that their tactics more like WWII blitzkrieg than the guerilla warfare - Western tactical approaches are more suited to that sort of warfare, still often based in WWII expertise, than Afghanistan.

Good communications, good mobility, and good propaganda – not far from a definition of blitzkrieg as practiced, especially if you read Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France.

That said, the late cold war airpower infrastructure of the Western powers was basically built to identify mechanised columns and operational-level command structures, and kill them with precision strike. here, and generally full of interesting logistics about Afghanistan and ISIS.

I watched the Wipe EOY review again just now - because like xyzzzz__ my impression had been that it was pure horseshit and that in fact, in its compressed way it's a better representation of what Curtis is trying to say in Bitter Lake than Bitter Lake is. In fact it's not *that* bad - the Vladimir Surkov stuff is fairly well documented (possibly paywalled, sorry), for instance, but then there's a big bait and switch where he says MAYBE the politicians in the west are doing the same thing. Define your terms! Either the west are using techniques of conceptual art and funding all sides at an attempt to create confusion and then in order to discredit the reported reality or... they're not. I'm going for the latter here. Maybe I'm naive, but i think they're probably confused and incompetent. It then fairly quickly shuffles to George Osborne, who is equated with Surkov. No, he just looks like any other chancellor trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear - it's a claim tenuous to the point of meaninglessness, a phrase that might apply to an awful lot of Curtis's grand political stuff. It then moves on to Quantitative Easing, and it's here, as in the Bitter Lake documentary that the ship really starts to rock. He's really shit at economics. But in a sense he's also *not wrong*. It's been in plain reported sight that the money that went into the economy via the banks wasn't then passed on to businesses in the way it was supposed to be and in a sense that *does* represent a transferal - well not strictly a transferal, but a creation - of wealth for the richest. But it's not a heist, it's not a secret and it's not confusing - it happens all the time.

It's also a story - infectious! - about the lack of media (as journalism) scrutiny, odd in a person so immersed in media (as form). If we're confused by politicians' stories, is it because no one - the campaigning journalism. that's probably as much about the decline of printed newspapers as the source of information as anything else. The last big campaign was, what, the Mail with Steven Lawrence? The big media event last year tellingly was the wikileaks and snowden stuff in the Guardian, but that was not a campaign of course, just an outflow of information none of which as far as I can tell was picked up and run with - the main outcome being scrutiny on surveillance and information gathering, without any meaningful outcome. I mean I did pick up on King Abdullah's viagra habit recently thanks to documented wikileaks, but Watergate it ain't.

A far more obvious statement about the problems of interpretation than Curtis's 'we need new stories' is Rory Stewart's now fairly famous quote:

In a way, he says, ordinary Afghans are far more powerful than British citizens, because at least they feel they can have a role in one of the country’s 20,000 villages. “But in our situation we’re all powerless. I mean, we pretend we’re run by people. We’re not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.” Some commentators, he says, think we’re run by an oligarchy. “But we’re not. I mean, nobody can see power in Britain. The politicians think journalists have power. The journalists know they don’t have any. Then they think the bankers have power. The bankers know they don’t have any. None of them have any power.

it's the inability to locate responsibility such that we can hold it to account. the closest we get is to be able to hold the government to account to hold the others to account.

so for me an appraisal of Adam Curtis's heavily political stuff boils down to these questions:

1) Description - did what he says happen really happen - usually yes I think - and did it really happen in the way he says it happened - a wary 'not proven, kind of feel uneasy about saying it did though, and sometimes definitively 'no''.
2) Methodology - is he right about the mechanics of how things happen? Answer: no, way too glib, massive distorting focus on 'stories' and media representation, there's a load of interesting material detail there that explains far better why things happened, and will also lead you to a more informed ability to create a master narrative if you wish.
3) Recommendations - are his solutions correct, or rather, what ideology do they imply? see above. really really weak - the whole we/us/them/nothing/no one/increasingly/ piece used to push a need for 'new stories'. Think the Pandora's docs essay makes a good case for saying this way lies fascism or totalitarianism.

2+3 are seriously tainted by each other, 1 is still useful I think, in forcing questions about grand political narratives.

Where the documentary is most successful I think, is in a central section, which binds Solaris, some references to mujahideen ghosts, and a theory of reciprocal cultural influence together. But this section's success isn't explanatory, it's more poetic, and perhaps better fits a film which purports to be explanatory, but is probably most successful aesthetically.

he's still great when he does goalkeeper crabs though.

wonderful post

Yep, and 100% right.

I do want to see the new one now though for the bits Fizzles describes as 'remarkable'. Curtis (and team) are so at footage mining, so tx for reminding me.

Kinda intersted in his early work. If you check wiki there is this:

Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster.

Wonder if he establishes his style really early or not too. Obviously its very much on topic in 2015.

increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense

I think we could just as easily say that the world has never made much sense, or that only now we are making more sense of it, but only through this process we realize how little of the world we can make sense of/actually know.

Which spins slightly more positively.

Obv we need an ilx poll with a set of options to verify all of this for definite.

