Good to know that there is no big man behind the curtains and everything is just more or less happening randomly. I can sleep better tonight.

The juxtaposition of the middle class lady crying about how Brexit made her feel against the 'artist' slashing a Z into the air in her film was on the nose, but it got a belly laugh out of me.

I am a bit speechless. Same way I felt after Bitter Lake, actually. This long form stuff definitely suits Curtis, the entire feel is a lot more sophisticated than his old films, structured in a way more appropriate to telling the story.

Is there a track listing I'll be able to get my hands on?

>>21184

Specifically the music that plays as Gaddafi's 3rd Universal Way is described, and ending when Curtis talks about how Gaddafi ended up isolated and friendless.

This one was much better than Bitter Lake I thought; much more well paced and digestible as a piece of ambient film-making, as well as a thought provoking documentary.

Weird thing is that in the years since getting into Adam Curtis' films, my world view seems to have arrived at a point where I'd kind of already thought about most of the points he made on my own. This film felt like a "beginner's guide" to that cynical, slightly-/boo/-but-not-too-much, media sceptic rationalisation of the world.

>>21186

Nothing wrong with a beginner's guide. For anyone struggling to make sense of the news (I think many people do) Adam Curtis is a great introduction to alternative ways of thinking about the world. The fact his audience eventual outgrow his films is a good sign, if anything.

That said, I think Bitter Lake was the more ambitious film. Hypernormalisation is almost like a recap and expansion upon his body of work thus far, but Bitter Lake is a sign of things to come, I think. Curtis seems to have a growing interest in just letting clips run and "speak for themselves".

>>21183
>This long form stuff definitely suits Curtis, the entire feel is a lot more sophisticated than his old films, structured in a way more appropriate to telling the story
I'd say the opposite. His earlier stuff was well crafted and argued (whatever you may think of the arguments), but the looser structure of the past few things has made him much less coherent. HyperNormalisation in particular sprawled out so much and tried so hard to tie all the threads into, well, everything, that it just ended up being nothing. Which is a shame, the Trump/Assad/Qaddafi parallels and interplay were very interesting.

Allow me to be that guy:

>>21186
>This film felt like a "beginner's guide"

Well it is very simplistic. In fact it made me a bit cross at multiple points such as when he followed the mistranslation of Putin praising Trump when actually he was described as what we would call a 'colourful' character which in Russian is put as radiant/bright. Lets get to my central argument though otherwise I could be here all day:

He focuses upon western relationships involuntarily creating his own distorted vision of the world* -suicide bombing for example is discussed in a relationship to attacks on the west or its interests. In doing so he also misses crucial points of Gaddafi and the development of the AU and R2P. This is surprising because there is a great irony in Gaddafi getting deposed on a justification of protecting civilians when he himself had argued for such a possibility, something you think he would be all over.

Things like R2P are however awfully inconvenient for his argument (I will also add, rooted in the ideas of third worlders such as Kofi Annan and Francis Deng whilst also enacted with almost unanimous international approval in the 2005 World Summit) because it is fundamentally an idealism within the international community and a vision for the future. Something that he, like other contemporaries like John Gray, can only attack which is ironic considering he himself is mostly about describing a loss of idealism. Perhaps its time we had an Adam Curtis documentary on Adam Curtis.

I concede that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with ripping into the world we live in, I myself am a cynical bastard as you may tell. The problem is Adam Curtis has never come to suggest answers so we're left with a career that is increasingly looking like the musings of a depressed teenager. I know he does have a vision of the world and occasionally it starts to bubble to the surface but I think its a vision that once revealed would be his own undoing.

*I'm reminded allot of a paper by Sebastian Schmidt about how Western academia views the national sovereignty through its own distorted lens. Sadly behind a paywall: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2011.00667.x/full[/sup]

>>21188
I definitely agree that he has declined over time. I think it began with Oh Dearism which raised eyebrows even when it was released in two short films, having rewatched Mayfair Set recently his older work still holds up very well but he has gradually fallen into the trap of post-modernism.

>>21190
>The problem is Adam Curtis has never come to suggest answers so we're left with a career that is increasingly looking like the musings of a depressed teenager.
He's never been anything but to my mind.

