HyperNormalisation - Adam Curtis (2016)

[TonyGosling]

Adam Curtis - Hyper-Normalisation
BBC Documentary 2016

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFtsrjlsclQ

So when's it on the telly then?????
Gutless so-and-sos

Sorry to see Curtis demonizing the Brexit campaign in the new film, but after all he is a well to do media type from London out of touch with reality. Brexit was a big victory for democracy, but in the film it is portrayed in the same way as The Guardian and the lying press portrays it.'

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.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/02d9ed3c-d71b-4232-ae17- 67da423b5df5

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.

Comment
The Leave campaign was exactly the kind of fake reality politics Curtis had warned against throughout this film. UK's contributions to the EU budget were highlighted without telling voters the UK receives most of it back in EU direct investments or rebates paid to UK government; EU law was portrayed as unnecessary red tape holding back the economy, and then now it emerges we have voted to leave the Government thinks we should incorporate all EU law directly into UK law anyway; 'take back control' was given as the prime reason for leaving, but now we are ruled by a PM who took power without facing a General Election and has denied Parliament a vote on the terms of negotiation nor the exact time for triggering Article 50

[cogbias]

Brexit is relevant because it was a very useful way to get around Westminster. When you can't get something like this through Parliament, handing the decision over to the public increases your chances.

Politicians would be whipped into line, much the same way the media whips the general public into believing pretty much anything.

Classic example being this European army. It's ok when we're trying to put a global army to fight the war on terror. But the Germans in charge sets the alarm bells ringing.

When we eventually get out, after we've negotiated with all the other countries, on their terms, you're still looking at a two year period just to put the paperwork together.

You could see a bizarre situation where Russia pumps the message over here, we vote to leave and Russia at some point get access to the IMF and the free market and we get bumped.

People still believe the UK has a huge market with lots of contracts and that is the basis of negotiation.

Now, if say for example, those contracts are dependable on technology based service design, that is quite easily replicated in another country by like minded, or more efficient coders.

Sorry but Brexit is totally relevant to the documentary. Certain things can't be said for legal reasons. But it is fair to say all these elections, referendums are very similar.

Referendums are a last resort, when the banks can't influence Parliament. I'm guessing but it stands to reason the market decides on whether we have a referendum or not. So that part has to be massive lobbying from the inside. Finally they get the referendum they always wanted. That was their only chance of getting out the EU and it worked.

European Army - doesn't exist.

War on Terror alliance - what was that exactly?

What would be worse, a European Army or a Worldwide Army?

The Worldwide one is what we've been using since 9/11. But somehow a European Army ran by Germany would mean opening up the gas chambers again. Even though those same gas chambers existed in the US, ran by the scientists the US hired from the Nazi R&D program at Auschwitz.

I think you'll find the US is a hell of a lot darker than Germany. I don't hear noises from Germany talking about getting the nukes into play.

United States of Europe - again ridiculous, but clever word play as always.

A united states of Europe has existed for some time, so to suggest giving it a different name changes that is fairly radical. Not.

Think about it. An alliance for the UK and the US is no different other than being far more destructive.

So a United States of Europe would be ran by America? Are you quite sure about that?

What else is there. Oh yeah, Hitler survived the war and went into house arrest in South America. How is that even relevant?

Bormann got out with all the Nazi loot, so what?

This makes the basic point that Germany wasn't punished after the war.

The general public had an absolute horrendous time from 1943 right up until the wall came down.

The worst of the Nazi bunch, reckoned to be between 3-5,000 all went to America. Those up for war crimes could be gotten out, if they weren't so well known. So you've got the worst of the bunch then in charge of the military space in the US and NASA. You'd have to imagine our scientists worked alongside them.

So think about that for a second.

Living on an island, immigration is relevant. However, that's just the market forces at work and they will effectively decide, not politicians.

Food labeling. Well that's been lobbied for and against for some time.

What are the chances that would be coming in anyway, because the EU can just decide to do that anytime they like.

Are they more likely to do that than the US? Of course they are.

So it is relevant to the documentary because you could be voting against something, but in reality you are actually promoting the very thing you're voting against.

[TonyGosling]

HyperNormalisation review (Adam Curtis, BBC iPlayer): A masterfully dark dive into our dissociative experience of reality
A rare documentary that respects the viewer's intelligence

Christopher Hooton @christophhooton 8 hours ago2 comments
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/hypernormal isation-review-adam-curtis-bbc-iplayer-a-masterfully-dark-dive-into-ou r-dissociative-a7367166.html

If your various news feeds present a reality you don’t recognise, and scrolling through them leaves you desensitised, this documentary goes some way in offering the explanation you’ve been seeking. Bitter Lake director Adam Curtis’ latest film looks at how “we have retreated into a simplified and often completely fake version of the world,” and the various social, political and cultural agents that have landed us in this seemingly hopeless world situation.

It initially seemed a shame that HyperNormalisation was to be resigned to BBC iPlayer, but, in retrospect, it was absolutely vital. Programming that respects the viewer’s intelligence is rare in the UK these days, particularly when it comes to documentaries and their fairly recent Stacey Dooley-isation, and by avoiding a primetime broadcast slot, Curtis was able to deliver a thoroughly uncompromising film, which clocks in at two hours and 46 minutes and carefully and purposefully charts our descent into synthesis.

Though technology and changing modes of communication are touched upon, politics is at the documentary’s centre, which opens in New York and Damascus in 1975 and covers the Reagan years, the younger and elder Assads, the master puppetry of Gadaffi and the stupefying rise of Trump.

Curtis rejects the talking heads approach to documentary-making, with HyperNormalisation instead consisting almost entirely of existing footage that is repurposed exquisitely. While there is plenty of news footage of gruesome blasts, there is also static shots of wind balloon men flapping in the wind outside car dealerships, the eerie descent of empty elevators and a hilarious montage of all the “my God…” moments in disaster movies. Executions at the tail end of the Soviet Union are interspersed with a Jane Fonda fitness video. The first instance of a suicide bomb is paired with the image of fairground ride slowly rotating. It’s completely refreshing; at one point, Curtis demonstrates a point using the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, and he doesn’t strain to explain to the viewer who he is.

The lo-def graininess of the footage well serves his point about the blurring of experience and it is always apt and metaphorical without feeling too on-the-nose.

Nearly all of the political moments Curtis drops in on are well known, but he recontextualises them in an engrossing way. Initially a daunting prospect at almost three hours, you end up wishing HyperNormalisation had an even longer runtime or was episodic, especially as it not until very near the end that it starts to deal with the ideologically localised echo chamber of the internet.

‘You were so much a part of the system that you were unable to see beyond it,’ is the line that sticks with you, and Curtis is to be applauded for making a documentary that, in creating deliberately disorientating world narratives, those in power are trying to prevent.

HyperNormalisation was released on BBC iPlayer on 16 October, 2016 and will be available for over a year.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Towards the end this film gets v propagandistic