It is a theory that goes a long way to explain Curtis's shameful underanalysis and simplification of the '70s and '80s economic situation in Britain - a place where you would have thought his ideas of political stories being sold to a populace would have an awful lot of weight

did you mean in this doc specifically, or in general? the mayfair set covered this really well i thought, it was brilliant, this was one of the areas he's covered previously that he glibly reiterated in bitter lake - it really didn't work, it was like a professor saying "as we saw in lesson 5" or something.

the first hour or so was tight enough, i felt, some interesting stuff about the dams and heroin trade, but after a while it was just leaping from year to year with barely concealed opinion spoken over a random sequence of clips and images. all the burial was overkill too.

it was still brilliant in places - but by the end it lost focus completely. the central truth of it is sound enough but it wasn't well put together.

what i don't get is he seemed to be talking it up a lot beforehand and implying it was all about this dissemination of confusion by media and government - he referenced some aide of putin's who was a performance art type - is that a different doc he was promoting or just a tangential thread to this one that he chose to promote?

this lrb article on afghanistan prob was v good btw:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/james-meek/worse-than-a-defeat

the central truth of it is sound enough but it wasn't well put together

i mean about the afghan war, anyway.

it's up on youtube, so i watched it all yesterday. great post by fizzles up above, of course.

i know that most people would find this difficult and inadvisable and completely stupid, but when i watched bitter lake i ended up separating the message from the presentation. i agree with his point of view most of the time, actually, but yes, he oversimplifies even as he criticizes others for oversimplifying. he reduces entire eras and debates to single declarative sentences and blanket statements, only to get very ambiguous when the subject matter approaches the modern era.

but i don't really care too much about that, because i have so much love for the clips that he uses, the ways that they're edited together, the way he lets certain shots linger, how he allows certain tangents to develop for long periods of time before bringing things back to the central narrative. how he manages to insert humor between the most serious of clips without it being jarring to the viewer.

at the end of bitter lake, it says something like "film clips collected by..." and the person's name is not Adam Curtis (and it's not in the imdb credits, either). i'm sure that Curtis edited the clips and chose the order and deserves immense credit for all of that, but whoever went through the painstaking agony of collecting the building blocks that he had to work with is a genius.

I loved the rhythm of Bitter Lake. Curtis applies narration in a very sparse way, so the great majority of the piece is archival footage, and in those moments I think his genius is undeniable. But his narration is as glib as ever.

one part that has stuck with me was near the end, when the british troops move in to a newly "liberated" town and attempt to meet with the village elders to secure their support. they also ally themselves with the local police. it turns out that the police are the former warlords, but the troops seemingly don't recognize it. the locals naturally see the troops' alliance with the police/warlords as an indication that the british are on the opposite side of them in the war. the locals attack the troops. the troops see this as an indication that the locals are actually taliban. they obliterate the town with a giant bomb and cheer.

yeah in all his recent interviews he's said that there was this one guy who somehow had access to a load of raw footage the BBC shot. what the hell was going on with that girl who seemed to have an eye that had recently become damaged/ missing. that was horrible.

I liked it when the elders fucked off the generous offer of viewing a nature documentary

Finished watching Century of the Self last night (I know), but I really enjoyed it. Even though it's quite a few years old by now, a lot of it still feels relevant and almost eerily prescient of things like the Labour leadership candidacy.

was just searching for an appropriate thread to post something unnecessary and scurrilous about Frank Furedi and was reminded of Fizzles's beautifully accurate takedown of Curtis up there

Have you found an appropriate thread yet? Love me a bit of Furedi/LM/Spiked bashing

it was nothing, really, I was just following a trail of stuff about mental health provision in FE/HE and it inevitably led to that vicious clown

for a guy who professes to hate identity politics, Furedi sure seems to take a lot of stuff personally

bit of bored-at-work friday afternoon stuff, i retrieved that original adam curtis/frank furedi article and put it here. More intemperate than I remember it, and probably a bit off-target in a few places (i just think he misunderstands curtis's tone sometimes) but still quite a good read.

Thanks for this. Intemperate yes, but it draws interesting lines (like a Curtis film!)

Watching The Living Dead at the moment, interesting/horrifying to learn that Horst Mahler, former Red Army Faction leader who is interviewed throughout about his father's Nazism and how such discoveries fueled the student revolution, is now a committed neo-Nazi himself, though was not openly such when the documentary was filmed.

Here, he's discussing the heart of fascism with disdain: https://youtu.be/4xoM6-1SWl4?t=50m Only a couple of years later his own turn to the Far Right occurs.

helluva hell turn

heel turn dammit

dunno, hell turn fits to imo

true

I enjoyed Century of the Self at the time I saw it, but I wonder if revisiting it now I might find it too perfect and paranoid.

I find his documentaries fascinating, informative and thought provoking, and they send me off on tangents of thought I'd not have considered without their provocation, but I never really come away buying the whole larger premise.

Like, he's great as a tissue of references I want to explore further on my own recognizance.

what's he up to? he's been.. quiet for ages.

Bitter Lake was only last year, no?

I think his use of montage and music is incredible, even if I have issued with the substance at times.

shit yeah, january.

His blog hasn't been updated since 2014

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis

This is the piece I wrote about The Living Dead for Film Quarterly a few years back (since I'm back, or anyway seem to be reading Ilx again). Too sleepy today to self-fisk against Fizzles or the Furedi takedown: I do say something about philosophical idealism threatening to become a problem, which is maybe a gesture in that direction? These three films (now more than 20 years old!) seem way more at the poetic end of his work than the detailed/problematic material analysis, of course.

