The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

:) 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.

also i realize found footage has always been around but the smartphone explosion means that i'd now probably believe someone who argued that there's no excuse anymore for making movies with anything else.

loved the controlled, sarcastic fury of the beame-era nyc labor leader when asked whether the municipal workers' unions weren't being greedy too

This guy was great! "I wanna wish them well, the slobs"

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.

Having watched this in full last weekend then re-watched various bits & pieces though the week, completely agree - the notion of a carefully constructed reality suddenly collapsing in on itself (with attendant suspicion of chickens coming home to roost) is obv. going to feel pretty resonant just now (whether or not it turns out to be the most accurate or helpful way of framing things in the long run).

And yeah, the White House dinner footage... it's no doubt part of the format/conventions of these things, but I was impressed just how shit SNL dude's jokes were (with possible exception of the fox-on-the-head line).

There was a lot use of horror aesthetics in this one I thought, which is not something I'd associated AC with strongly with before (full disclosure: this is the 1st new AC thing I've watched since getting off the bus after Machines Of Loving Grace, having originally got on the bus with Century Of The Self).

One of the most effective bits for me was right near the start, where you get the shot of the neat, tidy, well-stocked kitchen and then the camera slowly pans across to reveal the pools of blood on the floor. Of course, the impact is hammered home by AC on the voiceover going on about 'dark forces are returning to pierce the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake world' or suchlike... but I reckon the point would still come across without the voiceover queues.
The section where he's cross-cutting between the Jane Fonda workout video and the footage of the Elena/Nicolae Ceausescu executions I found pretty fkn disturbing as well.

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.
Yup this is otm - the audience realises early on that at some point he's going cut to the actual 9/11 footage, and then the mounting dread comes from trying to anticipate exactly how/when it's going to happen, with the lengthiness just dragging out the dread. Again classic horror aesthetics.

All these reviews make me want to give this a second chance - love Adam Curtis but I find he offers a lot of dread without ever really offering ways out. Can be the epitome of bleak.

Never heard of Adam Curtis before this thread a couple weeks ago, but I found HyperNormalisation to be an amazing piece.

It kind of reminded me of this movie I saw back in college.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_or_the_Discovery_of_Television_Among_the_Bees

Interview with Curtis on Chapo Trap House:

https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-65-no-future-feat-adam-curtis-121216

i still haven't watched HyperN, mainly bcz i don't want to undermine my default troll, that curtis is actually right abt everything and recent events have swept the ground from under his critics' feets

it won't do anything to undermine that, in fact it will probably reinforce it

listened to that on the way to work this morning - really good interview, and curtis' final words have haunted me all day

really need to get around to watching hypernormality but i feel like it might be more grim reality than i'm willing to face right now

what were they?

couldn't make it through hypernormality, bleak/grim

a quick precis of his closing comments, after talking a lot about how the left is afraid of talking about taking real power and making real change: people need a big hopeful picture to change things on a massive scale, but liberals are wary of mass movements after the horrors of germany and russia in the 20s. massive change is thrilling but scary because it can erase security and remove certainty.

the question is: do you really want change becuase many of you in the centre might find yourself in an uncertain world where you lose a lot of things or do you just want to change thing a little bit, like banks are held to account of identities are respected but basically the world remains the same?

there are millions who do, right now, want change and they feel they have nothing to lose. currently they're being led by the right and so society may change in lots of ways you don't want.

to change things you've got to engage with the massive forces of power but you might personally lose a lot in the process but in doing so change the world for the better.

clearly he put it a bit better than i did - it's worth a listen, honestly

Another interview:

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation-interview-54468

Going at it from the artist perspective

https://twitter.com/johnthorntonjr/status/808424653094060032

The thing he said about the left never talking about power expressed something that has been on my mind for years.

I think the Bernie movement is a step in the right direction, but even there I think there was a failure of a lot of people to engage with what politics and power really are. That's why I think so many people were so dumbfounded/heartbroken/aghast to find out that the DNC was deliberately undermining him. I mean, of course they were, and did it matter? The whole party was openly behind Clinton and Sanders came out of nowhere. TBC, I think Sanders DOES understand power very well and knew what he was doing, but this whole "what? it wasn't fair?! I'm going home!" attitude bespeaks an avoidance of engaging with how power operates. What's good is that I see some real organizing coming in its wake.

And although I like to think of myself as on the left rather than liberal, I'm still definitely very much in that center he's talking about in my reality -- an affluent, live-and-let-live guy with a family whose attachment to belief systems is somewhat weak and who deep down fears losing what he has.

fwiw what he was saying about liberal mistrust of movements and big ideas also reminded me a lot of this:
http://utopiainfourmovements.com/about/
which was pretty good though not quite on Adam Curtis's level

That's why I think so many people were so dumbfounded/heartbroken/aghast to find out that the DNC was deliberately undermining him. I mean, of course they were, and did it matter? The whole party was openly behind Clinton and Sanders came out of nowhere.

otm -- this is the 2016 pol argument i most frequently ended up having w people younger than me (at work) -- them describing some intolerable malfeasance of the DNC's and me saying look "entrenched power" means you can expect to find them in trenches -- but these people are 20 and i had chalked it up to that. not sure it's the same as the occupy thing, which was a problem of experience not inexperience -- not being 20 but being squatted on too heavily by the 20c. curtis does basically say that, and he's sort of right to say that occupy only had ideas about process and not content, but it's matt cristman who really nails it imo: the faith of occupy was that content would arise from process. i agree that it failed badly (except that it built networks etc etc). it was not necessarily that no one could agree on anything but that even their points of agreement, which existed, somehow could not emerge. curtis is i think sharp to draw a line between occupy's temporary-autonomous-zone-esque idea of a "space" whose different rules would finally allow the revelation to come + the hippie idea of cyberspace. btw tho we'd all recoil from the idea of another steve jobs movie he is the perfect prism imo thru which to examine the ideological failure (or if you like "journey") of an entire generation. somebody around here may have said the same recently. maybe the sorkin movie did this, idk. gonna put a wild bet on no.

mark s yeah hyper-n has the usual complement of stretches and hold-on-a-secs but as a whole i doubt it will do any damage to yr working theory at all. fizzles' long post above itt is v good crit but these days i def question this part -- massive distorting focus on 'stories' and media representation -- as i think what he means by "stories" goes beyond media representation, to the roots of what ideology is (protoindoeuropean root of "story" iirc is "to see"), and i do think i agree that if the left cannot (again) produce a different way for people to imagine the future they are going to be destroyed very soon by a 21c right whose own trusty imagination is about to produce -- well like tesla sez, man-made horrors beyond your comprehension. (i got that from halsey's instagram.)

i still haven't watched HyperN, mainly bcz i don't want to undermine my default troll, that curtis is actually right abt everything and recent events have swept the ground from under his critics' feets

― mark s, Monday, 12 December 2016 15:57 (yesterday) Permalink

the post-election edition of the film comment podcast had a good chunk of this, with one critic in particular (don't remember who) saying "ahh, Curtis drives me nuts, he's just obviously so wrong but also i can't believe how right HyperNormalization is"