a.p. dent posted:

huh, this isn't my reading of it at all. he blames all of the problems on concentrated capital, and glorifies collective protests movements (the part in episode 6 with the mothers going to the front line for example). he doesn't come out and say "and that's why we need to go back to communism!" because he's not interested in writing political polemics, but he certainly makes the communist party regime look better than the capitalist one (IMO). and yeltsin is portrayed as a villain. i guess it's the nihilism that's the problem? which, fair, but i might feel the same way if i've been looking at all this history and seen it fail so many times

paul_soccer12 posted:

Tempora Mutantur posted:

maybe it's because I just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrNQeYYvabg which details exactly what mechanisms resulted in the fall of the USSR which aligns with anecdotes of people I grew up with and the narratives I heard as a kid that I look back on very critically to understand my own framing of things, but I think everything curtis says is framed to make the viewer ask questions, but at the wrong "level"/the wrong questions, based on:

1) not mentioning the US'/capital's direct role in influencing and promoting and literally empowering Yeltsin as part of why the USSR collapsed, not talking about the *actual* sudden nature of Yeltsin removing price controls with no supporting replacement, just describing the sudden free market, everyone pays the prices of those who have just bought the enterprises that were previously required to limit what they charge the people by the state, but the state is no longer doing that as "wow they worked really hard to get capitalism going!"

a.p. dent posted:

i'm having some trouble following the rest of your post, will come back to it, but just wanted to ask how much of the show you've watched so far? i assume this is based on just that interview? because in the show he talks about the sudden price control removal explicitly, and how the economist dude who implemented it, (can't remember his name) was following the advice of American advisors. he definitely plays up how much the US loved this development, showing the Clintons and the english queen visiting and stuff

Tempora Mutantur posted:

yeah this is all solely reflecting on that interview alone, that's heartening to hear; I assume traumazone requires watching based on the description, the interview I could just listen to

a.p. dent posted:

finished the series tonight. really good. i like “thanks to the hundreds of bbc film crews over 35 years” at the end of each ep. it’s incredible footage and i like watching it

err posted:

And then something strange happened...

Coolness Averted posted:

That's an interesting take. Which of his films that you've seen do you feel didn't have an actual critique or advocacy related to the stories he followed?
I will agree he doesn't come out on screen and look at the camera to say "Imperialism is bad, and the US and UK shouldn't do it," but I think you're really misreading things if you think his advocacy is "nothing can ever get better and we don't know why"

The Atomic Man-Boy posted:

He's also once compared believing that the CIA smuggles crack to the inner cities to believing in Qanon.

err posted:

I've got one episode left. Most memorable people are the Russian conscript and the older lady traveling to her sister's house.

Charles Ingalls posted:

i wonder what became of the little girl who hustled the film crew for a pair of boots as payment for being filmed, she seemed like the kind of person who’d take anything life could throw at her and come out ahead

The Atomic Man-Boy posted:

With the caveat that I have just started TraumaZone, all the films I've seen lack any kind of useful critique. Don't get me wrong, I like most of his documentaries, he's good at showing cultural movements and is a is a great film editor, and is good at saying "Isn't it crazy how this is like this?"

But his worldview is such that he just sees powerful people running around with ideas, which compel them to do things. These things only turn bad when they run into other people with other ideas, or failed to see something. He takes bad actors at their word, and fails to consider that these people have interests, and they might be compelled by these interests. In Bitter Lake, (though it might have been Can't Get You Out of my Head, it's been a while since I've seen them) he claimed that the NeoCons actually wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East. No mentions of Halliburton or war contractors, nothing about trying to start a Baghdad stock exchange before turning the lights or water back on, and how that (plus C.I.A. torture prisons) might have played more into the creation of ISIL than, i dunno, idealism. He's also just a lazy researcher. In Can't Get You Out of my Head he claims that Kerry Thornley created the Illuminati conspiracy by getting his letters printed in Playboy as a joke to make fun of people who disbelieved the Warren commission and felt there was a conspiracy to kill JFK. Never mind that the Illuminati conspiracy has existed since like the 1700s, and that the publisher in Playboy who published his letters was Robert Anton Wilson, a CIA asset who was involved in the William Mellon Hitchcock & Timothy Leary LSD operation, and Hugh Hefner kept his money in Castle Bank, the CIA bank that bankrolled a bunch of Latin American death squads. And that's just something I knew about by having Epstein brain. With a cursory amount of research he could have found that out, linked that information together with some BBC footage of the Playboy mansion in the 60s, and enlightened the viewer just a little bit on how the world actually works. But he's just as incapable of doing that as I am of sprouting wings and flying to the grocery store.

Ytlaya posted:

I think that the combination of "not having any clear/concrete ideology" and "being an artistic person" tends to lead towards a very character/narrative-driven view of history (which leads to a variety of wrong ideas).