Hullo everyone.

hello :)

*dorks cheer*

:) enjoyed the article. wd be v interested to hear your thoughts on bitter lake if/when you have the required overplus of time and energy. first thought in the light of reading it is that my focus on the authoritarian voice in curtis was disproportionate and that the solaris/mujahideen ghosts stuff is the most successful facet of bitter lake, is a conduit or vehicle for the rest of the collage, and fits very well with your description of the nature of haunting - a various bustle of material, captured and mediated memory.

bcos the strength is in the footage a pure focus/critique of the explanatory elements is far too partial. i'm not sure i'd revise anything i wrote then - apart from finishing hanging sentences :/ - but something which brought the visual elements in as the large part of an act in which the authoritarian voice participates wd be valuable.

feels a bit like a bad rabbithole for me to plunge down -- ie an attractive one -- so we shall see how disciplined i turn out to be

but glad you liked it :)

hope AC is working on a dual portrait of Trump University and the Clinton Foundation.

Mark, should I finish watching The Living Dead before reading your essay? hello btw!

Hi! I don't really know! I think the argument is clear even if you haven't seen it and I don't think spoilers are an issue :) On the other hand you may want to keep me out of your head until you've formed your own take…

New one in October: HyperNormalisation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2016/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation

where events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control - from Donald Trump to Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, and random bomb attacks. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.

Stoked for the inexplicable things and why we cannot understand them to finally be explained and understood.

'God works in mysterious ways... Here's how'

"People believed God worked in unmysterious ways -- but this was etc etc"

a radical new form of god

This got me thinking Curtis is a bit of a hero after all … and made me want to read John Dos Passos.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/09/adam-curtis-donald-trump-documentary-hypernormalisation

http://thequietus.com/articles/21077-adam-curtis-hypernormalisation-review-bbc-politics-doom

Enjoyed this for all the usual reasons - great shot after great shot e.g. Assad walking into his gigantic but bland palace, the helicopter over Cairo adorned by green laser pen lights from the crowd below (perhaps not intentionally an arresting contrast with the UFO footage earlier)...and some WTF stories e.g. the Japanese gambler who took millions at Trump's casino before being butchered by yakuza. Hated that focus on the young girls dancing in their back garden at the end tho.

All the usual argumentative holes too I guess but seemed enough in there to keep afloat.

i enjoy curtis' documentaries a lot but there seems to be an accumulating redundancy to them. if you watch several of them in a short space of time they really blend into one thing

Did anyone else turn off the new Adam Curtis before the end? If he's going to rehash themes he could at least buy the other Burial album.

Local Garda on twitter otm

Jim otm - increasingly they consist of him saying things he believes, unproven, over pretty images. His beliefs have become a sort of melange that dilutes itself each reheat.

i will probably watch this while baked and with plenty of spare hours on hand and basically just enjoy it aesthetically. but as far as taking the theses that he puts forward even remotely serious it's not going to happen.

bitter lake i think was the most nonsensical/worst of his documentaries yet though so that doesn't really augur well

wasn't exactly watching that closely but i'm not exactly sure what the thesis was. maybe some vague foreboding about the control society.

i will probably watch this while baked and with plenty of spare hours on hand and basically just enjoy it aesthetically.

this is how i've watched all of his films and it's always a great time. his attempts to make connections between various themes sometimes veer into plausibility (esp during stretches of power of nightmares), but in general they're secondary for me.

I felt like this was big great unwieldy greatest hits package. The Donald Trump/Japanese gambler story would make a great documentary just by itself.

Can't really complain too much about anything with Yanka Dyagileva on the soundtrack but the challenge for me was the shift towards the end that seemed to suggest that Surkov and Trump are engaging in a new kind of post-truth/reality politics when the rest of the film, and the rest of his films, make it clear that post-truth politics has been around since the fifties at least. Without anything else to tie it together it does seem more of a 'this happened and then this happened and then this happened' affair than usual but still enjoyable. The footage of the Egyptian helicopter lit up by laser pens isn't something I had seen before and was remarkable.

I watched this the other day and was going to mention the helicopter scene too. I had scene some footage from the ground before, but not from the pilot's perspective. Amazing sequence.

I started watching this before Tuesday and finished just now. I suspect the last half hour or so wouldn't have had much impact if I'd seen them pre-Trump victory. It plays with strong "goodbye to liberal democracy" overtones now.

In particular, it's hard to shake those images of him sitting taciturn, fixedly staring ahead as that SNL writer makes joke after joke about him at the 2011 White House correspondents' dinner.

http://i.imgur.com/YlcymTX.png

Hated that focus on the young girls dancing in their back garden at the end tho.

i didn't rly know what this was meant to convey and doubt it was anything i approve of but i did like the rhythm of it in the same way i v much liked the dancing motif in bitter lake, a movie i too have forgotten the point of but thought was top-of-game montage. this had in general less interesting footage -- seemed like a much greater percentage of mood shots of office buildings, highways, snowy trees, blinking computers, jane fonda etc.. lots more talking heads this time too, tho at least they are usually vintage. (loved the controlled, sarcastic fury of the beame-era nyc labor leader when asked whether the municipal workers' unions weren't being greedy too; felt what reagan would call "clean hatred" at the sight of timothy leary explaining that politics are for olds.)

