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Adam Curtis Collection 1989-2016 (various quality; some with soft English subtitles)
Inside Story (1989)
How can a revolution have come to this? In The Road to Terror, Iranian revolutionaries tell how their dream descended into a nightmare of terror and execution. They speak as exiles in Paris, a city preparing to celebrate the glories of the first mass revolution of 1789. Behind its strange images, the struggle for power in the Iranian revolution has followed a pattern uncannily similar to many of the great revolutions of the past. Just like 200 years ago in France, the Iranian revolution has gone down the old road from liberation to repression, the road to terror.
Pandora’s Box (1992)
Six modern fables by Adam Curtis exploring the cultural impact of 20th Century science using archive, clips from feature films, cartoons and home movies.
E01 The Engineers’ Plot
The Russian revolutionaries who toppled the Tsar in 1917 believed science had the power to create a new world. This film reveals how the Soviet technocrats came to run the Plan, which would order their society along rational, scientific lines, and how they ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering world for millions of people. Footage includes the Magnitogorsk Choir of Industrial Progress singing of the new rational world to come; two men who planned the toothbrushes for the whole of the Soviet Union; and a planner who tells how she scientifically decided the people wanted platform shoes, only to discover that they were out of fashion by the time the factory was built. / / Producer Adam Curtis explains: "In the years following the war, people in America, Europe and the Soviet Union were captivated by the idea that science could be used to build a better world. It inspired politicians to apply the methods of science on a vast scale to try to solve the social and political problems of the age. This is a series about that grand and noble vision - and what happened to it.... The dramatic, unforeseen consequences that unfold in the films were due to the mistaken belief of those in power that scientific knowledge and its methods gave them the means to control the world."
E02 To the Brink of Eternity
An investigation into the workings of the first scientific think-tank, the Rand Corporation, which Khrushchev called "the American Academy for death and destruction". The mathematical geniuses there believed they could apply the abstract methods of science to the dark terrors of the Cold War and build a new age of peace and reason. In the end, their vision degenerated into fantasy.
E03 The League of Gentlemen
Twice since the war, British governments have been bewitched by economists promising foolproof ways to recapture the prosperity of the past. Twice they failed disastrously. This film, featuring Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson, Keith Joseph, Tony Benn, Milton Friedman, and other well-paid economists, tells the odd, often comic story of the science of money.
E04 Goodbye Mrs Ant
A comic and absurd story about human beings, science and nature. In America after the war, pesticides like DDT relieved the grinding poverty of life on the land for millions of people. Scientists became heroes in what was seen as the struggle against nature. Then, in 1968, DDT was put on trial in a mid-western courtroom. / / Other scientists argued that it was wrong to control nature. They in turn became heroes, this time of the new environmental movement. This film looks at the strange things that happen when science is used to justify social and political change, and raises serious questions about our present attitude to nature.
E05 Black Power
In 1957, Kwame Nkrumah dreamt of building an industrial utopia in west Africa. Technology on a grand scale would, he promised, launch the "dark continent" into an ambitious, modern future. At the heart of his scheme was the gigantic Volta dam, which would generate vast amounts of cheap electrical power. To get it financed, Nkrumah turned to a giant American multinational. But as the grand plan took shape, it brought with it other, more dangerous, forces which he could not control - including the enormous pressures of the Cold War in Africa, the demands of powerful industrialists and the intrigues of shadowy figures in the CIA. / / Despite seeing his"metropolis of science" sink into corruption and debt, Nkrumah still believed the dam could save him. /
E06 A is for Atom
This is the story of the rise and fall of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians believed they could create a different world with this limitless source of energy. But as early as 1964 senior nuclear scientists and engineers in America and the Soviet Union knew they were building potentially dangerous plants. Then came Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. In frank interviews the scientists explain why they lost control. And the film also tells the dramatic stories behind the two great nuclear disasters, drawing evidence from the secret tapes of those in charge.
The Living Dead (1995)
Three films by Adam Curtis about the attempts of those in power to control the past.
E01 On the Desperate Edge of Now
In the 1930s the Nazi leaders attempted to reconstruct Germany's history. At the Nuremberg trials, Allied prosecutors tried to rewrite the history of the war for different reasons. Was either side successful, and how did these attempts affect future generations?
E02 You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough
Fifty years ago, a group of scientists believed they had found a way to wipe people's memories, and then reconstruct them. They were convinced that the prejudices and hatreds that led to nationalism, war and destruction were built on memories. But as the Cold War developed, the CIA became involved. / / This film tells the story of what happened when the CIA started secretly funding the memory experiments, and the scientists and secret agents found themselves in a world of paranoia where nothing could be trusted, not even their own memories.
E03 The Attic
The speeches of Winston Churchill in 1940 inspired the British people at a perilous time in their history by calling on romantic images of a glorious and idealised past. The final film in Adam Curtis' series shows how Margaret Thatcher used Churchill's vision to shape Britain in the 1980s - and to stay in power.
Modern Times - The Way of All Flesh (1997)
In 1951, scientists removed cancerous cells from American Henrietta Lacks just before she died in the hope that they held the secret of how to conquer cancer. The cells have been growing ever since and there are now billions in laboratories all over the world. This film tells how many believe they hold the key to conquering cancer. A film by Adam Curtis.
The Century of the Self (March 2002)
Documentary series by Adam Curtis examining how Freudian theory influenced twentieth century society.
E01 Happiness Machines
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. / / Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. / / His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. / / It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.
E02 The Engineering of Consent
This episode explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. / / Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind. / / Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.
E03 There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads; He Must Be Destroyed
In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself. / / Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics. / / This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training - into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation. / / But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.
E04 Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfil the inner desires of the self. / / Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people's inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products. / / Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s. / / The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. But what they didn't realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.
