The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

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.