thought this was one of his better ones tho. still great stuff in there. the egyptian helicopter yeah. various eerie uses of bare space, not just in assad's palace but at press conferences, tv interviews -- sets. gaddafi's facial expressions are haunting: never in control. (similar shots of trump.) and that we-need-new-stories thesis, crypto-fascist as it may or may not be, works better here than it did in e.g. the trap, or probably even bitter lake, since so much of this is about various forces, both deliberately and not, colluding to create an uninterpretable world? i guess? whether the world has ever been fruitfully interpreted is another question

his style does make me feel idk close to the world in some way. bathing in moments. and even tho it is a polemical assemblage it is so sloppy and digressive and always not-quite-persuasive i don't feel suffocated by his ideas. doomy montage that's fun to watch high is of course its own kind of escapism but it does feel like an antidote to the relentless constructed clarity of facebook-era media.

the "supercut" of pre-9/11 disaster-movie crowds staring up past the camera in horror went on so long it became both funny and creepy. even if what seemed like a majority of it was just from independence day.

also i realize found footage has always been around but the smartphone explosion means that i'd now probably believe someone who argued that there's no excuse anymore for making movies with anything else.

loved the controlled, sarcastic fury of the beame-era nyc labor leader when asked whether the municipal workers' unions weren't being greedy too

This guy was great! "I wanna wish them well, the slobs"

I started watching this before Tuesday and finished just now. I suspect the last half hour or so wouldn't have had much impact if I'd seen them pre-Trump victory. It plays with strong "goodbye to liberal democracy" overtones now.

Having watched this in full last weekend then re-watched various bits & pieces though the week, completely agree - the notion of a carefully constructed reality suddenly collapsing in on itself (with attendant suspicion of chickens coming home to roost) is obv. going to feel pretty resonant just now (whether or not it turns out to be the most accurate or helpful way of framing things in the long run).

And yeah, the White House dinner footage... it's no doubt part of the format/conventions of these things, but I was impressed just how shit SNL dude's jokes were (with possible exception of the fox-on-the-head line).

There was a lot use of horror aesthetics in this one I thought, which is not something I'd associated AC with strongly with before (full disclosure: this is the 1st new AC thing I've watched since getting off the bus after Machines Of Loving Grace, having originally got on the bus with Century Of The Self).

One of the most effective bits for me was right near the start, where you get the shot of the neat, tidy, well-stocked kitchen and then the camera slowly pans across to reveal the pools of blood on the floor. Of course, the impact is hammered home by AC on the voiceover going on about 'dark forces are returning to pierce the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake world' or suchlike... but I reckon the point would still come across without the voiceover queues.
The section where he's cross-cutting between the Jane Fonda workout video and the footage of the Elena/Nicolae Ceausescu executions I found pretty fkn disturbing as well.

the "supercut" of pre-9/11 disaster-movie crowds staring up past the camera in horror went on so long it became both funny and creepy.
Yup this is otm - the audience realises early on that at some point he's going cut to the actual 9/11 footage, and then the mounting dread comes from trying to anticipate exactly how/when it's going to happen, with the lengthiness just dragging out the dread. Again classic horror aesthetics.

All these reviews make me want to give this a second chance - love Adam Curtis but I find he offers a lot of dread without ever really offering ways out. Can be the epitome of bleak.

Never heard of Adam Curtis before this thread a couple weeks ago, but I found HyperNormalisation to be an amazing piece.

It kind of reminded me of this movie I saw back in college.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_or_the_Discovery_of_Television_Among_the_Bees

Interview with Curtis on Chapo Trap House:

https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-65-no-future-feat-adam-curtis-121216

i still haven't watched HyperN, mainly bcz i don't want to undermine my default troll, that curtis is actually right abt everything and recent events have swept the ground from under his critics' feets

it won't do anything to undermine that, in fact it will probably reinforce it

listened to that on the way to work this morning - really good interview, and curtis' final words have haunted me all day

really need to get around to watching hypernormality but i feel like it might be more grim reality than i'm willing to face right now

what were they?

couldn't make it through hypernormality, bleak/grim

a quick precis of his closing comments, after talking a lot about how the left is afraid of talking about taking real power and making real change: people need a big hopeful picture to change things on a massive scale, but liberals are wary of mass movements after the horrors of germany and russia in the 20s. massive change is thrilling but scary because it can erase security and remove certainty.

the question is: do you really want change becuase many of you in the centre might find yourself in an uncertain world where you lose a lot of things or do you just want to change thing a little bit, like banks are held to account of identities are respected but basically the world remains the same?

there are millions who do, right now, want change and they feel they have nothing to lose. currently they're being led by the right and so society may change in lots of ways you don't want.

to change things you've got to engage with the massive forces of power but you might personally lose a lot in the process but in doing so change the world for the better.

clearly he put it a bit better than i did - it's worth a listen, honestly

Another interview:

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation-interview-54468

Going at it from the artist perspective

https://twitter.com/johnthorntonjr/status/808424653094060032

The thing he said about the left never talking about power expressed something that has been on my mind for years.

I think the Bernie movement is a step in the right direction, but even there I think there was a failure of a lot of people to engage with what politics and power really are. That's why I think so many people were so dumbfounded/heartbroken/aghast to find out that the DNC was deliberately undermining him. I mean, of course they were, and did it matter? The whole party was openly behind Clinton and Sanders came out of nowhere. TBC, I think Sanders DOES understand power very well and knew what he was doing, but this whole "what? it wasn't fair?! I'm going home!" attitude bespeaks an avoidance of engaging with how power operates. What's good is that I see some real organizing coming in its wake.