>>21190

So copy and paste mate.

Are you a fucking nonce?

Blindboy Boatclub made the same basic point last year, but in two minutes instead of two and a half hours.

https://twitter.com/Rubberbandits/status/788019461769031681

>>21190
>Sadly behind a paywall
Then post a screenshot or a cache or something. What the hell am I supposed to do with a broken link? Have a word with yourself.

>>21196
It's okay, I don't care about it any more. You can shove it up your gaping arse.

>>21192
>>21195
Its a url link to the abstract with a '[/sup]' accidentally put at the end. At 12 pages its too long to copy and paste while anyway we are not discussing Westphalian Sovereignty.

If you're really interested you can find the paper. I'm not going out of my way to post academic work for an autistic manchild on a site whose rules would likely object.

>>21198

Christ, standards of education really are slipping, aren't they?

>>21198
I said I don't care. Why are you stil having a teary about this? Print all 12 pages or whatever, roll them up tightly and ram it up your hungry arse. You fucking twat.

>>21200
He couldn't have been sure you'd said that about the article because I deleted my unhelpful post and he's not me. Honestly I feel a bit bad about that, so I took the time to screenshot the entire article for you.

>>21201

Cheers.

Jesus christ, have none of you cunts heard of scihub?

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2011.00667.x

>>21203

I've heard of it, but unfortunately all I want to download is ASTM specifications which it doesn't work for.

>>21204

Sci-hub is for journal articles only. If you want books and other materials, try Libgen (http://golibgen.io) - they have about 1.5 million books and documents, including most of the ASTM publications.

If Libgen doesn't work, tweet a request with the hashtag "#icanhazpdf". Someone should provide you with a download link within a few minutes, at which point you should delete your tweet.

I have to say that while I enjoyed Bitter Lake and HyperNormalisation, they put me mad trying to describe them to other people in comparison to his earlier work.

>>21190
>The problem is Adam Curtis has never come to suggest answers
Is one of his threads not that "nobody has any answers" though? (Or at least, not good ones, not ones that inspire people and can actually change the world.)
If he had answers, that would kind of go through the floor.

>Instead, Curtis repeats his by-now common refrain: that western leaders have no solutions to the world’s complex problems. So in Afghanistan and Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair followed predecessors like Ronald Reagan in casting the world simplistically as a fight between good and evil. Their opponents were portrayed as demonic genuises.

>In this way, Curtis effectively lets Bush and Blair off the hook. They fell for an idea, a mistaken and lazy one. They wanted the best for us, to protect us from these evil masterminds, to rebuild a reassuring world for us. They may have been wrong, but their intentions were good.

>It is no surprise that Curtis only briefly deals with the US-UK attack on Iraq and even then does not mention oil as a factor, or the fact that Cheney and others made huge financial gains from the dissolution of the Iraqi state, or that the Iraq war generated a weapons sales bonanza for the military-industrial complex, or that there were geo-strategic interests for the US and Israel in weakening Arab nationalism. These issues are off Curtis’ radar, so well has his own perception of events been managed.

>Curtis is simply playing his part in managing our perceptions – and doing so in great style.

I thought this was interesting: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/21/adam-curtis-another-manager-of-perceptions/

>>21220
It's the same old shit pumped out by the time wasting left wing clickbait factories. Evil west out to get you, buy our t shirts and join da revolushun. I have been reading that sort of thing since 2003 and got bored of it by the time I was 20.

>>21221

Yes, your critical faculties certainly seem well honed.

>>21222
Not as well honed as your reliance on tedious written clichés apparently.

>>21223

Perhaps you ought to rely a little more on cliché yourself, when you try to do your own thinking you end up with 'sentences' like that.

>>21206
>Is one of his threads not that "nobody has any answers" though?

Yes but its a valid problem with his work. For example what little there is of a conclusion is fondly reminiscing the 1950-60s when politicians could "change the world for the better". I believe this is just where he decides to start things off but it highlights the problems that come about from his perspective even in just asking where you start with the statement that shit's fucked.

