The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

was just searching for an appropriate thread to post something unnecessary and scurrilous about Frank Furedi and was reminded of Fizzles's beautifully accurate takedown of Curtis up there

Have you found an appropriate thread yet? Love me a bit of Furedi/LM/Spiked bashing

it was nothing, really, I was just following a trail of stuff about mental health provision in FE/HE and it inevitably led to that vicious clown

for a guy who professes to hate identity politics, Furedi sure seems to take a lot of stuff personally

bit of bored-at-work friday afternoon stuff, i retrieved that original adam curtis/frank furedi article and put it here. More intemperate than I remember it, and probably a bit off-target in a few places (i just think he misunderstands curtis's tone sometimes) but still quite a good read.

Thanks for this. Intemperate yes, but it draws interesting lines (like a Curtis film!)

Watching The Living Dead at the moment, interesting/horrifying to learn that Horst Mahler, former Red Army Faction leader who is interviewed throughout about his father's Nazism and how such discoveries fueled the student revolution, is now a committed neo-Nazi himself, though was not openly such when the documentary was filmed.

Here, he's discussing the heart of fascism with disdain: https://youtu.be/4xoM6-1SWl4?t=50m Only a couple of years later his own turn to the Far Right occurs.

helluva hell turn

heel turn dammit

dunno, hell turn fits to imo

true

I enjoyed Century of the Self at the time I saw it, but I wonder if revisiting it now I might find it too perfect and paranoid.

I find his documentaries fascinating, informative and thought provoking, and they send me off on tangents of thought I'd not have considered without their provocation, but I never really come away buying the whole larger premise.

Like, he's great as a tissue of references I want to explore further on my own recognizance.

what's he up to? he's been.. quiet for ages.

Bitter Lake was only last year, no?

I think his use of montage and music is incredible, even if I have issued with the substance at times.

shit yeah, january.

His blog hasn't been updated since 2014

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

This is the piece I wrote about The Living Dead for Film Quarterly a few years back (since I'm back, or anyway seem to be reading Ilx again). Too sleepy today to self-fisk against Fizzles or the Furedi takedown: I do say something about philosophical idealism threatening to become a problem, which is maybe a gesture in that direction? These three films (now more than 20 years old!) seem way more at the poetic end of his work than the detailed/problematic material analysis, of course.

Hullo everyone.

hello :)

*dorks cheer*

:) enjoyed the article. wd be v interested to hear your thoughts on bitter lake if/when you have the required overplus of time and energy. first thought in the light of reading it is that my focus on the authoritarian voice in curtis was disproportionate and that the solaris/mujahideen ghosts stuff is the most successful facet of bitter lake, is a conduit or vehicle for the rest of the collage, and fits very well with your description of the nature of haunting - a various bustle of material, captured and mediated memory.

bcos the strength is in the footage a pure focus/critique of the explanatory elements is far too partial. i'm not sure i'd revise anything i wrote then - apart from finishing hanging sentences :/ - but something which brought the visual elements in as the large part of an act in which the authoritarian voice participates wd be valuable.

feels a bit like a bad rabbithole for me to plunge down -- ie an attractive one -- so we shall see how disciplined i turn out to be

but glad you liked it :)

hope AC is working on a dual portrait of Trump University and the Clinton Foundation.

Mark, should I finish watching The Living Dead before reading your essay? hello btw!

Hi! I don't really know! I think the argument is clear even if you haven't seen it and I don't think spoilers are an issue :) On the other hand you may want to keep me out of your head until you've formed your own take…

New one in October: HyperNormalisation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2016/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation

where events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control - from Donald Trump to Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, and random bomb attacks. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.

Stoked for the inexplicable things and why we cannot understand them to finally be explained and understood.

'God works in mysterious ways... Here's how'

"People believed God worked in unmysterious ways -- but this was etc etc"

a radical new form of god

This got me thinking Curtis is a bit of a hero after all … and made me want to read John Dos Passos.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/09/adam-curtis-donald-trump-documentary-hypernormalisation

http://thequietus.com/articles/21077-adam-curtis-hypernormalisation-review-bbc-politics-doom

Enjoyed this for all the usual reasons - great shot after great shot e.g. Assad walking into his gigantic but bland palace, the helicopter over Cairo adorned by green laser pen lights from the crowd below (perhaps not intentionally an arresting contrast with the UFO footage earlier)...and some WTF stories e.g. the Japanese gambler who took millions at Trump's casino before being butchered by yakuza. Hated that focus on the young girls dancing in their back garden at the end tho.

