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for the longest time i thought adam curtis was the adam ruins everything guy that guy is good
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Feb 12, 2021 19:20
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Victory Position posted:our Ken Burns I'm sure most ppl here have seen The Civil War series but if you haven't watched his The West it's also really good
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Feb 12, 2021 19:34
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watched the first episode its GOOD and im HERE FOR IT now i just gotta get the other 5
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Feb 12, 2021 19:36
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Zeno-25 posted:I'm sure most ppl here have seen The Civil War series but if you haven't watched his The West it's also really good But don't let that be your only exposure to this subject because Burns also has the narrator say poo poo like "Robert E Lee disapproved of slavery"
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Feb 12, 2021 19:41
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Adam Curtis presents FARK.com
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Feb 12, 2021 19:43
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Bootleg Trunks posted:Adam Curtis presents FARK.com lol just remembered that the fark guy ran for statewide office in kentucky
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Feb 12, 2021 19:58
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MeatwadIsGod posted:But don't let that be your only exposure to this subject because Burns also has the narrator say poo poo like "Robert E Lee disapproved of slavery" Lol what? I would have remembered this
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Feb 12, 2021 20:07
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-we-need-new-civil-war-documentary-180971996/quote:The first mention of slavery is not until six minutes into the film, at which time it is invoked with McCullough erroneously stating that Robert E. Lee “disapproved” of slavery, a fact easily challenged by the fact that Lee fought to inherit enslaved people who his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, wanted to free. Soon after, the first African-American is mentioned: a short vignette about the writer, activist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, referred to as a “runaway boy” even though Douglass was about 20 years old when he escaped slavery. After a very cursory four-minute discussion (a full minute less than the time devoted to the Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack), slavery—and the enslaved themselves—are rarely discussed.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:11
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Zeno-25 posted:Lol what? I would have remembered this https://youtu.be/KlseQlnk3R8?t=365 Efb
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Feb 12, 2021 20:14
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part 1 was ok
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Feb 12, 2021 20:28
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Oh man. Curtis reminding me of western leftists criticizing efforts to rescue and repatriate the Boat People got me super mad again. loving hell.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:28
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yeah ken burns also did the vietnam war doc where america is portrayed as misstepping and oopsie-ing into a tragic war instead of as obvious american aggression that was lopsided as all hell and very intentional
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Feb 12, 2021 20:33
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And then, something else happened
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Feb 12, 2021 20:33
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quote:Inspired by the 2016 apex of populism—the political ideology which presents The People as morally good, and The Elite as morally bad—the underlying aim of the series is to show why the critics of Donald Trump and Brexit were unable to offer an alternative vision for the future. lol nah
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Feb 12, 2021 20:36
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QUEER FRASIER posted:“Suddenly, everything changed” "And then, things became very strange"
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Feb 12, 2021 20:37
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Has Curtis ever suggested a solution to all of these problems he's bringing up? Like a new kind of ideology?
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Feb 12, 2021 20:38
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THS posted:yeah ken burns also did the vietnam war doc where america is portrayed as misstepping and oopsie-ing into a tragic war instead of as obvious american aggression that was lopsided as all hell and very intentional i think they also had like 3 vietcong testimonies compared to the roster of US soldiers
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Feb 12, 2021 20:39
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Honest Thief posted:i think they also had like 3 vietcong testimonies compared to the roster of US soldiers For a production made in the US, that's more than I expected.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:40
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Eric Cantonese posted:Has Curtis ever suggested a solution to all of these problems he's bringing up? Like a new kind of ideology? no and he self-describes as a neo-con so the feverdream found-footage musical dance montages while he gives the weedtakes hes been cultivating for 20 years are p much fine
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Feb 12, 2021 20:45
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THS posted:yeah ken burns also did the vietnam war doc where america is portrayed as misstepping and oopsie-ing into a tragic war instead of as obvious american aggression that was lopsided as all hell and very intentional
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Feb 12, 2021 20:48
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bird. posted:no and he self-describes as a neo-con so the feverdream found-footage musical dance montages while he gives the weedtakes hes been cultivating for 20 years are p much fine Wikipedia posted:People often accuse me of being a lefty. That's complete rubbish. If you look at The Century of the Self, what I'm arguing is something very close to a neoconservative position because I'm saying that, with the rise of individualism, you tend to get the corrosion of the other idea of social bonds and communal networks, because everyone is on their own. Well, that's what the neoconservatives argue, domestically. [...] If you ask me what my politics are, I'm very much a creature of my time. I don't really have any. I change my mind over different issues, but I am much more fond of a libertarian view. I have a more libertarian tendency [...] What's astonishing in our time is how the Left here has completely failed to come up with any alternatives, and I think you may well see a lefty libertarianism emerging because people will be much more sympathetic to it, or just a libertarianism, and out of that will come ideas. And I don't mean "localism".[2] loving hell.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:51
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How old is that quote though? I feel like he's been increasingly critical of individualism over time. Plus he opens this new series quoting fuckin' David Graeber.
