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Adam Curtis continues search for the hidden forces behind a century of chaos
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2016 16:02:58 -0400
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From: Hendricks Dewayne <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: October 21, 2016 at 2:11:23 PM EDT To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Adam Curtis continues search for the hidden forces behind a century of chaos Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com [Note: For those of you who are interested in seeing this documentary and don’t have access to the BBC’s iPlayer, then for the time being you can find it here: <https://youtu.be/dZ9DridFLCE> DLH] Adam Curtis continues search for the hidden forces behind a century of chaos The documentary-maker’s new film, HyperNormalisation, continues his quest to look beyond the ‘fake world’ to the unseen powers that have steered modern history By Tim Adams Oct 9 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/09/adam-curtis-donald-trump-documentary-hypernormalisation> In the midnight hours leading up to the first US presidential debate, I sat up watching a rough cut of Adam Curtis’s new BBC documentary, HyperNormalisation, on my laptop. I thought – rightly – that the film would provide a suitable preface to Trump’s global horror show. Like all Curtis’s documentary work, HyperNormalisation exists in a twilight between disturbing truth and restless dream. It charts an eccentric course through the choppier ideological currents of our times: the origins of Syrian apocalypse; the collapse of political middle grounds and the rise of nationalism; the meaning of Putin and Assad and the Donald himself. The film is the most ambitious statement of Curtis’s methods and his message since his 2004 series The Power of Nightmares, which prophetically examined the ways that western governments exploit fears of terrorism to exert control. It is based on the premise that as a culture, perhaps as a species, “we have become lost in a fake world and cannot see the reality outside”. Curtis suggests that the trending opposites of our times – the chatter of social media and the stricture of Islamic fundamentalism – represent a retreat from complexity into an existence that constantly reflects our desires and anxieties back to us. Meanwhile, genuine power to change lives becomes more opaque and distant, leaving large parts of the world helpless and desperate. Along the way, this being Curtis, his film offers tragicomic asides on Patti Smith and Occupy, BlackRock investments and The X-Files. Critics of Curtis’s films say that his jump-cut techniques and abrupt mood changes in somAdam Curtis continues search for the hidden forces behind a century of chaos e ways cheat on the dogged legwork of documentary journalism. As ever here, shifts in geopolitics are routinely represented by a couple of seconds of arresting footage – the banality of puppet dictators is illustrated by Colonel Gaddafi checking his hair off camera; the emergence of me-culture becomes Jane Fonda giving up on activism and donning a leotard; to explain the collapse of communism there is a punch-up in a Soviet breadline. Arguments become impressionistic, the criticism goes, an atmosphere of conspiracy is not the same as the exposure of truth. This criticism misses the point. Curtis’s films do not pretend to be definitive histories; rather they cast doubt on the possibility of that idea. They announce themselves clearly as subjective essays: “This is a story about …” is his opening mantra. His method is not only to attempt to understand the world, but to dramatise the ways we might go about understanding it. The films take the attention-deficit patterns of our 24-hour news cycle and try to impose some kind of persuasive narrative order on them – just as we try to do all the time. It is Curtis’s contention that in the constant distraction of our digital lives, we miss the larger play of ideas that shape them. His aim is to give us some clues about what those forces might look like. The day after I watched the film, still groggy from Trump and his tax returns and Miss Universe, I had lunch with Curtis to talk about HyperNormalisation. As with his most recent documentary, Bitter Lake, about the postwar history of the west in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, this will be launched exclusively on BBC iPlayer. He insists that this apparent demotion is wholly by choice – the open-ended format gives him licence to experiment and not be constrained by hour-long episodes (the current film is nearly three hours long). “My editor says theoretically I can have a video that lasts up to 10 hours,” he says, with some boyish excitement about the possibility. “I’ve done this one with chapter headings. What was lurking in the back of my brain was that it is like a novel with lots of characters and you can jump from that part to that part and trust that it is all going to come together at the end.” The model that Curtis’s films have always aspired to, he says, is that of the archetypal great American novelist, John Dos Passos, whose books he describes as “the most satisfying thing I have ever read”. The novelist pioneered a technique called “camera eye” which was, as it sounds, a rush of raw experience, and then spliced it with montage from newspapers and the lives of fictional characters. “Why I love Dos Passos is he tells political stories but at the same time he also lets you know what it feels like to live through them,” Curtis says. “Most journalism does not acknowledge that people live at least as much in their heads as they do in the world.” [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
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- Adam Curtis continues search for the hidden forces behind a century of chaos Dave Farber (Oct 21)