The Power of Nightmares (2004)
Adam Curtis explores how the illusory threat of a hidden network of terror has come to dominate global politics.
E01 Baby It’s Cold Outside
How the illusory threat of a hidden network of terror has come to dominate politics throughout the world. Political philosopher Leo Strauss and Egyptian school inspector Sayyid Qutb both believed that liberalism eroded the bonds that held society together. The respective movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But the public's growing disillusionment with politics led to US neoconservatives creating a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union, while Islamists turned to terror to enforce their message
E02 The Phantom Victory
The US neoconservatives and the Islamists came together to fight the USSR in Afghanistan. Emboldened by the belief that they had then defeated the "Evil Empire", both groups tried to transform the world. Their subsequent failure was followed in the case of the neoconservatives by the post-1992 bid to regain power by inventing a new fantasy enemy - the morally bankrupt Bill Clinton. Extremist Muslims, meanwhile, chose to use terror and violence to try to persuade the people to follow them.
E03 The Shadows in the Cave
Western governments consistently refer to al-Qaeda as a highly-structured global network, poised to strike at any moment. But, argues Adam Curtis, does such an organisation really exist? He argues that in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September, neoconservatives have reconstructed the Islamists in the image of their most recent 'evil' enemy, the Soviet Union.
Shorts (2007-2016)
E01 The Rise and Fall of the TV Journalist (October 2007)
A short and possibly unfair history of the rise and fall of the TV journalist as a hero.
E02 Oh Dearism (April 2009)
Are you finding the world’s news too depressing and scary to bear? This is the story of the rise of Oh Dearism in television news.
E03 Paranoia and Moral Panics (February 2010)
Once upon a time politicians believed they could change the world… Adam Curtis reveals how the media has turned us all into paranoid weirdos.
E04 Oh Dearism II (December 2014)
So much of the news is depressing and confusing, to which the only response is 'Oh Dear'. Has that defeatist response become a central part of a new system of political control?
E05 Living in an Unreal World (October 2016)
We live in a dream world, detached from reality. Adam Curtis reveals how, if you pull back and look at everyday life around you, you can see the cracks appearing through the shiny surface of the cocoon we live in.
The Trap (March 2007)
A series of films from Adam Curtis that explore the contemporary concept of freedom.
E01 Fuck You Buddy
BAFTA award-winning producer Adam Curtis argues that the traditional model of freedom was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War. He believes people have become trapped into thinking that there are no other forms of liberty, which can lead to political situations that cause death and chaos abroad.
E02 The Lonely Robot
Adam Curtis examines how politicians in the 1990s applied ideas based upon the freedom of the market to the whole of society. The assumption was that people act like simplified robots and were rational calculating machines whose behaviour can be predicted by numbers.
E03 We Will Force You to be Free
Adam Curtis examines the consequences of the attempts of Tony Blair and the Americans to enforce their version of liberty around the world, from Russia to Iraq. Their approach, he argues, was based on the assumption that their intervention would a inspire a new form of democracy and order to arise. Instead it ended up creating authoritarian nationalism in the former Soviet Union and anti-democratic Islamism in Iraq.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)
Films by Adam Curtis about how humans have been colonised by machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything is through the eyes of the computers
01. Love and Power
A series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. / / This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems - without hierarchy. / / The film tells the story of two perfect worlds. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires. The other is the global utopia that digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to create in the 1990s. Many of them were also disciples of Ayn Rand. They believed that the new computer networks would allow the creation of a society where everyone could follow their own desires, yet there would not be anarchy. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had also been a disciple of Ayn Rand. He became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of stable capitalism - "Like a New Planet", he said. / / But the dream of stability in both worlds would be torn apart by the two dynamic human forces - love and power.
E02 The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
A series of films exploring the idea that we have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. / / This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components - cogs - in a system. / / But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has become the model for utopian ideas of human 'self-organizing networks' - dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders, as in the Facebook and Twitter revolutions, and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory. / / This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counterculture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world. / / But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn't true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. But the dream of the self-organizing network had by now captured our imaginations - because it offered an alternative to the dangerous and discredited ideas of politics.
E03 The Monkey in the Machine
A series of films exploring the idea that we have been colonised by the machines that we have built, seeing everything in the world today through the eyes of computers. / / This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed - so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure. / / At the heart of the film is one of the most famous scientists in the world - Bill Hamilton. He argued that human behaviour is really guided by codes buried deep within us. It was later popularised by Richard Dawkins as 'the selfish gene'. It said that individual human beings are really just machines whose only job is to make sure the codes are passed on for eternity. / / The film begins in 2000 in the jungles of the Congo and Rwanda. Hamilton is there to help prove his dark theories. But all around him the Congo is being torn apart by 'Africa's First World War'. The film then interweaves the two stories - the strange roots of Hamilton's theories, and the history of the West's tortured relationship with the Congo over the past 100 years.
Bitter Lake (2015)
Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis - leaving us bewildered and disorientated. / / Bitter Lake is an adventurous and epic film by Adam Curtis that explains why the big stories that politicians tell us have become so simplified that we can't really see the world any longer. / / The narrative goes all over the world, America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia - but the country at the heart of it is Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is the place that has confronted our politicians with the terrible truth - that they cannot understand what is going on any longer. / / The film reveals the forces that over the past thirty years rose up and undermined the confidence of politics to understand the world. And it shows the strange, dark role that Saudi Arabia has played in this. / / But Bitter Lake is also experimental. Curtis has taken the unedited rushes of everything that the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan - and used them in new and radical ways. / / He has tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan. A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.
HyperNormalization (2016)
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. / / But there is another world outside. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury forty years ago - that then festered and mutated - but which are now turning on us with a vengeful fury. Piercing though the wall of our fake world.
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