The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

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