The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

Haven't seen any of this but sounds like a couple of bones / nits I'd also have picked. For Thornley presumably what it was was cosmically hilarious when Oswald gained such um.. notoriety.

Delightful detail on the cover of the Playboy magazine shown in ep 1: 'Vladimir Nabokov's sexiest new work since Lolita'

and 'people thought the bavarian illuminati wanted to undermine democracy but in fact they were utopians trying to replace religion with reason' - these two goals are not at all contradictory. - sure but one doesn't automatically imply the other, so distinction still useful?

picking up on an earlier thread, oscar, Astrid Proll actually spent some time on the lam in the UK if you didn't know, so that could have been written by someone who'd met her! Or, who knows, the woman herself, in a fit of self-irony?

and 'people thought the bavarian illuminati wanted to undermine democracy but in fact they were utopians trying to replace religion with reason' - these two goals are not at all contradictory. sure but one doesn't automatically imply the other, so distinction still useful?

The "but" sounds like it implies the latter aim necessarily precludes having the former.

yeah; also my paraphrase missed out on the key curtis detail that it wasn't "in fact " but "in reality".

The guy who wrote the blog I linked has written this up further here.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/in-defence-of-adam-curtis

For the more literal-minded viewer, though, his rooting of contemporary systems of control in colonialism becomes a point of frustration, as he appears to argue that colonial administrative techniques were the decisive origin of computational rationality, but this is to miss the point. The footage he uses functions as evidence of how these systems rhyme historically. Both cases involve the circumscription and prediction of behaviour, both involve the control of restive populations, frequently for the purposes of labour. His discussion of the British interest in understanding the ‘African mind’ ultimately derives from Aime Cesaire’s 1950 Discourse on Colonialism: techniques of oppression and exploitation deployed at the periphery will return to the metropole.

this moment was a huge rmde from me, and i don’t think “rhymes” is a very brilliant way of saving it

The longer and more wide-ranging they become, the more the films of Adam Curtis have turned into a ‘Rorschach test for people to project their own professional anxieties upon’, as one person put it. Professional historians pick him up for glaring errors in detail, or for presenting histories that do not even come close to the academic consensus.

lol at historians pointing out historical inaccuracies as “projecting their professional anxieties”

That is totally otm. On twitter I argued with a couple who wanted experts, and that is just basic point missing.

if as the writer suggests every one watched his docs as a pynchon novels without the funny names that would make sense, but the fact that he’s not an expert on history doesn’t shield him from criticism when he’s making docs about history filled with historical inaccuracies

watching Curtis docs in parallel with historians criticisms and “well actually” is the only way to come away having learned anything imo

There are other ways to get at these documentaries but to talk about inaccuracies is just lol when Curtis trades in playing with generalities.

Anything that treats huge swathes of time, geography, ideologies and schools of thought in a few sentences and some video isn't going to be accurate and it seems to sort of miss the point to worry about it too much. It's a bit like reading foucault, you need to take the "history" aspect with a grain of salt and just enjoy the ride. If you want the straight dope about some aspect of the content then you can do your own research

based on the shows i've seen in the past, he's generally making documentaries about collective dreams more than about history

They mine histories but yes this is not historical, as such.

We would not be talking about them if they were, either

Well he makes sweeping peremptory statements about history

That NHS head psychiatrist guy and the the manner in which he talks to Julia Grant, what an evil supercilious prick and his voice omg

I agree that his approach is very similar to the Foucaultian archaeology. It's very much taking a trip to a foreign and lost past to uncover the seeds of today's systems and rationalizations.

Adam Curtis take! The BBC has a £3.6 bn budget but we are only allow one solitary archivist-auteur, as a treat. Why aren't they commissioning far more in the way of efforts to make sense of the present? And not just by solitary white men of a certain age.

— Dan Hind (@danhind) February 21, 2021

Otm - we need talented filmmakers that have a go at explaining things. They needn't be academics like Tooze tho'.

