sunday, october 23, 8 pm: hypernormalisation (adam curtis)

[pirate cinema berlin]

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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