The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

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?