snein 24 oktober 2004
Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself ii
I’d like to pitch The Power of Nightmares again. A documentary series shown on BBC 2, on Wednesday 22.00 cet. As it is this rare thing: a visual essay more than a documentary.
I am convinced TV is a bit too stuck in its ways of story telling about current affairs, that more or less always come down to showing talking heads.
This is different. And television needs to be different.
In this way, led partly by curiosity and chance, Curtis leaves his films open to possibility. ‘Journalism traditionally is done in specialisms,’ he says, ‘but the interesting thing in the modern world is that different things impinge on each other in unexpected ways.’ By cutting at almost subliminal speed between news footage and pop cultural references, academic interviews and fragments of film noir, Curtis’s films recreate exactly that sense of juxtaposition and seem close to the way we experience the world.
a visual essay more than a documentary.
This is totaly untrue. The facts revealed in this documentary (and it is a pure documentary, of the type only the British can make) are the core of the film; what it looks like is irrelevant. The facts, about the torture, the philosophy and its adherents are what makes this such a compelling piece. The fact that the archive film is also stunning in terms of what they managed to find, should not distract you from the information being conveyed. That is, if you can watch something AND listen to a lecture at the same time, you should be as blown away by it as if it had been just a narrators voice reading a thesis.
skreau Antoine Forquery, op snein 24 oktober 2004 op 16:22
I call it an essay because Curtis uses a very unique and personal approach in his narrative, unlike many other documentary makers.
But, come to think of it. The word essay probably has a different meaning to me, than to native speakers of the English language, who’d have to write countless essays at school. I use it in the sense Montaigne invented the genre; to me the essay is a personal piece, in which the writer reflects on the world in ways not done before. An experiment if you like. Which says nothing about the content.
skreau eamelje, op snein 24 oktober 2004 op 16:40
News, he believes, must be run by people who can maintain a strict sense of questioning distance. ‘If you report things emotionally it immediately depoliticises them. No one gets judged, little gets fully understood.’
skreau lieuwe, op woansdei 27 oktober 2004 op 10:48