Sandbrook is a well-respected historian but the series felt like an affirmation of our recent past rather than an interrogation of it. Perhaps the whole point is that increasingly, there's no such thing. The most insightful comments on all subjects will be published daily in dedicated articles. Elsewhere in Manhattan, wide-eyed, a-political musician Patti Smith relishes the manifestations of chaos and poverty yet, like other artists of her time that she is seen to typify, is moved to do nothing but aestheticise the fall-out. And yet in a wider sense, is he really swimming against the tide? Executions at the tail end of the Soviet Union are interspersed with a Jane Fonda fitness video. Please continue to respect all commenters and create constructive debates. But in a surreal turn of events, an MI6 agent later noticed that the details provided had been plucked out of a cheesy 1996 blockbuster, called The Rock, featuring Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery. Exploring big ideas or possibilities of change, is pointless. Adam Curtis isn't, strictly speaking, a reliable narrator because these days, no one is. It is normal. I don't know, I think I believe in aliens. It was hard not to think of the discontinuous reality that is Bidens brain getting edited into a smooth veneer of able statesmanship. First, I’ll give a fuller sense of what the film is about. Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate? This theory is known as HyperNormalisation and it is that title which this exclusive-to-iPlayer film is known by. He explores how power shifted from politicians to bankers in the ’70s, the solipsistic effects of social media echo chambers, untold stories of the younger and elder Assads, the bewildering rise of Trump, the rise and fall of the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, Prozac, Brexit, the emergence of suicide bombing as a weapon against the West (despite the Qu’ran prohibiting suicide), and even the US government’s deliberate propagation of UFO conspiracies to conceal military arsenal. In many ways, it's the film that Curtis' whole career has been building towards as many of the cultural, social and political undercurrents he's explored (mass manipulation, the surprisingly compatible goals of Islamic and neoliberal fundamentalism, the unintended consequences of developed world interventionism) seemingly begin to form an unstoppable tsunami. In our post-truth times, it could be argued that Curtis himself is just another master manipulator. (Tell me in the comments…, Movies are more than just capturing images; the way they are manipulated and they way they are captured is vitally….

Footage of Soviet executions are muddled together with Jane Fonda fitness videos. The encouragement in a film such as this is that you work to make sense of it all. Far and away my favorite documentary I've seen in recent memory, but more than likely, one of the most important and innovative pieces of film I've seen period. The films are edited in a playful way, with catchy tunes and quirky archive footage often serving to underscore central themes. He strives to jar the viewer out of our desensitised escapism. Its timing is uncanny - the film will arrive on the BBC iPlayer on October 16, just 23 days before Americans go to the polls and decide whether or not to submit to the leering rictus of mass insanity represented by Donald J Trump. Here are some of the strands in HyperNormalistation: In early 1970’s New York, property prospector Donald Trump is gifted bargain price former social housing by finance companies who are now largely running the bankrupt city. Nearly all of the political moments Curtis drops in on are well known, but he recontextualises them in an engrossing way. That depended on what the user was expecting. Underlying all these themes and endlessly entertaining historical tangents is one eerie assertion: the power of truth is dying.

I don't have the breadth of knowledge, or even intelligence, to talk about this monumental achievement in documentary filmmaking with any kind of confidence, so all I can do is continue to champion it and encourage everyone to read one of the incredible reviews already on Letterbox. Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate?

“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. 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 way in which once progressive ideas from psychology and avant garde culture can be (ab)used is illustrated by Vladislav Surkov, former theatre director, now senior aide to Vladimir Putin’s government. Casual brutality in the Middle East elides into codified, leisure-time banality in the US.

Feature Image: AK Rockefeller, happy souls in hell [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0] I don’t know how many people have the stomach or attention span for a sprawling, nearly 3-hour documentary covering the last 40 years of our civilization’s slide into metacrisis and narrative collapse. Directed by Adam Curtis. But less obviously aberrant programmes are equally telling; the likes of The Bank (three laboured hours spent exploring the workings of a High Street bank) and The Met (London's coppers, placed under a not-particularly powerful microscope) represent one troubled institution reaching out to a couple of others; everyone telling everyone else that it's business as usual. Worse still, the innovations are co-opted and become part of the problem. It felt as ill-timed as HyperNormalisation is timely - if this year has proved anything, it's that culturally and politically, the long game set in motion by that decade has run out of steam. Don’t forget to share it on social media! While there is plenty of news footage of gruesome blasts, there are 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. There's a fascinating segment in the middle of HyperNormalisation telling the story of one of Donald Trump's bankruptcies. If you love what we do, you can help tQ to continue bringing you the best in cultural criticism and new music by joining one of our subscription tiers. © Letterboxd Limited. Inventing an alien conspiracy to distract from a weapons conspiracy? Not just because only the BBC would have given him the time, space and indulgence to assemble his remarkable portfolio of argumentative, tendentious, visionary and defiantly sprawling films (this one weighs in at a whopping two hours and 45 minutes). America good, russians and arabs are bad lmao. 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. Gaddafi fixes his hair before a press conference and somehow, the ten second clip says more about the bathetic vanity of a dictator than a thousand UN indictments ever could. Which is why he often feels like a throwback to a more adventurous TV age. Assad’s son Basher, current Syrian leader, was previously disinterested in politics.