All the usual argumentative holes too I guess but seemed enough in there to keep afloat.

i enjoy curtis' documentaries a lot but there seems to be an accumulating redundancy to them. if you watch several of them in a short space of time they really blend into one thing

Did anyone else turn off the new Adam Curtis before the end? If he's going to rehash themes he could at least buy the other Burial album.

Local Garda on twitter otm

Jim otm - increasingly they consist of him saying things he believes, unproven, over pretty images. His beliefs have become a sort of melange that dilutes itself each reheat.

i will probably watch this while baked and with plenty of spare hours on hand and basically just enjoy it aesthetically. but as far as taking the theses that he puts forward even remotely serious it's not going to happen.

bitter lake i think was the most nonsensical/worst of his documentaries yet though so that doesn't really augur well

wasn't exactly watching that closely but i'm not exactly sure what the thesis was. maybe some vague foreboding about the control society.

i will probably watch this while baked and with plenty of spare hours on hand and basically just enjoy it aesthetically.

this is how i've watched all of his films and it's always a great time. his attempts to make connections between various themes sometimes veer into plausibility (esp during stretches of power of nightmares), but in general they're secondary for me.

I felt like this was big great unwieldy greatest hits package. The Donald Trump/Japanese gambler story would make a great documentary just by itself.

Can't really complain too much about anything with Yanka Dyagileva on the soundtrack but the challenge for me was the shift towards the end that seemed to suggest that Surkov and Trump are engaging in a new kind of post-truth/reality politics when the rest of the film, and the rest of his films, make it clear that post-truth politics has been around since the fifties at least. Without anything else to tie it together it does seem more of a 'this happened and then this happened and then this happened' affair than usual but still enjoyable. The footage of the Egyptian helicopter lit up by laser pens isn't something I had seen before and was remarkable.

I watched this the other day and was going to mention the helicopter scene too. I had scene some footage from the ground before, but not from the pilot's perspective. Amazing sequence.

I started watching this before Tuesday and finished just now. I suspect the last half hour or so wouldn't have had much impact if I'd seen them pre-Trump victory. It plays with strong "goodbye to liberal democracy" overtones now.

In particular, it's hard to shake those images of him sitting taciturn, fixedly staring ahead as that SNL writer makes joke after joke about him at the 2011 White House correspondents' dinner.

http://i.imgur.com/YlcymTX.png

Hated that focus on the young girls dancing in their back garden at the end tho.

i didn't rly know what this was meant to convey and doubt it was anything i approve of but i did like the rhythm of it in the same way i v much liked the dancing motif in bitter lake, a movie i too have forgotten the point of but thought was top-of-game montage. this had in general less interesting footage -- seemed like a much greater percentage of mood shots of office buildings, highways, snowy trees, blinking computers, jane fonda etc.. lots more talking heads this time too, tho at least they are usually vintage. (loved the controlled, sarcastic fury of the beame-era nyc labor leader when asked whether the municipal workers' unions weren't being greedy too; felt what reagan would call "clean hatred" at the sight of timothy leary explaining that politics are for olds.)

thought this was one of his better ones tho. still great stuff in there. the egyptian helicopter yeah. various eerie uses of bare space, not just in assad's palace but at press conferences, tv interviews -- sets. gaddafi's facial expressions are haunting: never in control. (similar shots of trump.) and that we-need-new-stories thesis, crypto-fascist as it may or may not be, works better here than it did in e.g. the trap, or probably even bitter lake, since so much of this is about various forces, both deliberately and not, colluding to create an uninterpretable world? i guess? whether the world has ever been fruitfully interpreted is another question

his style does make me feel idk close to the world in some way. bathing in moments. and even tho it is a polemical assemblage it is so sloppy and digressive and always not-quite-persuasive i don't feel suffocated by his ideas. doomy montage that's fun to watch high is of course its own kind of escapism but it does feel like an antidote to the relentless constructed clarity of facebook-era media.

the "supercut" of pre-9/11 disaster-movie crowds staring up past the camera in horror went on so long it became both funny and creepy. even if what seemed like a majority of it was just from independence day.