The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

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.

I think I read your full-stop as a semicolon.

It Felt Like A Kiss watchable here (via iplayer, so probably uk only):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/it_felt_like_a_kiss/

It's available for download on archive.org (as is most of his stuff).

So the first part of this was v poor - the connections are often reaching as expected but the collage just wasn't as good as in some of his past series.

Low point was possibly the quote from msg board rant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts

I quite enjoyed this article, simultaneously trolling UK Uncut and laying bare the limitations of his approach by applying it to people who are - I assume - fans of his work.

saw the rest of the first ep and it definitely went downhill and sped up, getting very garbled. says things like 'for the first time in human history everyone believed everything would be stable forever...' it's almost as if he takes what people say at face value. or takes thinkers like ayn rand to be saying something radically new and different -- when it translates to a belief in low taxes and unregulated markets, it's not as if the rand-ness is that significant. it wasn't all bad though.

man he shd check out some of the 18th century Parliamentary debates on Income Tax and get his mind proper blown

no amusing video footage of the Earl of Bute tho

He's incredibly irritating.

Missed part 2, does that Observer article cover the same ground? i.e. californian hippies fail at recreating the earth in a greenhouse, lol who gives a shit.

i'm with hm, he's much better appreciated on the level of absolute style and take no notice of the polemicism

I don't find his style that engrossing, just seems like standard stock footage playfulness. I have not seen IFLAK tho.

He's got a really irritating habit of authoritatively and wrongly conflating a wide spectrum of views - "scientists believed", "hippies believed", "psychologists believed", "economists believed, "scientists discovered that ", "psychologists discovered that " etc - as if there was one convergent view across these groups. This invariably conveniently sets an inaccurately summarised 'philosophy' that Curtis says completely misled politicians. (Not that they are completely blameless - presumably the point of the Lewinsky footage in the first episode is that Clinton was so distracted by the Lewinsky episode that he ignored urgent messages from economists that could have saved the world from doom.

wish someone would tabulate exactly how many people i kill with each consumer electronics purchase

well y'know that sort of is how the economy works but best not to think about it too hard unless u wanna wind up making cut-up documentaries for a living

monday night is genocide night at the G household

the final thought: we have comforted ourselves that we are automatons directed by genes to avoid responsibility for our actions that have caused great suffering.

or words to that effect.

total balls. who the hell has been comforting themselves with this? (ok maybe John Gray, the dick.)

Best made episode of the series, but yeah that conclusion was ridiculous and typically wrong use of 'we' by Curtis.

ah super, a cogent argument in defence of Free Will.

Just caught up with the last episode. On balance, I felt this was spectacular bullshit, full of nonsequiturs, duplicitously vague applications of "we" and stories that deserved their own docs (esp Rwanda) and were insulted and muddled by being chucked in the blender with bits of Burial and slo-mo footage of people dancing. By the end, the alleged central thesis had become utterly meaningless. If this argument were put into a written essay it would be laughed out of a GCSE class. But hey, it sure was pretty.

There was enough material for about twenty hours of television in the last episode alone. As an exercise in explaining the course of events, it would be laughable - there's no way you can summarise the causes for the wars in Rwanda and Congo in four minutes apiece - but as an exercise in providing a set of interesting things for viewers to go and find out more about, it had a purpose. I think the overarching polemical point was fairly weakly structured but, again, it gives us something to think about when the show's over. There's not much on television that can make the same claim. Also, Pizzicato 5!

What annoyed me the most, aside for the use of 'we believed' and 'scientists thought' throughout, were the sections that seemed to bend fact to fit the theory. The idea that the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan demonstrate that organic displays of people power without hierarchy are doomed to failure, for example, ignores the fact that they were never organic and always had a hierarchy. There were too many occasions like that for it not to come across as a little dishonest, rather than misguided or constrained by format.

His name was Adam Curtis, and his programmes followed a radical new path. He would show that history, far from being something supported by facts, was something quite different. This was a radical new form of documentary, in which the very idea of not pulling a fast one was simply not a problem.

At its heart was some cool slo-mo footage of people dancing intercut with Alan Greenspan and the Pizzicato 5.

j/k - love him really

I thought this one was great and pretty entertaining. I couldn't get through a couple of his past shows. I feel like the haters don't really "get" adam curtis. Approaching his work like it's some kind of cogent political essay seems kind of silly to me.

oh, and alba lol and otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

but this was a fantasy

I never got around to saying why wk's thing about not "getting" Adam Curtis was an undeserved get-out-of-jail-free card but this parody does it for me.

some lols in this, though i'm surprised that the most obvious Curtis phrase/meme didn't pop up; just before a sudden shift in the narrative you get "and then (name of person) ..*made a discovery* ...".
there's always some random fellow somewhere who's making a discovery in Curtis stuff.