Has anyone else seen this here? Did anyone else die of despair after watching this...

Has anyone else seen this here? Did anyone else die of despair after watching this? What do you think of Adam Curtis in general?

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monoskop.org/images/7/7a/Baudrillard_Jean_The_Spirit_of_Terrorism_2003.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=PtjfoEvsR9w
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I feel like he restated the problem that has been identified many times, no prominently organized group of leftists have a coherent (or at least compelling) vision for a better world right now. There is only management. The world peaked in its prosperity, and now we are just trying to get back to the peak (defining the peak as a more generalized prosperity, whereas right now prosperity is obviously concentrated towards the top).

He also said this in the Chapo episode. There needs to be a vision for the future, because if there is no future we will just continue to try to remove ourselves from the world.

But speaking to the parts of the documentary talking about narratives, it was very relevant to all of this russian shit. I mean, it was relevant to ISIS and whatnot before, but post-election the libs are driving themselves insane with red-baiting and thinking that the lost election is all Russia's fault.

Bitter lake is way better. I feel like he covers way too much here.

Bitter Lake is required watching before HyperNormalisation, I think. The section about the USSR in the former gels well with the entire point of the latter, painting liberal democracy being in its own version of the USSR in the 80's. People often criticise Curtis for his style of editing, but I think that when you describe the styles of the films he creates, they actually end up describing the theme the film itself shows. Bitter Lake was a "confusing, ambling mess, making little sense at times" and HyperNormalisation was "things seemingly happening for no reason, leading you to think that there was a point but then revealing that there wasn't". The style represents the underlying theme, and I really enjoy that and people are so used to being talked down to with media that they don't think someone can express themselves not just in content, but style.

I really enjoyed the disaster movie section, probably my favourite part of the film.

monoskop.org/images/7/7a/Baudrillard_Jean_The_Spirit_of_Terrorism_2003.pdf

It is le illuminate tier "documentary" with no theory behind it.
0/10

What anime is that

Nice, working my way through it now. Do you think Curtis read it or missed a golden opportunity to incorporate it? I remember the disaster movie phase being surreal, but never put the two together.


It's not about theory you spooky faggot.

no, curtis takes unrelated events while leaving out important details of them in order to fit his political narrative and subsequently crafts a hopeless story to put the viewer in despair through music, scene footage, and etc. Curtis wants the viewer to identify and see everything from his political lens while ignoring all other parts of reality that don't fit his story, the entire section on the middle-east and Syria was completely fucking irrelevant to his story. The only things to take away from Curtis's documentaries are the events themselves so you can read about them, including the people who surrounded them, and his central message, everything in between is pure garbage.

imperialist apologist trash

I didn't really get that impression at all from this. Also his previous documentary The Power of Nightmares is very explicitly anti-US foreign policy.

well he didn't mention americas involvement at all in the creation of ISIS and he claims Putin is deliberatly created the revolt in ukraine because of "resons"

This the parts he's shit. Is he willfully ignoring things? I notice he thought OWS just collapsed because well y'know stuff happens, pure coincidence. Never accuses the USA of "conspiracy theories" which are actually fact proven in courts of law and fancies himself a bit of a coincidence theorist. Examples being CIA running coke and guns and interferring. This annoys me quite a bit, but if he was to look into these things he would do a full film on them, so what's the deal?

He does gut the US in some films, and will even attack his own supposed ideology at other times. But what does he believe? I assumed him to be a disillusioned liberal not sure where to go, struggling to put all the information into a film without going on a 20 minute tangent at each revelation. It's clear with some things he's inserting them now so he can revisit them later (Trump and Clinton had little relevance in HN, but he throws it in for what seems like so his next film can focus quite a bit on it), but at other times it seems he skimps.

I think it's one of his weaker films, but people ITT are giving it too much shit. It's okay. Yeah, it doesn't address the US sufficiently but he does that in other documentaries.

I think he was saying the Occupy and Arab Spring protests failed because people refused to imagine a society beyond maintaining the status quo or going back to some imagine previous state of "equilibrium." Whether or not he explicitly knows it his views seem to be Zizekian in the sense that he thinks the problem is people cant seem to imagine things beyond their current ideology and the problem is we need to start imagining new political solutions beyond capitalism.

I don't think that is the only reason Occupy "failed" but it was a consistent problem of the protests and a lack of vision is a general reason why America seems to keep edging further and further right despite most people being of a general left wing mindset in their solutions on the ground statistically.

Also he made fun of liberals quite a bit in this but the jokes were in the editing so you might have missed it. The ending was comical beyond belief.

Haven't seen HyperNormalisation, but years ago saw the one about Silicone Valley/lolbertarians/cybernetics/other thing/and another thing/forgot what the point was. His heavy usage of old film clips created the impression of research that wasn't really there, suggesting connections that weren't really there. I don't remember much detail, as I put that in my brain's trash folder, but probably still have some notes on that on another computer. The problem was stuff like this: People who share sentiments with, for instance, the Club of Rome (ecological catastrophe around the corner!!! reduce birth rates now!!) and those who follow Ayn Rand don't have much in common aside from a tendency to be misanthropic. But the clips flowed together suggesting all sorts of connections, without Curtis actually saying directly person A agreed with person B on topic X. Also saw a bunch of other clips and read some blog posts by Adam Curtis and interviews and figured that it was pseudo-authenticity faking depth and research must be the general way Curtis operates.

I would definitely say something like about the one that I watched, that is
except that Curtis is such a slimy and oily person that he has kept it so vague, he could weasel out of most things accused of by stating in his defense: I never said such a thing! The counter-question is then: What the fuck is supposed to be your message? To which he would answer with a two-hour movie featuring footage of British educational films from the 70s, scary gray Soviet scientists cutting off doggie heads and re-attaching them, American noodle commercials from the late 80s, and spooky theremin sounds.

Holla Forums, the anime where all the characters with some exeptions belong into factions (ideologies) that fight eachother but unite when the bad dudes (nazis, ancaps) show in.

the protagonist is a qt boy that has the power to change ideology whenever he pleases, he also gets drunk and tells everyone he is going to kill himself.

muke is the typical dude that gets everything wrong and is basically a comical relief character.

anfem is the half slut half smart half not really smart girl.

catgirl drawfag is the only character that is stable/a good person.

I might have, I can't remember though. I seem to be one of the few people that picked up the dark forebodings of the editing in Bitter Lake before he bluntly points it out and turns up the editing to 11, but I felt mostly Hyper was setting the stage for more work to come. Got any links to the scenes you mean?

There's a lot of themes in Curtis' "Living in an Unreal World" (a short related to Hypernormalisation) that are common to Baudrillard's writings:
youtube.com/watch?v=PtjfoEvsR9w
It seems likely to me that Curtis was seeing some similarities between what he's trying to say and the movie Matrix, so he skimmed through some texts of "that matrix guy" Baudrillard.

...

It's sad that he's the only one that approached Silicon Valley in such a way, yet all his analysis is so dated there. He should make one about big data, algorithmic regulation of society, quantified self, etc…