The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

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.