And although I like to think of myself as on the left rather than liberal, I'm still definitely very much in that center he's talking about in my reality -- an affluent, live-and-let-live guy with a family whose attachment to belief systems is somewhat weak and who deep down fears losing what he has.

fwiw what he was saying about liberal mistrust of movements and big ideas also reminded me a lot of this:
http://utopiainfourmovements.com/about/
which was pretty good though not quite on Adam Curtis's level

That's why I think so many people were so dumbfounded/heartbroken/aghast to find out that the DNC was deliberately undermining him. I mean, of course they were, and did it matter? The whole party was openly behind Clinton and Sanders came out of nowhere.

otm -- this is the 2016 pol argument i most frequently ended up having w people younger than me (at work) -- them describing some intolerable malfeasance of the DNC's and me saying look "entrenched power" means you can expect to find them in trenches -- but these people are 20 and i had chalked it up to that. not sure it's the same as the occupy thing, which was a problem of experience not inexperience -- not being 20 but being squatted on too heavily by the 20c. curtis does basically say that, and he's sort of right to say that occupy only had ideas about process and not content, but it's matt cristman who really nails it imo: the faith of occupy was that content would arise from process. i agree that it failed badly (except that it built networks etc etc). it was not necessarily that no one could agree on anything but that even their points of agreement, which existed, somehow could not emerge. curtis is i think sharp to draw a line between occupy's temporary-autonomous-zone-esque idea of a "space" whose different rules would finally allow the revelation to come + the hippie idea of cyberspace. btw tho we'd all recoil from the idea of another steve jobs movie he is the perfect prism imo thru which to examine the ideological failure (or if you like "journey") of an entire generation. somebody around here may have said the same recently. maybe the sorkin movie did this, idk. gonna put a wild bet on no.

mark s yeah hyper-n has the usual complement of stretches and hold-on-a-secs but as a whole i doubt it will do any damage to yr working theory at all. fizzles' long post above itt is v good crit but these days i def question this part -- massive distorting focus on 'stories' and media representation -- as i think what he means by "stories" goes beyond media representation, to the roots of what ideology is (protoindoeuropean root of "story" iirc is "to see"), and i do think i agree that if the left cannot (again) produce a different way for people to imagine the future they are going to be destroyed very soon by a 21c right whose own trusty imagination is about to produce -- well like tesla sez, man-made horrors beyond your comprehension. (i got that from halsey's instagram.)

i still haven't watched HyperN, mainly bcz i don't want to undermine my default troll, that curtis is actually right abt everything and recent events have swept the ground from under his critics' feets

― mark s, Monday, 12 December 2016 15:57 (yesterday) Permalink

the post-election edition of the film comment podcast had a good chunk of this, with one critic in particular (don't remember who) saying "ahh, Curtis drives me nuts, he's just obviously so wrong but also i can't believe how right HyperNormalization is"

Bill Ayers was speaking tonight at Powells in Portland and made a point to bring up that one of the necessary bits is that you have to take time just to talk to each other and work out and work on exactly what kind of world you're building toward. He reiterated the need for the imagination process.

btw i was rather proud when curtis in this movie repeatedly used the phrase "everything is going according to plan" because that is the name of a song by late-soviet punk band civil defense (grazhdanskaya oborona), which i made an english lyric video of and uploaded to youtube for use in an EMP presentation i'm otherwise now a lil embarrassed by, and adam curtis later linked to my video from a blog post making some of the same arguments he makes in the soviet section of this movie, and tho he does not mention the song in the film he is clearly grimly delighted by the phrase and i like to think i turned him on to it.

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation-interview-54468

This has probably been asked before, but what's a good first Adam Curtis film?

Hi kingfish - "Century of the Self".

Ok, cool

It's a really great overview of history as well as how we fell into such a consumerist nightmare (simplification).

plus lots of sweet 70s cult footage

watched two-thirds of hypernormalisation before bed last night and ended up having some horrible dreams, which i guess is kind of a recommendation

it's really good so far, and troublingly i think it's the most persuasive of his films. i'm frankly not psyched for our oncoming societal collapse :(

not sure if "the living dead" is currently easy to see, but look out for it

Unfortunately the one set of videos I have by him that I can't watch through my memory stick stuck into my tv. Wish I knew better how to tell which files were going to play.

But have watched or at least listened to most of the Adam Curtis stuff over the last coupel fo weeks with the exceptionof that Living Dead and possibly about half of Bitter lake. Oh and Hypernormalistation which I watched a couple of months back.

Living Dead is on youtube (first two parts anyway, the third one gives me a copyright error)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xoM6-1SWl4

(there's another set that is 18 x 10min that seems to play ok)

there is an Adam Curtis collection out there in t0rrentland which has everything up to 2011.

Finally begun watching hypernormalisation now - it is thrilling, powerful, even if i don't buy every twist and turn. he is a supernaturally talented researcher of footage. I often find myself wondering, *how did you find that??

i always think of this post when i wonder the same--

at the end of bitter lake, it says something like "film clips collected by..." and the person's name is not Adam Curtis (and it's not in the imdb credits, either). i'm sure that Curtis edited the clips and chose the order and deserves immense credit for all of that, but whoever went through the painstaking agony of collecting the building blocks that he had to work with is a genius.

― ♪♫_\o/_♫♪ (Karl Malone), Tuesday, February 3, 2015 6:28 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

--but i forgot to check if hypernormalisation had a similar credit.

yeah, it's not very clear...adam curtis, in a couple recent interviews with him i've read or listened to, seems to give the impression that he is the one finding the footage, but painstakingly searching through the immense BBC archives which only a select few people have access to. It's possible that there's someone else (the "film clips collected by..." person) doing it, but if so, Curtis sure doesn't give that person much credit!

but by painstakingly searching

To this end Curtis has become a kind of heroic one-man depository of BBC memory. For the past few years he has been funding a former BBC cameraman, Phil Goodwin, to travel the world digitising all the unedited material in BBC cupboards and storerooms worldwide, the hours of rushes that got boiled down to a 20-second news report.