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Feb 12, 2021 20:54
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all im saying is i dont need adam curtis' manifesto i'm on his bullshit for his descriptions not his prescriptions
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Feb 12, 2021 20:58
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some people have a gift for painting a picture and breaking out of banal and trite perceptions of the world taken for granted, and i dont think i'd agree with werner herzogs political philosophy if i knew it its probably real hosed up but his documentaries are still p magical
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Feb 12, 2021 21:03
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TrixRabbi posted:How old is that quote though? I feel like he's been increasingly critical of individualism over time. Plus he opens this new series quoting fuckin' David Graeber. 2012, to be fair. https://web.archive.org/web/20140116091402/http://filmcomment.com/entry/interview-adam-curtis I go on Curtis binges whenever he comes out with something, but I do feel like what he ends up doing best is reinforcing this feeling that nothing can be done. I don't expect him to have all the answers, but there's not even a hint of a way forward after I watch his stuff and I just want a drink or two as I process it all.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:04
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Eric Cantonese posted:loving hell. when is that quote from because it doesn't describe his project or his oblique discussion of his projects in any way in the last like 5 or 6 years.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:08
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bird. posted:some people have a gift for painting a picture and breaking out of banal and trite perceptions of the world taken for granted, and i dont think i'd agree with werner herzogs political philosophy if i knew it its probably real hosed up but his documentaries are still p magical 100%, Curtis's films are the distilled aesthetic essence of the "crack ping" feeling that C-SPAM knows so well and I don't think you need to have the same prescriptions to appreciate that since so SO much of everything else reinforces the opposite feeling, that "everything will be fine and the smart people will figure it out and the manager will set things straight just calm down and enjoy the show" feeling.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:08
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adam curtis is friends with alan moore, which is interesting. i think curtis is more of a pessimistic sort-of anarchist type disposition. if he said he was a neocon once he might be not very serious in saying that, his docs show attempts at intervention and ordering the world in a very bad light but yeah adam curtis is not at all the guy for solutions, he’s just skillful at painting how alienated, dysfunctional and nightmarish the present is
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Feb 12, 2021 21:09
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bird. posted:all im saying is i dont need adam curtis' manifesto i'm on his bullshit for his descriptions not his prescriptions i also don't think he cares to much about providing prescriptions. he describes himself as fundamentally a historian and i'm really leery of when people dismiss any form of critique because "well what's your idea then" because that poo poo historically has been used to disenfranchise like the entire field of materialist critique. curtis himself doesn't consider himself a materialist but he certainly engages or is obviously influenced by a historical dialectic and if anything pulls from the emotional subject in a way that raw materialism is not capable of doing.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:10
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bird. posted:some people have a gift for painting a picture and breaking out of banal and trite perceptions of the world taken for granted, and i dont think i'd agree with werner herzogs political philosophy if i knew it its probably real hosed up but his documentaries are still p magical herzog loves gorbachev and considers him a hero lmao
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Feb 12, 2021 21:11
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Yeah Curtis' montages are good at conveying the totality of systems at various stages of robustness or decay. Kubrick is one of the only people I can think of who might do it better with shots like these.    
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Feb 12, 2021 21:11
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Eric Cantonese posted:2012, to be fair. I saw this speech get posted every once in a while https://youtu.be/mlaPZ-xMPGY But it really doesn't sound like "everything will always stay the same"
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Feb 12, 2021 21:13
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if you haven't ever heard it, Curtis' chapo interview from 2016 is very good to succinctly grasp his perspective and is also one of the best critiques of the left I've heard in recent memory.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:16
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I listened to the Chapo interview (at least the one he gave to promote Hypernormalisation) and I've also heard that speech lostconfused shared (thanks for bringing that up by the way). I get his perspective that you need to have an inspiring "bigger idea" to fill the void that untrammeled consumerist individualism creates, but I guess after he articulates that, it's more of a "hope you craft something better. Good luck with that. I'm going to go hang out with Massive Attack." Maybe that's all I should expect, but I don't know where the new ideology/religion/morality comes from that does not just degenerate in the same way that we just spent the last 5 or 10+ hours of his work showing in beautiful visual detail.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:23
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Again, he opens this new series with a Graeber quote all about our ability to do something other than what we assume is pre-ordained. I think this current series, note I've only just started it, is perhaps pushing back a bit on the nihilistic idea that there's nothing to be done and if anything is putting that defeatism under the microscope. I don't think Curtis has the answer, nor does he expect to be the catalyst for the way forward, but I think he is saying that things can change. If anything, his whole thesis across all his work is about connecting unexpected and discordant people, ideas and philosophies and showing how they disrupt and reorder the system. "But then, something else happened." "And then, things became very strange." "But there was this man." The world that exists is the result of a billion moving parts and those in power attempting to order them. However, a new philosophy, a new innovation, a new figurehead can always disrupt it. The trend for the 20th and 21st century has been for it to be getting progressively worse: more chaos, more inequality, but who's to say something else won't come along and once again shift the flow of history?
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Feb 12, 2021 21:24
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Eric Cantonese posted:I go on Curtis binges whenever he comes out with something, but I do feel like what he ends up doing best is reinforcing this feeling that nothing can be done.  A quote from David Graeber who sadly died of necrotic pancreatitis just last year.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:28
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He talks about the same thing as being the problem with the nascent left: that they cannot understand how they created the Trump era and that there is no real opposition to him being created again and again
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Feb 12, 2021 21:31
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Dmitri-9 posted:I'm having trouble finding a thesis that holds all of the episodes together. Well in the opening you get "These films are a history of how we got to this place, and why both those in power and we find it so difficult to move on." Then he goes on about how some things happened with people brought up on individual ideals get confronted with power structures and political systems.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:37
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Here is a very recent interview where he discusses the new series and goes a bit more in depth on his politics: https://thequietus.com/articles/29558-film-adam-curtis-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-interview. Choice quote:quote:In the third film you tackle climate change, which you haven’t done to the same extent in your previous work… I think he makes some cogent criticisms of the left as it exists today, specifically with its tendency to frame modern class/power relations in the language of decades-old political movements rather than presenting a vision for the future. He's hardly hostile to leftist principles though.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:46
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aybe the left should just develop an arson-based plan no one ever suggests arson as a political ideology and u could say it on fire
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Feb 12, 2021 21:49
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