Maybe its just a problem of the medium, I've read similar authors who put the fucking of shit down to our very nature which he hints at but those are books.

>>21220
Rather than go through the problems of Cook's narrative I think its easier for all of us if I just point out that the Chilcot report was released quite recently and as a result its very reasonable for Curtis to have avoided discussing the Iraq War given his film (documentary?) was likely put together before its release.

I'm surprised Cook didn't realise this but then its an area of interest for him like R2P is for me. You can't make everyone happy, not least grumpy people on the internet.

>>21222
I don't think you understand the typical .gs user. This isn't about politics but rather how hipster they are with their opinions. As they are mostly jobbo student types, their social circles are left wing and they aim to rise above them by learning their opinions from facist imageboards. Adam Curtis being wrong or right doesn't matter, the important thing is how that poster could find factoids to support his projected personality type.

You should watch Century of the Self to understand what it is I'm on about.

>>21226

When I'm in the fallout shelter with my grandchildren, and one of them asks with two of her four mouths, "Granpa, just how the alt-right movement start anyway?". I'll turn to those lovable mutants and say, "well, y'see, before the the Event it was very important for some people to project an insufferable caricature of their invert selves online. It was very funny until they managed to elect this one guy..."

>>21227

That's it lad, keep deluding yourself that Hilary is the one less likely to start a nuclear war.

We live in a completely bonkers topsy turvy world my friend; George W. Bush Jr decommissioned 5,000 nuclear weapons compared to Barrack Obama's paltry 500. Strikes on civilian targets in the middle east have increased. But which one of these men do you see as a warmonger?

Donald Trump's claims of election rigging are true- He is the rig. You could get the people of the United States to democratically elect Adolf Hitler if you set him up to run against the earthly embodiment of Satan. In this way, the election of a maniac warhawk who poses a very real threat of ending civilisation itself will be legitimised as the right thing to do.

After all, a vote for Trump is a vote for a racist and a sexist. The red team is the only rational choice.

>>21226

>You should watch Century of the Self to understand what it is I'm on about.

I chortled.

>>21229

Yes, yes, thank you.

>>21229
>which one of these men do you see as a warmonger?
The one who started the war.

>>21234
I don't even understand your point any more, fascistlad. I mean... Are you even a fascist?

>>21235
I don't think I'm whoever you think I am, but for clarity's sake, no I'm not a fascist.

>>21226
I wasn't discussing Curtis. I was talking about the counterpunch bilge.

Hilarious that you decry some invented fault of .gs posters when you can't even be fucking cunted to pay the slightest bit of attention to what's right under your nose.

>>21234

Which war?

>>21238

MY WAAAAARRRR!

>>21238
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War

Bit of a long read ahead of you.

>>21240

Pfft, it wasn't a war. It was an intervention against Saddam Hussein and an effort to bring democracy to the people of Iraq. Have you been reading non-governmental sources, you pinko terrorist sympathizer?

>>21240

Ah, that war. But definitely not this war...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_Syria

Or this war...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya

Right?

>>21241
What can we do? We brought democracy to Iraq, and the people decided democratically that they just couldn't live together.

>>21244
Hmmm, looks like you didn't even read the titles of those articles.

>>21245
So... Accept ISIS as the will of the people?

>>21237
Which was discussing Curtis. Are you okay? You sound a little hurt, don't worry about it, I'm sure everyone else thinks you're still special. Just not me.

>>21251
>Which was discussing Curtis.

So? The

>Adam Curtis being wrong or right doesn't matter

comments were objectively stupid, because I didn't make any comments on Adam Curtis's film. I only commented on the Counterpunch article, which is the usual anti-western 'Putin is no worse than Tony Blair' bullshit that pinko rags have been pumping out for years.

There's a really boring habit of the sort of arrogant cunt that thinks they're a march ahead on the rest of mankind because they read Counterpunch and watched Fight Club on DVD. They get caught out, and then conduct panicked rearguard actions during their retreat, just like you right now. Sad!

>>21252

>Sad!

I had no idea Donald Trump was capable of writing more than 140 characters in one go.

>>21254

>>21255

Sad! Tremendously Sad!