The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

this wanker

pain that these are digital only. surely there's an episode of something with portillo in it that they can drop.

This is fabulously all over the place. 40 minutes in we’ve had Sandra Howard, the Mau Mau uprising and the Voynich Manuscript.

he didn't want to do anything on Trump because the whole world was

There are other plausible reasons

Michael X, Jiang Qing, Komarov's charred remains in an open coffin - this is fun stuff!

i have never argued that Adam C isn't an entertainer tbf

tried to pretend for 5 mins that i was in the uk using the internet. iplayer saw thru my charade. F

they had an interview with AC on BBC WS earlier where it was mentioned it will probably be on Youtube shortly if I heard it correctly.

xp

lol dig the Komorov tribute dn!

well some of them might be on YouTube for a while before they get taken down by music copyright claims

First one is OK once it gets going.

Took a shot when a bit of Burial played obv

I loved in Century of Self when Pye Corner Audio soundtracked the Russian hair salon

https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/

mirror for Americans who don't want to use a VPN

ty

OPERATION MINDFUCK!
https://imgur.com/a/k7pebfh

some more fun or at least frictive than usual form/content stuff going on in this one, like the way quite a bit of it seems to be saying "did you know there are people who believe that by making imaginative free-associative connections and organizing rapid streams of information along subliminal or emotional lines, you can affect their thoughts?" as sherlock holmes once said, yes i have heard something of the kind

audibly gasped tho at "you were willing to be quite ruthless weren't you?" "well, i-- i had to be ruthless, to be... f-free" like i wouldn't even have begrudged it if YOU HAVE TO BE RUTHLESS / TO BE FREE immediately appeared on the screen in colorful ariel

always nice to hear stars of the lid

resident jiang qing specialist is rolling her eyes at me rn

"an ongoing chaotic rush of biochemical data that flashes up and fades away... turned into stories that bear little relationship to the reality outside" you say?

think he consciously elides "but this was a fantasy" now even if he leaves innumerable opportunities for you to insert it yourself. on the other hand the dancing, "at the very same time", and "but in order to do this" are all absolutely out of control lol

(control being a fantasy)

Shouting “but this was a fantasy” while doing shots is how I’m going to watch ep2 of this tonight.

^^^ an extraordinary life

I know he will get the shit ripped out of him with all these shot playing games based around his his repetitively repeated deficiencies and amusing little peccadilloes etc, but tbf hardly anyone else on the BBC talks about what a racist hellscape the UK is nor even mentions the Kenyan Gulags of the 60's.

Agreed.

Can't wait to watch all the eps in one day and then have a flawless Adam Curtis impression for a week afterwards as I narrate everyday tasks

If you can't manage a passable Adam Curtis then shoot for Geoffrey Palmer instead as it'll do in a pinch.

Can't wait to watch all the eps in one day and then have a flawless Adam Curtis impression for a week afterwards as I narrate everyday tasks

lol

but tbf hardly anyone else on the BBC talks about what a racist hellscape the UK is nor even mentions the Kenyan Gulags of the 60's.

Which makes me hope that it's broadcast one day rather than just living on iPlayer. I'm not sure Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation ever were, but the episodic format of CGYOOMH means maybe this'll be different?

calzino otm and not limited to the bbc; all my posts itt are obv just sublimating that i watched this for five straight hours yesterday

just for the record I wasn't having a passive aggressive pop at anyone on this thread with my comment above!

<3

this show has multiple archival clips featuring fatuous plummy voices emanating from unseen figures sitting immediately behind the camera trying to impose their systems-of-control on whoever’s in front, which is another thing that feels strangely and pleasantly like autocritique

could just be a house style i guess

fave ariel so far: RECONSTRUCTING / THE SKELETON / OF THE TSAR

4 episodes in and loving it tbh. i'm not as well versed in history as the majority in this thread so lots and lots of stuff new to me in these. thought the person at the start of 'what is the people are stupid' was peter kay at first, turned out to be julia grant, and boy was her psychiatrist enraging.

the musical play out of that episode outstanding as well.

About two minutes into this my brain decided Curtis sounds fucking exactly like Kieth and I can’t make myself unhear it

it just feels like 5 hours listening to Kieth reading his focus-grouped shopping list with nothing on it or briefly apologising after fatally running you over with his tory cunt SUV.

I’m loving this so much. Thrilled to find out how quickly we can go from Ken Dodd to ISIS.

Yeah this is a blast

the Hong Kong material is powerful stuff, especially the children's choir singing a rod stewart song! but also the hypocrisy of a country that had run a colonial police state for over a century chatting shit about democracy during the handover and the shocking footage from '78 of Brit arsehole colonial thug cops giving some gentle treatment to the *natives*. On the BBC you still get lots of mealy mouthed bs reportage about HK and it wasn't that long ago some of the HK protesters were waving colonial flags.

I find Deng much more interesting than Jiang Qing, perhaps partly because I'm a sexist bastard! During the cultural revolution one of his sons was thrown from a window and seriously injured and left disabled, he was perhaps somewhat reluctantly given protection by Mao as a fellow long marcher, fellow early days revolutionary veteran etc despite becoming politically suspect, but that protection involved doing a mundane factory job and living in an obscure shithole for years. I'm not too sold on the importance of all that "unit of one" thing he has going on, but it's his show!

lol i’m into the individualism stuff tbh. actually suspect that content/thesiswise this is his best since at least TCOS (in which tho i could have sworn he claims psychologists “discovered” in the 20s and 30s what he claims this time they “discovered” in the 80s) (which is actually like, in shakespeare lol) tho i dunno if there’s as much eye candy as (the kinda muddled) bitter lake. looking forward to eps 5 and 6 as to a birthday party.

just been intensely moved by a bright eyes cue. may need to be taken out and shot

closing montage in e4 of iraqi militias / fictional klansmen / english pastoralism v good.

sorry, e5.

yes that was good, also farage + empire myths = oxycontin.

I can't remember which writer it was who suggested Jiang's power was very formidable but still somewhat exaggerated at her trial because the die was cast and the CCP had decided to deliver an Empress Dowager Cixi type figure to the people to cop for the murderous excesses of the cultural revolution and the mask fitted her perfectly. She might have been ruthless but not ruthless enough to win at the game of political factionalism.

The last episode is superb.

watched 1.5 episodes so far and have to say I am really enjoying it so far, being back in a full-length series and including more archive interviews seems to be the key here, everything he did in the 2010s seemed a bit too busy and unfocused, but this really seems to be a return to form

it's definitely been an improved experience on some of his weaker stuff in recent years. I think I'm going to watch it all again.

chris de burgh loving jihadist is the adam curtis content i crave

Not seen yet but good rev

arguably a bit spoily https://t.co/PLwHHZ8Ltx

— joolsd (@joolsd) February 12, 2021

best since the mayfair set is where i ended up too.