Adam Curtis

[AhabsOtherLeg]

BBC are bizarre. They use RealMedia for most of their online video content as well... so 1998.

Some of their videos go worlwide, others don't. They seem to choose on grounds of how popular they think it will be. Obviously, they don't think anyone outside the UK will want to know about a boring, unimportant place like that place where half the world's armies are fighting right now.

[Sweejak]

Via Joe Cannon:

For an excellent background briefing on Afghnistan -- the secret history of how it happened, and what we should do now -- I strongly recommend a series of interviews with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story. Fitzgerald and Gould are fascinating speakers with a wealth of truly new information and insights. The interviews are here (#685, #683, and #680).

680
http://wfmu.org/playlists/DX#32628

683
http://wfmu.org/playlists/DX#32788

685
http://wfmu.org/playlists/DX#32946

[8bitagent]

Can't wait to see this!

I consider The Power of Nightmares one of the most visionary documentary films I've ever seen. (I get goosebumps just thinking about the first time I saw all three hours)

[cptmarginal]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2 ... art_5.html

[8bitagent]

Is there a proxy url site I can use to watch Kabul City 1-5?

[justdrew]

well, this hasn't been webripped yet but fyi, uknova is at this moment taking public signups. this at least once was a rare event. and I have some invites to thebox.bz if needed.

I doubt any advertised proxyies will work, even if you pay for access, it'd just be a scam. too easy for the beeb to identify and shut off the IPs.

this is at uknova (search: curtis)...
INCLUDES:
The Great British Housing Disaster (1984)
Pandora's Box (1992)
The Living Dead (1995)
25 Million Pounds (1996)
The Way of All Flesh (1997)
The Mayfair Set (1999)
The Century of the Self (2002)
The Power of Nightmares (2004)
The Trap (2007)
Short film from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe (2007)
Short film from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe (2009)

this show also exists by him but is not available at the moment:
An Ocean Apart (1988) - Concerning the process by which the United States was involved in the First World War

then there is also his thing:
It Felt Like A Kiss

It Felt Like A Kiss is an experimental film by Adam Curtis which served as the basis for an interactive theatre experience at the Manchester International Festival in July 2009:

Quote:
It Felt Like a Kiss tells the story of America’s rise to power in the golden age of pop, and the unforeseen consequences it had on the world and in our minds. Beginning in 1959, the show spotlights the dreams and desires that America inspired during the ’60s, when the world began to embrace the country and its culture as never before. But as this daring production unfolds across five floors, blending music with documentary and the disorientating whirl of a fairground ghost train, the audience is forced to face the dark forces that were veiled by the American dream – a dream that ultimately returns to haunt us all.

Unlike most of Curtis' other work, it does not feature his own narration but is interspersed with occasional explanatory captions.

(this is available on thebox.bz atm)

[cptmarginal]

# 7. At 04:53am on 29 Sep 2009, JBarrett847 wrote:

Ya, you can use TOR as a proxy to view the iPlayer stuff:
http://hurwi.net/blog/?p=28

Excellent blog posts btw, very interesting to read, and some fascinating videos.


# 8. At 10:57pm on 29 Sep 2009, mwenge2 wrote:

You can also try Mgeni : http://code.google.com/p/mgeni

Download Tor from here: (get "Installation Bundle for Windows")

http://www.torproject.org/

...then download Mgeni from above. Run Tor, then run Mgeni, and you will quickly be able to pick a country's flag and spoof your location.

[Nordic]

Jesus Christ, I'm watching The Century of the Self right now.

Wow.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODAyODQ0NTI=.html

Holy shit, this may be one of the most important documentaries i've ever seen.

Everybody should be forced to watch this! (that's sort of a joke but not really)

[Sweejak]

Too true, and I hope he puts this Afghan story together soon.

BTW Power of Nightmares is on Netflix.

[8bitagent]

Jesus Christ, I'm watching The Century of the Self right now.

Wow.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODAyODQ0NTI=.html

Holy shit, this may be one of the most important documentaries i've ever seen.

Everybody should be forced to watch this! (that's sort of a joke but not really)

Glad you discovered that! While Power of Nightmares is my fave, that is a close second. Really exposes the Madison Avenue mind control the elite have been orchestrating for decades.

[MacCruiskeen]

Caveat: I've never seen any of Curtis's stuff on TV, and I've never managed to sit through more than a few minutes of it at a time on YouTube.

But check this out: seven minutes from his highly-acclaimed film, The Trap:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsJ5C1dy ... r_embedded

Just appalling stuff. The worst misrepresentation of R.D. Laing's life and work I have ever seen in my life - and god knows that's saying something. It doesn't help that Curtis airily mispronounces Laing's name throughout (it's not "Lang", it's "Layng", you plummy-voiced pillock), and that's indicative of the care he takes elsewhere, for example when purporting to summarise people's ideas.

The style is the substance here: just as Curtis skips "wittily" from a home-video of a golfer teeing off to a bomb exploding in Vietnam, so he jumps from a snippet of Laing talking about love and the family (which Curtis misrepresents, quite breathtakingly, as the "bleak, paranoid" claim that there's no such thing as love at all), and flutters straight on "associatively" to Friedrich von fucking Hayek - for did they do not both take an interest in Game Theory? Well then, [cue creepy music], they were both essentially the same!! Curtis, verbatim: "What Lang (sic) and the counterculture movement (sic) in general were doing, was tearing down Britain's institutions in the name of freedom." In short: R.D. Laing = Margaret Thatcher.

Like hell. The adman's artiness of it all just makes it very much worse. Only the unrelenting and incredibly self-satisfied musical and visual overkill allows him to paper over the mile-wide cracks in his argument. If this is anything to go by, then Adam Curtis is a charlatan, and a reactionary charlatan to boot.

[Wombaticus Rex]

The distortions in his work are an important part of his work. I think it's really integral to what he's "showing" that we find out how flawed and spurious his own "research" is.

[MacCruiskeen]

The distortions in his work are an important part of his work. I think it's really integral to what he's "showing" that we find out how flawed and spurious his own "research" is.

Ah, right. I'm trying to remember which of the Loose Change masterminds it was who responded, when it was pointed out that certain parts of that film were simply not true: Ah, yes, we made that mistake DELIBERATELY so that so that people would QUESTION ALL AUTHORITY!!!

To which the only possible response is: "Well, you're extremely young and your heart is probably in the right place, but really: You're full of shit. Cut the crap. Grow up and get real."

Adam Curtis made that film in 2007; he was 52 at the time. R.D. Laing, who achieved adulthood adult at a much earlier age, had been dead since 1989 and couldn't defend himself. Adam "Reader's Digest" Curtis does not have the excuse of being a fiery adolescent. He is as unfiery as he is unyouthful. He's MTV: calculatingly scatterbrained. He's a sign o' the times.

[Wombaticus Rex]

If the Loose Change kids were as interesting and prolific as Adam Curtis, I'd give you that one. Since they're not, I'm gonna disagree.

I believed Adam Curtis when I first watched The Trap. Then I sat down with some friends and showed it to them and un-convinced myself while I was trying to convert them...fun times. Century of the Self came later for me, and covered very familiar territory so I saw his brushstrokes a lot more clearly.

I really think I'm not offering an after-the-fact Apologia for Curtis and his "mistakes" -- I think I'm talking about the central point of his art. And it is art, it's not a documentary or journalism.

Personally, I'm fine with the fact he deceives people. He's a useful catalyst, not a set of answers.

[Nordic]

I never would have learned about Edward Bernays if it weren't for The Century of the Self.

I'm assuming what he presents in that about Bernays is factually true.

It's something everyone should know about.