SIMPLY STAGGERING - The Finest TV Programme/Film I've Seen In Two Decades
HYPERNORMALISATION
SIMPLY STAGGERING - The Finest TV Programme/Film I've Seen In Two Decades
Welcome to the post-truth world. You know it's not real. But you accept it as normal. But there is more out there. HyperNormalisation.
If you are lucky enough to live in the UK watch this and educate yourself. This stunning piece of TV opened my eyes to events I lived through and yet knew nothing about.
I have a new film going up on iPlayer this Sunday - the 16th October 2016. Here’s a background to what the film is about. And a trail.
We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.
This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.
It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal.
HyperNormalisation
The film has been made specially for iplayer - and is a giant narrative spanning forty years, with an extraordinary cast of characters. They include the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, the early performance artists in New York, President Putin, intelligent machines, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers - and the extraordinary untold story of the rise, fall, rise again, and finally the assassination of Colonel Gaddafi.
All these stories are woven together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created. Part of it was done by those in power - politicians, financiers and technological utopians. Rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, they retreated. And instead constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang onto power
But it wasn’t just those in power. This strange world was built by all of us. We all went along with it because the simplicity was reassuring. And that included the left and the radicals who thought they were attacking the system. The film shows how they too retreated into this make-believe world - which is why their opposition today has no effect, and nothing ever changes.
But there is another world outside. And the film shows dramatically how it is beginning to pierce through into our simplified bubble. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury forty years ago - that were then left to fester and mutate - but which are now turning on us with a vengeful fury.
Adam Curtis - HyperNormalisation iPlayer Link (UK Only)
First shown: 16 Oct 2016
First shown: 16 Oct 2016
Available for over a year
HyperNormalisation: A new film by Adam Curtis - BBC iPlayer Trailer
REVIEWS
The cult doc-maker explores the falsity of modern life in his own inimitable style. Just make sure you put enough time aside to watch it
I struggle to think a more perfect union of medium and message thanHyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis’s new film for the BBC iPlayer. Though he’s spent the best part of four decades making television, Curtis’s signature blend of hypnotic archive footage, authoritative voiceover and a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for bizarre historical tangents is better suited to the web, a place just as resistant to the narrative handholding of broadcast TV as he is.
Safe in the knowledge that his audience now has the ability to pause and rewind at will, Curtis crafts a mammoth labyrinth of political storytelling in the film, his follow-up to last year’s “war on terror” epic Bitter Lake. Launching on Sunday, his 165-minute opus makes a feature of its sheer unwieldiness, as Curtis veers from social history to conspiracy theory via the odd rambling bar-room anecdote, like a man who’s two-dozen browser tabs into a major Wikipedia binge.
He argues that an army of technocrats, complacent radicals and Faustian internet entrepreneurs have conspired to create an unreal world; one whose familiar and often comforting details blind us to its total inauthenticity. Not wishing to undersell the concept, Curtis begins the film with a shot of a torch shining limply into a thicket, so that viewers find themselves literally unable to see the wood for the trees.
From there, HyperNormalisation tracks a course to the present day, allowing Curtis to weigh in on Trump, Putin and Syria. But those expecting a snappy crash course in our chaotic world (“You won’t believe how this veteran BBC film-maker explains the Islamic State! What happens at 156:34 will shock you!”) clearly aren’t familiar with his methods. The film may address some of today’s most critical global issues, but it also allocates space to Jane Fonda, the fall of the Soviet Union and a supercut of pre-9/11 disaster movies. And unlike Curtis’s earlier work for TV, HyperNormalisation refuses to drop the kind of storytelling breadcrumbs that might anchor a viewer in its overarching narrative.
Instead, the film embraces the peculiarities of online viewing, trusting that its audience – if confused – will skip back 20 minutes to refresh their memories, or supplement Curtis’s argument with research of their own. If its colossal running time means it’s unlikely to be watched in a single sitting, each viewer must decide for themselves how exactly to navigate the experience. For all Curtis’s apparent dogmatism, it’s his audience who have the final say.