This piece of archive footage feels like a brilliant metaphor for where we are in 2016. HyperNormalisation: Is Adam Curtis, Like Trump, Just A Master Manipulator? How someone who won one primary in 3 presidential runs suddenly became "electable." As other reviewers have mentioned on this site, the greatest irony of this film is the fact that, despite crusading against politicians' oversimplification of problems and oversimplified solutions in the opening monologue, HyperNormalisation does that very same thing, something I'm sure Curis is conscious of yet does nothing to upend. It's a more reliable but harder to swallow truth than The Bank or The Met or Britain's Hardest Workers or anything else that the BBC is currently offering can bring itself to acknowledge. I could have blocked certain commenters or deleted select comments, but leaving only the remarks that said things like “great review!” seemed rather self-serving. The first instance of a suicide bomb is paired with the image of fairground ride slowly rotating. We are encouraged to see her positioning as a symptom of the counter culture which, having failed to enable social change, turns inward. It initially seemed a shame that HyperNormalisation was to be resigned to BBC iPlayer, but, in retrospect, it was absolutely vital. I’m going to suggest that the film is essential viewing for psychotherapists, for a number of reasons that I’ll allude to throughout the review. If you can’t change the world, change yourself: for example Jane Fonda, the film star once known as ‘Hanoi Jane’ for her opposition to the Vietnam War, who swaps political radicalism for aerobics and makes millions. Create a commenting name to join the debate, There are no Independent Premium comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts, There are no comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts.

It was released on October 16th 2016 and is available only on the BBC iPlayer. Critic Reviews for HyperNormalisation All Critics (2) | Fresh (2) The film constantly threatens to collapse under the weight of its narrative breadth. The stylisation also gives us some light relief, for his films can be disorienting, as we reel from the impact of familiar material being rended again and again. Can we talk about Boris Johnson’s anti-Semitism now, please? HyperNormalisation dives into our dissociative experience of reality, You may not agree with our views, or other users’, but please respond to them respectfully, Swearing, personal abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia and other discriminatory or inciteful language is not acceptable, Do not impersonate other users or reveal private information about third parties, We reserve the right to delete inappropriate posts and ban offending users without notification. 2. And it's hard to think of a more fitting way for a filmmaker to illustrate that point that to either deliberately or inadvertently build it into his own narrative. The first instance of a suicide bomb is paired with the image of fairground ride slowly rotating. As the reader will be aware, making sense of complexity is rarely easy business! It's only the BBC's willingness to step out of its comfort zone, wander into the world's more contested corners, and keep the cameras rolling and the mics on in 80s Russia or 70s Syria that enables Curtis's unmistakable visual grammar.

Or rather, as he highlights in an interview, think of a supposedly singing dog. HyperNormalisation dives into our dissociative experience of reality, You may not agree with our views, or other users’, but please respond to them respectfully, Swearing, personal abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia and other discriminatory or inciteful language is not acceptable, Do not impersonate other users or reveal private information about third parties, We reserve the right to delete inappropriate posts and ban offending users without notification. And now, more than ever before, the truth is subjective and is seen to be so. Executions at the tail end of the Soviet Union are interspersed with a Jane Fonda fitness video. So, partly thanks to its continuing patronage of a maverick like Curtis, the BBC maintains its cultural centrality, right? The just under 500 films submitted by the users of /r/redscarepod in the July 2020 poll. Unlike his earlier, conventionally-broadcast films, it's unlikely to confront an unwitting or indeed hostile audience with its scope and strangeness.

So, the film seeks to give us an embodied experience of elements that have led us to Brexit and Trump, Jihadist terrorism and getting lost through cyber space. four years on and it's is still so vital, so contemporary, and so so relevant. I have been writing professionally about film for over 15 years, not counting my time in academia. 2016 3. There are many other elements to the story, some of them key, that I’m unable to include here, yet I feel that this is appropriate in this context.



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