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This project has been funded with support
from the European Commision.
Last Sunday, the BBC premiered Adam Curtis' new film "HyperNormalisation" (1).
It's a film about perception management: it begins in 1975, with Patti Smith
and Martha Rosler in New York and Kissinger and Assad in Damascus, it ends in
2011 at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and in the streets of Cairo, and
in between cuts from John Perry Barlow to Gaddafi and from Ceausescu to Jane
Fonda, with Donald Trump lurking on the sidelines. If that sounds like an Adam
Curtis film to you, then you've probably seen one before. And since what we
wrote about Curtis almost ten years ago (2) still holds, and there really isn't
much to add to it, we've come up with an English translation, included below.
* * *
Two or three things that are problematic in the films of Adam Curtis are easy
to come by: certainly the political naivety of their director, which turns out
to be less of a tactical or rhetorical trick than one would hope, and in the
worst case tends to fuel nothing more than a diffuse feeling usually called
"anti-globalization"; then probably their general tendency to prefer
psychological explanations for economic phenomena over economic explanations
for psychological phenomena, and in turn pay too much tribute to the very
ideologies whose power they aim to deconstruct; maybe also the fact that the
stories they're telling -- even though that may be their actual topic -- are
seriously overpopulated with powerful male protagonists. The one thing however
that Adam Curtis isn't guilty of is making documentaries the way in which
documentaries are usually made: interviews and sound bites interlaced with a
few establishing shots and a layer of ambient music, carefully assembled to
follow a predetermined narrative arc that documents nothing but the lack of
ideas on the part of their authors, who often, even though their medium is
supposed to be film, don't even bother to come up with a single instance of an
actual image. Adam Curtis works for the BBC and has access to their archives,
where he spends so much time watching and copying television footage that he
only emerges once every two or three years, each time with a new film that
demonstrates the potential for a productive use and abuse of an institution
(television) and their resources (the archive). The story is always the same:
it's the tale of a strange and twisted turn that the history of the Western
World seems to have taken around 1970, when in the face of an economic crisis,
the liberalization, individualization and deregulation of society rather
unexpectedly failed to fulfill the widespread hope for social revolution or at
least political progress, but instead opened the way for a rapidly accelerating
shift of power towards an entirely new political constitution where every
single demand of the 1960s appeared to be fulfilled in the exact wrong way, and
which, even though Adam Curtis never uses this term, would be best described as
"societies of control". And since he already knows the story, there is enough
free space on the screen for images, and they don't just follow his narration
in form of associations, but in the best case grow into a dark stream of our
society's collective television subconscious, where the separation between
documentary and fictional images (the main reason television is so depressing
to watch) is almost entirely suspended. This type of montage -- which isn't
new, it has just rarely been employed so thoroughly and extensively -- has an
interesting, even if unintended side effect: once broadcast by the BBC, Adam
Curtis' films are never officially published, but instead get uploaded to the
Internet Archive and YouTube, since not even the legendarily vast resources of
the BBC are sufficient to make any serious attempt at clearing the rights for
all the images and sounds. The fact that his films are relatively freely
available may have contributed to their popularity; especially the Left however
-- the community of those who prefer shared opinions over shared techniques --
usually likes Adam Curtis for all the wrong reasons: because he makes allegedly
complex films about supposedly important political issues, even if in fact he
makes, about complex issues that he rarely names very precisely, political
films whose politicity has nothing to do with their director's personal opinion
about capitalism, control and terror, but resides in a specific way of making
use of images that makes visible at least a faint trace of an idea about how
and why one could or even should make television. And that's not obvious at
all, and it's the kind of idea whose general absence contributes more to the
continuation of capitalism, control and terror than the general presence of
critical voices in documentary film contributes to their abolishment.
* * *
(1) https://piratecinema.org/trailers/HyperNormalisationTrailer.mp4
(2) https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20070408
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pirate cinema berlin
u kottbusser tor
sunday, october 23, 8 pm
hypernormalisation
adam curtis
2016, 166 mins
12 seats, rsvp
first come first serve
location in separate mail
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pirate cinema berlin
www.piratecinema.org
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