Adam Curtis

DLaurent

Well-known member
From a Wire Interview.

. "I'm serious about it but I'm also playing with you. I'm not a preachy, John Pilger-y I-believe-this-deeply. I'm saying we live in a very, very, very rigid, conservative time and am just asking have you thought about reconfiguring it and looking at it like this? And I do the same with music. Have you thought that I could put silly dancing music over Islamist terrorists? See what that feels like." I reply that it feels ridiculous. "Well then, you're not that frightened of it anymore. So it has a serious point."

I like the way he's not preachy like John Pilger can be.
 

version

Well-known member
i've had my limit of adam curtis but i'm interested in the new one cos the trailer features michael x
AC Do you remember seeing me two years ago in Soho and shouting: “When is it coming out?!” Every time I met you you’d say it. It has taken three years. But I always start with a theme and the stories, which is what I spend most of my time researching. I like ambiguous characters. So in the new film there is a guy called Michael de Freitas, who is a revolutionary but also a vicious gangster, and I like that complexity.

DM I can’t believe John Lennon and Yoko cut their hair off for him!

AC And then he stole their money.

DM Yeah, but their hair, Adam, their hair. They had lovely hair.

AC [...] the reason I was interested in Michael de Freitas, who became known as Michael X, is that, a while ago, I met a couple of guys in Notting Hill who worked with him in the 60s. And I’d read [De Freitas’s] book, where he said there was a sadness at the heart of England. These guys said the same thing, that there was a sort of melancholy in the English. [De Freitas] didn’t like the racism, but he said there’s something underneath that, which is a sort of melancholy about what they’d lost. And I think you still feel that now, not just among the Brexit voters, but you also feel it about the people who hated the Brexit voters because they go: “We’ve come to this?”
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty

host is a big fan but Curtis does a pretty good job of explaining himself here
 

catalog

Well-known member
Interesting thing for me with that recent spate of films by mcqueen, small axe, as good as they were, there was no room for Michael x in there.

The Tom vague bits are very good on him.

I never thought about this melancholy at the heart of England business through him, but it actually sort of sounds about right as a general diagnosis.

Empire comedown still reverberating? Fits right in with kpunk and a cancelled future.
 

version

Well-known member
You'll like some of this, @luka They're saying the same stuff you are about Twitter being a game and the influence of games in general.
A few years ago I fronted a Channel 4 list show about influential video games. They were listed chronologically, so we started with things like Pong, and the final entry on our list was Twitter, which I described as a “multiplayer online game in which you choose an avatar and role-play a persona loosely based on your own, attempting to accrue followers by pressing lettered buttons to form interesting sentences”.

At the time people sort of scoffed at that, and I was slightly taking the piss, but I do think we were right to classify it as a game, because it’s designed like one. Not just in terms of the “score” feedback, the retweets and likes and so on, but the rhythm of it, the flow of little moments of delight or disappointment, just like a Mario game. There’s a clear gameplay loop where, the more you engage, the less you want to put it down. If Twitter didn’t already exist, you could launch it today on the Steam game store as an RPG.
 
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Version luka doesn’t like recommendations. I don’t either but he’s even worse with authority than I am, much worse. You need to frame it like, ‘everyone’s talking about this really weird interpretation of luka’s idea of... ‘ then his ears will prick
 

luka

Well-known member
lol. i did read it though. this was the best bit.

I’ve been thinking about what you said about “a weaponised faux nostalgia”. It is completely fake – but as I try and show in the films, that dream of England has gone very deep inside the head of millions of the English people. It doesn’t really come from the empire, but from the time after that, when the empire was collapsing. And it’s a strange, rural, almost feudal picture of England. And it has wormed its way deep into the minds not just of the people who voted for Brexit, but it also possesses the minds of those who hate the Brexiteers, many nice liberal middle class people as well.
In the films I show how the first Glastonbury Festival was held in 1920, and was full of that vision. And it has kept going underneath our society in all kinds of ways. The hippies expressed it vividly. It also helped shape the environmental movement in England into something suffused with nostalgia. Unlike the far more radical and effective environmental movements in Germany and America
 

luka

Well-known member
when Gus was trying to talk about the pastoral in the English imagination (on this trad dad thread) we bumped into it
 

luka

Well-known member
it's worth reading Prynne on Wordsworth in relation to this and also to try and catch it as it exists in your own head. that is the green pleasant Platonic England of the imagination and how exactly it got there.
 
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luka

Well-known member
you probably havent read for example the Romantics, or at least not to any great extent. But its there as an imaginal substrate.
 

luka

Well-known member
I’m watching this Curtis now, although distractedly. I feel kind of tired of the style at this point
i feel i am too despite not having seen one since hypernormalisation. doesnt feel adequate to the times
 

sufi

lala
I’m watching this Curtis now, although distractedly. I feel kind of tired of the style at this point
+1
finding his assured tones sounding a lot less plausible
it washes over one pleasantly with music and imagery skipping through tweaky concepts
hard to see whether its subtly indoctrinating something vague, or is just so vague you can project whatever depth you want on there
 

luka

Well-known member
i mean, none of us read so its nice to hear about some of the people we might read about if we were to read.
 
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luka

Well-known member
the one that really lodged itself into the wider conspiratorial discourse is Bernays. much more than anything else hes discussed eg game theory
 
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