The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

(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.