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I have now finished The Living Dead and am halfway through Pandora's Box. Some observations with your permission. Adam Curtis most definitely does not make mus

I have now finished The Living Dead and am halfway through Pandora's Box. Some observations with your permission. Adam Curtis most definitely does not make music videos around conspiracy theories. He makes intellectually challenging documentaries based on absolutely stunning archive footage and refreshingly radical observations. He seems to apply a kind of a dialectic method. For instance in the Living Dead he combines three quite remote subjects. The first episode is how the WW2 was painted as the battle between good and evil, while some think that in a war bad things happen at both sides. The second one is about cold war brainwashing techniques both in the U.S. and in Russia. The final one is all about how Margaret Thatcher bought Winston Churchill's dream of a Greater Britain. Looks like the last one is the point he really wanted to make and the two first are just preliminaries, although extremely insightful. He is also obsessed about the relativity of truth and the feasibility of rational planning and free will. Which are not subjects readily emptied methinks. And I don't find his voice annoying at all. So all in all, my first impression is extremely good and I have already recommended him to a couple of friends.

jacques_chester 14y ago
That was exactly my point. Curtis takes reams of archival footage, sets it to funky music, then ties together disparate historical events into a seamless narrative. The problem is that he likes that narrative to have agency. But a lot of history is "one damn thing after another". No particular cabal animates this or that outcome, people just act based on what's in front of them. And that's what I mean by the animistic fallacy. Curtis sees the lightning bolts of history and supposes that some god is throwing them (usually, dunh dunh duuuuh, it's economists). But it basically doesn't happen that way. It's style over substance. Mind-candy. Sweet and ultimately unfulfilling.

jacques_chester 14y ago

That was exactly my point. Curtis takes reams of archival footage, sets it to funky music, then ties together disparate historical events into a seamless narrative. The problem is that he likes that narrative to have agency. But a lot of history is "one damn thing after another". No particular cabal animates this or that outcome, people just act based on what's in front of them. And that's what I mean by the animistic fallacy. Curtis sees the lightning bolts of history and supposes that some god is throwing them (usually, dunh dunh duuuuh, it's economists). But it basically doesn't happen that way. It's style over substance. Mind-candy. Sweet and ultimately unfulfilling.