Goodwin spends weeks with a bank of six laptops and six tape machines collecting it all – and then brings it back and gives it to Curtis in plastic lunch boxes full of small computer drives. “So for example I have everything the BBC has ever shot for 60 years in Russia sitting on 58 terabytes of drives,” he says. “Phil is doing China next. Then Egypt. Vietnam. And then we are doing Africa. I aim eventually to have the last 50 years of unedited material. I could do an emotional history of the world.”

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/09/adam-curtis-donald-trump-documentary-hypernormalisation

Curtis has (had) his own blog on the BBC website where he occasionally shared amazing curios he found in the archives, like a brilliant documentary on early 70s British bikers, who were as far removed from the Easy Rider ideal as one could be, and still be riding a hog.

Found this, don't think anyone has posted it yet. It's Jarvis Cocker interviewing Adam from last October:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVx3lt8ZKHw

film critic Michael Sicinski:

Interesting thing about Curtis' visuals. Whenever he wants to show the fake dreamworlds of consumption, the unreal world of the Internet, or just ideology in general, without fail he shows clips of girls and women. And maybe a cat video for good measure.

And of course, no discussion about how the "fake" cyberworld serves particular purposes for minorities -- African-Americans and LGBTQ folks in particular -- whose physical bodies are uniquely threatened in the "real world."

Seriously, this is the type of guy I used to avoid on Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, trying to sell me the Socialist Worker. One single analysis for everything, no nuance. I'll pass.

Where's that quote from?

Letterboxd

And then the Strangest Thing Happened: What is Adam Curtis doing?

I haven't read a lot of the thread above, so maybe people have already talked about this, but there's this thread of over-attribution of agency that runs through AC's shows. People or groups are depicted as having an intentional influence far beyond their realistic reach. In a lot of cases, even if some group (politicians, financiers) did have distinct goals and a large amount of power to go along with it, it still seems implausible to attach subsequent historical outcomes to them. There's too much noise, too much granularity, too many human animals with their various appetites and weaknesses between putative influence A and outcome B. He's always insinuating conspiracy when chaos seems so much more likely. Humans have this need to form a consistent narrative

that's basically half this thread

but this was a mistake

haha sorry

Hold on, let me out another green world on

But one person saw things differently

Maybe people already talked about this as well, but AC's shows often remind me of Burke's Connections series, except Burke did seem to have a better grasp of the importance of historical accident.

meanwhile, in a message board on the other side of the world

*cut to grainy VCR footage of Colonel Gaddafi*

i think most of this thread is people valuing his aesthetic virtues above his analytics, but tbf to the lad he does illuminate patterns sometimes and most of his subjects are, at the very least, people who wanted to influence the world

historian in 'creating narratives' shocker

still haven't watched hypernormalisation, reason given above still applies

all will be made clear in my Curtis response film, Sometimes Assholes Just Get Lucky.

* atonal drone plays over a monochrome swarm of men wearing near-identical hats *

I think he takes the view that seeing as we're all in thrall to stories, he might as well weave ones that challenge the ones that prevail.

I suppose this a small step from justifying fake news on the grounds that your opponents are making hay with their own propaganda.

i thought owen hatherley's essay was pretty good: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/and-then-the-strangest-thing-happened/

in exciting news, i may watch HN over the weekend.

hadn't seen this from dlh above:

these days i def question this part -- massive distorting focus on 'stories' and media representation -- as i think what he means by "stories" goes beyond media representation, to the roots of what ideology is

at this remove i'm not even sure where my emphasis lay originally but this makes sense.

i'm feeling a bit softer towards him these days anyway. narrative/argument as part of aesthetic - massive heavy strokes of paintwork across synthesised media. we'll see whether that holds up over three hours is it of HN.

Not sure if it's my attention span but along with some of the other, more obvious gripes about Hypernormalisation, I found I'd often regularly slip into a 'Huh, whu? What are we talking about again?' state

DL - Same here. Don't think it's attention span - Curtis' style weaves in disparate elements that don't always necessarily seem to cohere to anything. Mind you he ties up the loose ends, but it can feel like an onslaught of media in search of an overarching theme IMO

guys the medium is the massage

pretty uncomfortable massage, NV ;-)

This Economist interview is pretty weak, and an odd, belated time and place for it to appear.

On the question of his relation to Frank Furedi's progression and role, (outlined in that Pandora's Docs piece upthread) there is more evidence that he aligns to a degree. Here against identity politics in what I would consider a weak argument:

Mr Curtis: I’m not denying it. But that has colonised all of politics. Those kinds of economic policies have a very good role to play. But in the 1990s that attitude spread and captured the whole of politics and at that point, they became managers. What we lost was the idea of politics where you tell a simple, powerful and romantic story of where you are going and what it’s all for.

These are questions that people do ask themselves. People ask why they can’t have a better standard of living, but they also have this thing in their heads asking what it’s all about. One of the reasons we have politics is because it gives answers to those sorts of questions. In Britain, for example, the Labour Party was born out of religion because it will give you a sense of being part of something that will go on past your own existence.