TV review: HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis, BBC iPlayer
Formidable new documentary examining world power structures from Brexit and Donald Trump to 9/11 and Desert Storm
'We live in a strange time …' murmurs Adam Curtis at the very beginning of his latest masterfully built but contentiously structured foray into the accumulated BBC footage archive from around the world. His voice is soothing and professorial, as though he were the David Attenborough of ripe political conspiracy theorising. In the first few seconds of this 165-minute opus, faces gaze, enraptured, to a glowing strobe in the ceiling, a bomb goes off and the camera falls to the floor, and Curtis reels off his latest targets: 'suicide bombs, waves of immigrants, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit . . this film will tell how we got to this strange place.'
This place, as is usually the case with Curtis' films, is one where everybody in power knows everything and nobody's telling the people; where backroom political decisions, old grudges and psychological theories fester over the years into a network of connected domino pieces which illustrate the structures of power which we're not meant to know of. In Curtis' world, the bankruptcy of New York in the 1970s feeds into banks edging into a position of political control in order to bail it out, which feeds into Donald Trump's rise as he builds opulent buildings in the remains of the decrepit city. Meanwhile Henry Kissinger's Cold War attempts to divide and control the Middle East alienate Syria's ruler Hafez al-Assad (father of the current President, Bashar; one of the more mundane revelations is that the latter's favourite band is Electric Light Orchestra) and eventually give rise to Colonel Gaddafi's emergence as a 'fake terrorist mastermind'.
And so it goes, through an admittedly thrilling and often terrifying two and three quarter hours of relentless questioning. Typically, Curtis' visual and audio scene-setting is hugely engaging, cutting away to warzone reporters addressing cameras as bombs go off behind them, or pre-2001 clips of landmark American buildings being destroyed in Hollywood movies cut into a hallucinatory montage to the soundtrack of Suicide's 'Dream Baby Dream'.
The major events of the last four decades are covered; a catalogue of wars in the Middle East, the fall of Communism, the rise of cyberspace, 9/11, the crash of 2008, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, the rise of Trump all to build a case that, apparently, nobody knows anything. Which is an easy get-out when you're making a documentary, frankly. Taking the temperature online of people's expectations for Curtis' latest, it's possible to detect a certain weariness, even among fans. In an age where it's frankly painfully obvious that nobody knows anything, what's required are answers; what Curtis offers is the pretence of answers.
His greatest strengths are also his greatest weaknesses, as the purposeful cut and thrust of his editing lends the impression that connections exist where there are none. The control desk for the drone which took out Gaddafi's escaping car and the server where footage of his murder was uploaded to the internet are less than ten miles apart in the desert outside Las Vegas. 'Wow,' you think. And then you think again, and you realise it doesn't matter. You realise that Trump and Assad have nothing to do with one another, really. Or Brexit and Henry Kissinger. When Curtis discusses Putin's mercurial strategist Vladislav Surkov, or the uncanny way Trump can inspire devotion by holding literally opposite opinions at the same time, one might be forgiven for detecting a note of admiration at their psychological skill.
Yet despite such reservations, Curtis' work is still strangely brilliant. Certain scenes are heart-stopping: the fearsome, tattooed Trump supporter declaring himself 'a proud fuckin' American, made in the USA, bitch!'; the tearful woman fearful of the rise of fascism at the film's climax; all the warzones and corpses and glimpses of harrowing human drama. This is not a secret history, as it presents itself, but it is a history, or rather multiple histories seen in long-buried detail. Narrative is key: the narrative governments create, dictators, rebels, movements, artists, even just the story we build of the world from our own internet bubbles, most of them demonstrably not part of some long game decades in the making. Curtis is just one more storyteller, with his own sources and his own perspectives. As a documentarian, a journalist, he's as open to question as any. As a dramatist, however, he's truly formidable.
HyperNormalisation is available on BBC iPlayer from 9pm on Sun 16 Oct 2016.
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