Adam Curtis continues search for the hidden forces behind a century of chaos

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> 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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