I really don't think what we need is a simple, powerful and romantic story at the moment. Evidence of politicians engaged in practical policy to help the large number of people who live in their country would help more than that. There's necessarily been a lot written on failures of democracy, the globalisation of power and neoliberalism, recently, and Adam Curtis' poles, how he sets out the tent-pegs of his theory, look less and less appealing or intellectually amusing. There's a lot here that's quite embarrassing, although I suppose some of the incoherence can be put down to it being an unedited interview (never really a very helpful approach imo).

I've just watched rough cuts of my friend Adam Curtis's imminent new series 'Can't Get You Out of My Head - An Emotional History of the Modern World'. It is brilliant and the range of stories are amazing. Mao's wife Jiang Qing and Afeni Shakur are especially great. Also...

— jon ronson (@jonronson) January 2, 2021

🚨NEW ADAM CURTIS SERIES INCOMING🚨

CAN'T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD: AN EMOTIONAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD drops on @BBCiPlayer 11 February

First look: https://t.co/7eJRH3tAhq pic.twitter.com/p8t564SR0L

— BBC Film (@BBCFilm) January 20, 2021

stoked for the bummed-out-ness

same

I have found the last couple of things a little disappointing, hope this one is a return to form.

when bitter lake came out i watched all of his stuff (from 2002 onwards) in a big binge. all starts to meld together and you forget which part belonged to which show. feel like i may have gotten to a saturation point with his style and the tactics of his arguments, and i no longer put too much stock in the "message" of his films, but this will still be better than 99% of things i'll watch this year

I think it's been said upthread somewhere, but not having the interviews holding the documentaries together has weakened them, I get what he is going with the medium is the message stuff, but it would be nice to have a thread that isn't just adam's voice.

Maybe a return to the series format will mean a return to interviews too.

there might be a few groans here and there as Curtis maybe gives that unconvincing portentous voiceover to a Burial fadeout another runout, but I'll guarantee this will still be better than anything else on the BBC rn

My friend Adam Curtis has made this trail for his imminent new series 'Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.' The trail is exclusive to this tweet and will exist nowhere else! I love the series and its wild range of stories. pic.twitter.com/jCe8FqM8H6

— jon ronson (@jonronson) January 24, 2021

it was amazing to watch that, yesterday, without knowing what it was. i mean, very clearly from the first few images and words and sound, it was adam curtis. but i couldn't tell if it was satire or parody or not. but within a minute, it was clear it was him, because although he has a crystal clear, recognizable style that's easy to emulate, no one does it as well as him. he's a great editor, it's a pleasure just to watch him do his thing

that trailer is like the perfect filmic equivalent of every guy i've ever tried to avoid getting caught in a conversation with at a lecture or art opening

i did like the putin wax dummy head tho tbf

Adam Curtis New Yorker article: Adam Curtis Explains It All (pulls face)

fairly one-sided, but some detail around his archive collection. reminded me how unhelpful i find his read on the modern world via narratives=meaning framework. still obv looking fwd to the series, but it doesn't sound like there'll be much if anything in the way of non-archive interviews (as... someone... said upthread, that was a lot of the interest in the Mayfair set etc).

There's a neatness to the way his films have skipped the Trump presidency: Hypernormalisation was released the month before he was elected and ominously ended (I think) with that slo-mo footage of Trump fuming while Seth Meyers roasted him at the White House correspondents' dinner and now we have this the month after Biden is inaugurated.

I remember him saying, in the Adam Buxton interview I think, that he didn't want to do anything on Trump because the whole world was.

tasty stuff here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eRrZifFkHA

got major adam curtis vibes from this today

A woman did her regular aerobics class out in open without realizing that a coup was taking place in #Myanmar. A Military convoy reaching the parliament can be seen behind the woman as she performs aerobics. Incredible! pic.twitter.com/gRnQkMshDe

— Aditya Raj Kaul (@AdityaRajKaul) February 1, 2021

lmao otm, hope he regrets not keeping his “women be dancing EVEN THO HISTORY IS VERY SERIOUS” powder dry all these years

(still a fan, i think)

FYI "The Century of the Self", "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", "Bitter Lake", and "HyperNormalisation" are all currently on Amazon Prime in the US.

Ooh, nice to be able to watch non-YouTube versions of these

oh they they are on UK prime as well.. I've got two days free trial left and have been struggling to find anything worth watching.

all right the huge intrusive BBC Worldwide logo in the top left is annoying af

But this was an illusion lol

it was a phantom watermark that was manipulating and controlling the viewer... to stick to fucking downloading bastard torrents in future!

From the Owen Hatherley critique mark s linked to above, on AC’s habit of presenting unsubstantiated claims - which could be found in his work as far back as The Great British Housing Disaster:

The film’s final assertion—that the policy by local authorities to re-clad badly-built prefabricated towers with layers of insulation would create its own set of technical disasters—has not been borne out over the past thirty years.

sometimes you can present unsubstantiated claims in a factual manner and still be bang on correct

I don't get as irritated by some of the famous Curtis idiosyncrasies as much as I used to, he has grown on me a bit recently.

I'm about halfway through "The Century of the Self" and digging it so far - but wanted to point out that the Betty Crocker cake mix/egg anecdote in it isn't quite true according to Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/

Also, the conversion or transfer or render or whatever of the video itself seems slightly dodgy - here's a screenshot of an "HDD SLEEP" pop-up window that appears over Wilhelm Reich's cloudbuster ("bustin' makes me feel good"): https://imgur.com/qHavVGO

Bad eggsample, Adam.

