The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

two thumbs up

Post first two EPs I really like how he pushes his own version of a conspiracy theory in these strands, while discussing conspiracies of all kinds. He has always done a form of this, it's part of the appeal while a high-wire act to actually not sound too nuts.

Can't say I liked the montage sequences with that kind of BBC Radio 6 soundtrack in the first EP. Elsewhere I did lol at how often he used Aphex Twin, that it hasn't been killed by overuse shows how good a record it is.

Where this film really stands out on is the stuff on China but also the women in it. I don't know whether he has centred women quite in this way before?

Surprised to hear Cigarettes After Sex at the end of ep 3. I know some people on here really took against them, who can say why. It’s only by hearing them and The Raveonettes in back to back episodes that I realised how similar they sound.

Raveonettes was a real "uh huh, ILX is not going to be happy with this one" moment for me

Having watched the first ep I thought it seemed almost a rapprochement with the forces of individualism - all these case studies he brings up, some of whom are obviously not in line with his politics, are portrayed not as the harbringers of a deadly individualism to come but as arguments against our current incapacity for change. Like he's less interested in what Xing or crazy objectivist dude meant politically and more in their faith that the world can, and should, be changed.

But of course I'm behind everyone on watching these and the discourse has moved on, alas, alas.

no i'm right there with you :) i finished the first one last night.

Watched the first one this weekend — my first experience with his work — and was kinda disappointed; reviews had led me to expect something a little more Parallax Corporation. I'm intrigued enough by some of the stories he's telling that I'll watch at least one more, though.

daniel_rf otm, more than any of his other stuff i think this successfully portrays a figure/ground relationship between “individualism”/“collectivism”, or “control”/“surrender”, that is more promising than a story about (let alone argument for) one opposed set or the other.

agreed. and also to daniel’s point about “current inability to change” - i think ensuring the “paralysis” element is used to distnguish the age we live in, brought into meangiful context by climate change, helps here as well.

https://www.tomscott.com/infinite-adam-curtis/

Yay "Where Were You" by the Mekons

Baader-Meinhoff are such a bummer.

yeah B-M were a hideous bunch of arseholes

It's terrifying to think of now, but my mum's take is that at the time she and lots of young ppl in Germany were pretty sympathetic towards B-M because the people they were fighting were The Establishment and a good percentage of them had indeed been in roles of power and leadership during the Third Reich. The trauma of what that group set in motion set radical politics in Germany back decades.

I think even Curtis himself has few insights into ppl like them or Michael X beyond "oh no".

i grew up in a small village in the middle of the english countryside and the first graffiti i can ever remember seeing was at the bottom of our road where the building that housed a neighbours pigeons had 'FREE ASTRID PROLL' in huge white letters painted on the side of it. i asked my mum who astrid proll was and she claimed not to know. v weird.

You suspect your mum did it?

no. i am surprised that anyone in my village would sympathise with leftist terrorists, or if they did that the graffiti would be left up for years.

one thing I'll say about AC's use of music is that I can never get enough Stars Of The Lid

I'm only on ep 3.
Did people in America in the 50s/60s really go to their doctors with feelings of anxiety and fear? It feels like it's quite a modern thing to see your physician about your feelings/mental health (but I am not in America)?

the stereotype in my head is that when they did it was male authority figures sending women to the doctor to get “medicated” in order to curb whatever behaviour was deemed insufficiently obeisant but that type of thing may have opened up a space for legit and useful therapy idk someone should probably post who actually knows lol

I haven’t got that far yet but didn’t people used to get prescribed ‘mother’s little helper’, ie Valium, for just that, aka their ‘nerves’?

x-post

Yeah this was in the bit about Valium being invented. I guess I'm wondering which came first, the drugs or "recognising" it as a medical problem. I think it's just the choice of wording he used that sounded a bit, errr, simplistic. "Doctors were telling him about people from the suburbs coming to them with vague feelings of anxiety and fear - something the doctors didn't know how to deal with".

Oh wow Adam Curtis is on Cameo now pic.twitter.com/Z8HvewFeyx

— John Tucker (@johntuckerart) February 16, 2021

two episodes and finding this good watching

One episode in and I concur with the general mood, great watching despite the sweeping generalisations (which i take as a kind of authorial tic rather than a sincere statement of belief) and other handwaving. Two things from ep 1: it wasn't an 'extraordinary coincidence' that Kerry Thornley met Lee Harvey Oswald; 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.

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.