The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

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.

might do a version of the Lewinsky "Suzanne" bit but with "Suzanne" slowed down to the same rate as the actual footage

A lot of his appeal seems to overlap with Malcolm Gladwell's - cool little stories about incredibly important people and things you probably haven't come across before, eg "In a laboratory in southern California in 1963 an eccentric young scientist named xxx made a remarkable discovery." I'm sure if you didn't know who Ayn Rand was, for example, then the first part of Loving Grace was a blast if only for telling her story vividly. But Gladwell, though prone to false connections and oversimplifications himself, has way more narrative focus. And the downside of this technique is that the more the viewer knows about a particular subject, the shabbier and more misleading this skimreading of it seems. It was the Rwanda section of Loving Grace which made me lose my patience with Curtis because it's something I know about and he was mauling it.

what did he get wrong abt rwanda?

(i think it's obvi that he's giving very partial versions of events in every case)

n e ways thought the third ep was the best thing he's done in a minute

But this was a fantasy!

hahaha

"but in reality!"

came here to post this

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3272903211813223143

classic material

I haven't seen that series. Should I start from the beginning?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a strange and brilliant phd student in cambridge made a fascinating discovery.

Going the Full-Carmody: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/09/the_curse_of_tina.html

psyched. read the first bit while listening to floyd cramer's 'on the rebound', to get ready.

Why we have become so possessed by the ideology of our age that we cannot think outside it.

except i, adam curtis

Ha. Obviously undeterred by The Loving Trap-style mockery, he's going the "full Curtis" here:

It is a rollicking saga that involves all sorts of things not normally associated with think tanks - chickens, pirate radio, retired colonels, Jean Paul Sartre, Screaming Lord Sutch, and at its heart is a dramatic and brutal killing committed by one of the very men who helped bring about the resurgence of the free market in Britain.

No wonder he gets so many commissions if his pitches are that good. It's a well-told story. I knew the Shivering Sands story already but didn't know much about Smedley.

"I want to suggest that the Hug has become a part of the modern problem of not being able to imagine any alternative to the world of today. The Hug is no longer liberating, it is restraining"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/10/the_curse_of_tina_part_two.html

aha, the killer final conclusion:

"If we can be taught to hug we can just as easily learn to march and chant."

well I'm seeing Loving Grace tom'w

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace

anyone else want to weigh in?

IIRC the consensus around here was that it was even less convincing than usual but still very entertaining.