They're up! https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p093wp6h/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head

this wanker

pain that these are digital only. surely there's an episode of something with portillo in it that they can drop.

This is fabulously all over the place. 40 minutes in we’ve had Sandra Howard, the Mau Mau uprising and the Voynich Manuscript.

he didn't want to do anything on Trump because the whole world was

There are other plausible reasons

Michael X, Jiang Qing, Komarov's charred remains in an open coffin - this is fun stuff!

i have never argued that Adam C isn't an entertainer tbf

tried to pretend for 5 mins that i was in the uk using the internet. iplayer saw thru my charade. F

they had an interview with AC on BBC WS earlier where it was mentioned it will probably be on Youtube shortly if I heard it correctly.

xp

lol dig the Komorov tribute dn!

well some of them might be on YouTube for a while before they get taken down by music copyright claims

First one is OK once it gets going.

Took a shot when a bit of Burial played obv

I loved in Century of Self when Pye Corner Audio soundtracked the Russian hair salon

https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/

mirror for Americans who don't want to use a VPN

ty

OPERATION MINDFUCK!
https://imgur.com/a/k7pebfh

some more fun or at least frictive than usual form/content stuff going on in this one, like the way quite a bit of it seems to be saying "did you know there are people who believe that by making imaginative free-associative connections and organizing rapid streams of information along subliminal or emotional lines, you can affect their thoughts?" as sherlock holmes once said, yes i have heard something of the kind

audibly gasped tho at "you were willing to be quite ruthless weren't you?" "well, i-- i had to be ruthless, to be... f-free" like i wouldn't even have begrudged it if YOU HAVE TO BE RUTHLESS / TO BE FREE immediately appeared on the screen in colorful ariel

always nice to hear stars of the lid

resident jiang qing specialist is rolling her eyes at me rn

"an ongoing chaotic rush of biochemical data that flashes up and fades away... turned into stories that bear little relationship to the reality outside" you say?

think he consciously elides "but this was a fantasy" now even if he leaves innumerable opportunities for you to insert it yourself. on the other hand the dancing, "at the very same time", and "but in order to do this" are all absolutely out of control lol

(control being a fantasy)

Shouting “but this was a fantasy” while doing shots is how I’m going to watch ep2 of this tonight.

^^^ an extraordinary life

I know he will get the shit ripped out of him with all these shot playing games based around his his repetitively repeated deficiencies and amusing little peccadilloes etc, but tbf hardly anyone else on the BBC talks about what a racist hellscape the UK is nor even mentions the Kenyan Gulags of the 60's.

Agreed.

Can't wait to watch all the eps in one day and then have a flawless Adam Curtis impression for a week afterwards as I narrate everyday tasks

If you can't manage a passable Adam Curtis then shoot for Geoffrey Palmer instead as it'll do in a pinch.

Can't wait to watch all the eps in one day and then have a flawless Adam Curtis impression for a week afterwards as I narrate everyday tasks

lol

but tbf hardly anyone else on the BBC talks about what a racist hellscape the UK is nor even mentions the Kenyan Gulags of the 60's.

Which makes me hope that it's broadcast one day rather than just living on iPlayer. I'm not sure Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation ever were, but the episodic format of CGYOOMH means maybe this'll be different?

calzino otm and not limited to the bbc; all my posts itt are obv just sublimating that i watched this for five straight hours yesterday

just for the record I wasn't having a passive aggressive pop at anyone on this thread with my comment above!

<3

this show has multiple archival clips featuring fatuous plummy voices emanating from unseen figures sitting immediately behind the camera trying to impose their systems-of-control on whoever’s in front, which is another thing that feels strangely and pleasantly like autocritique

could just be a house style i guess

fave ariel so far: RECONSTRUCTING / THE SKELETON / OF THE TSAR

4 episodes in and loving it tbh. i'm not as well versed in history as the majority in this thread so lots and lots of stuff new to me in these. thought the person at the start of 'what is the people are stupid' was peter kay at first, turned out to be julia grant, and boy was her psychiatrist enraging.

the musical play out of that episode outstanding as well.

About two minutes into this my brain decided Curtis sounds fucking exactly like Kieth and I can’t make myself unhear it

it just feels like 5 hours listening to Kieth reading his focus-grouped shopping list with nothing on it or briefly apologising after fatally running you over with his tory cunt SUV.

I’m loving this so much. Thrilled to find out how quickly we can go from Ken Dodd to ISIS.

Yeah this is a blast

the Hong Kong material is powerful stuff, especially the children's choir singing a rod stewart song! but also the hypocrisy of a country that had run a colonial police state for over a century chatting shit about democracy during the handover and the shocking footage from '78 of Brit arsehole colonial thug cops giving some gentle treatment to the *natives*. On the BBC you still get lots of mealy mouthed bs reportage about HK and it wasn't that long ago some of the HK protesters were waving colonial flags.

I find Deng much more interesting than Jiang Qing, perhaps partly because I'm a sexist bastard! During the cultural revolution one of his sons was thrown from a window and seriously injured and left disabled, he was perhaps somewhat reluctantly given protection by Mao as a fellow long marcher, fellow early days revolutionary veteran etc despite becoming politically suspect, but that protection involved doing a mundane factory job and living in an obscure shithole for years. I'm not too sold on the importance of all that "unit of one" thing he has going on, but it's his show!