Wallace sought liberation through technology, freedom to be an individual. *ambient music plays* *shot of hallway* What he did not know was that the forces the trousers would unleash would represent only a new and more sinister form of social control. *grainy shot of penguin*

— Greg Афиногенов (@athenogenes) February 21, 2021

xp otm, its not like there isn't a history of this. the black audio film collective were making films like this long before curtis and they didn't do that annoying smug voice

i feel bad now for comparing the BAC to adam curtis

I've not seen a film by them, will have a look.

mostly associated with john akromfrah now

You all could've warned me the last one was 2 hours long!

that threw me for a loop! I'll have to go back and give the last episode another shot because I fell asleep during the first hour. It felt like the last one could be a standalone documentary itself, but I didn't watch to the end.

Exciting to be in a new world where it's impossible to even know what the acceptable Yer Boyfriend opinion on Adam Curtis is

— Stefan Bielik (@prstskrzkrk) February 22, 2021

if as the writer suggests every one watched his docs as a pynchon novels without the funny names that would make sense

This feels a bit like "if as the writer suggested every one watched Scorsese mobster films as critiques of masculinity"; yes I'm sure plenty of people take Curtis docs as plain history but those ppl are being dumb, his shtick is so upfront about that not being the case.

brings to mind Alan Sokal attempting to dissect Deleuze as unscientific

Hypernormalislandisation pic.twitter.com/bUET3o7wYD

— TheIainDuncanSmiths (@TheIDSmiths) February 22, 2021

have been watching pandora's box after finishing can't get you out of my head and the scope is so much more limited, so there's less to complain about from an accuracy point of view. hasn't got his aesthetic down yet though, and of course there's no burial on the soundtrack

it's very funny to me that this thing is getting any kind of mainstream discussion/attention in your country; if this showed in the US on PBS, no one would notice

otoh adam curtis does get covered in prestige media in the US

he's sort of niche famous globally isn't he? in the anglosphere anyway. and not particularly more famous in the uk than he is in say north america afaict.

there isn't really a US equivalent that i can think of. maybe john wilson? its a very different thing that he's doing of course.

Ken Burns

lol, i would love to hear a ken burns take on the adam curtis schtick

montage of found images set to Appalachian fiddle music

i think although obviously they're quite difft frederick wiseman's films are far more challenging and interesting than curtis

there was a piece in Vice where I think Brooker interviews him, despite liking his work (not fucking Brookers, no!) I can't think of anything much more insufferable. I would probably consider him as big a tosser as Brooker if I'd have clicked on it and read it but he doesn't seem to have much interesting to say outside of his work anyway, well based on an interview I heard on WS where he was pedalling all that usual hackneyed polarisation of politics bollox beloved of most libs.

So far I think episodes 1 and 4 are best. 2 and 3 are kind of lists in search of an overarching point and 5 is all over the shop even by his standards. 1 and 4 both focus on a tendency that the left is broadly hostile towards - individualism and apolitical activism, respectively - and gives them their due, explains where they came from, while still pointing at how they can end in catastrophe.

it's very funny to me that this thing is getting any kind of mainstream discussion/attention in your country; if this showed in the US on PBS, no one would notice

Think you might be trapped in the same bubble I was in when I logged onto the iplayer page expecting this to be the featured item - turns out it wasn't even on the front page!

It was a featured item for me, presumably because of personalisation.

but really the operative word here was depersonalization [segues into stars of the lid track]

sorry that was piss poor!

So far I think episodes 1 and 4 are best. 2 and 3 are kind of lists in search of an overarching point and 5 is all over the shop even by his standards.

Yeah that's the one - lots of interesting stuff in there as usual but just moving from story to story with no sense of direction.

damn, i wanna see these but i don't have a UK TV licence and don't want to get one. can you buy/rent it or something somehow?

you know they don't know whether or not you use iplayer?

also that if the tv license man comes round you have no reason to let him in?