Adam Curtis it was who - in The Power of Nightmares - gave us the argument that politicians shouldn't be sowing fear of terrorist attack. Why not? Because, although the threat of this is real, it isn't well-organized but 'disparate and complex'. Curtis had the power of logic. Tonight he has a new series starting and it sounds like it might be a bit nightmarish itself. I look forward to finding out. But in the meantime, normblog has the good fortune to be able to post a preview of a future Adam Curtis series. Sent to me by its author, also from within the world of documentary film-making, here is...
A sneak preview of the next award-winning Adam Curtis documentary series - 'The History of Darkness'[Shots of TV centre, intercut with B&W images of piles of money falling over, flocks of penguins diving into sea, H bomb mushroom cloud explosion]
Voice over (whispered):
In the early 1990s, a seemingly insignificant group of documentary film makers stumbled upon a series of techniques which would enable them to re-write the history of the world.[Shots of cigarettes being stubbed out, large room filled with women operating adding machines, Adolf Hitler making ranting speech]
Voice over (even more whispered):
They discovered that with little more in the way of data than a number of cans of archival film pilfered from different cutting rooms, containing stock shots of disparate subject matter, they would be able to suggest causal connections between phenomena that were totally unrelated.[Shots of Osama Bin Laden with machine gun, cheer leaders at US football game in 1950s, Winston Churchill puffing on cigar]
Voice over (more whispered still):
Their discoveries coincided with a time of budgetary cutbacks in the making of BBC history documentaries. As money for serious historical research dried up, an increasing premium was placed on the qualities of inventiveness, and subjective historical imagination within the Corporation.[Shots of napalm bombs exploding in Vietnam, football hooligans, Beatlemania, laboratory footage of viruses multiplying]
Voice over (just about audible):
The confidence generated by accessing random shots from library film enabled a little known group to suggest that random events in popular culture were not merely symptoms of the crises of late capitalism, but were, in fact, the cause of momentous changes in modern political history.[Shots of Trooping the Colour, car bombs exploding in Baghdad, holiday makers in Blackpool, freemasons wearing regalia]
Voice over (less audible):
Their programmes were the conceptual breakthrough an increasingly cash-strapped Corporation was looking for. Large numbers of prestigious awards could be garnered by programmes that contained little more in the way of technique than the adroit shuffling of card indexes of shots from earlier programmes.[Shots of women screaming from Hammer horror films, New York Stock Exchange dealers gesticulating wildly, bears fighting ferociously in Alaska national park, Margaret Thatcher wearing lab coat in Oxford laboratory]
Voice over (much less audible):
Amongst their many achievements, these film makers could present an iconoclastic veneer of political irreverence, and the demystification of major political institutions, without doing anything in the way of original research.[Shots of genies from Arabian Nights fantasies with caption 'Copyright Holder Unknown' superimposed, patients in NHS hospital wards, rock stars hurling TV sets off balconies into hotel swimming pools]
Voice over (only just audible):
So great was their success that these film makers could by now propose an alternative history of absolutely anything, and yet their accountability to any known standards of documentary film making was so tenuous that only the…(Voice over disappears below the threshold of audibility)
ends