RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
  • blog
  • about
  • Writing

Disoriented: adam curtis's 'Bitter lake'

1/2/2015

 
Picture
George Santayana famously claimed that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. For nearly two centuries now, the British ruling class has been unable to leave Afghanistan alone, although its various shows of military force have often ended in humiliation.

Available only via BBC iPlayer, Adam Curtis’s new documentary, Bitter Lake, takes a sceptical, sideways look at the calamitous history of Western military and cultural intervention in the so-called 'graveyard of empires' and the concomitant rise of Wahhabism there since the 1950s. As such, the film is to some extent a reprise of Curtis’s earlier exploration of East-West geopolitical entanglements in The Power of Nightmares (2002). In a tour-de-force of television storytelling, Curtis shows how the manoeuvres of the great powers in Afghanistan have often been self-defeating, as Western states support allies who will later be enemies and attack enemies who will later be friends. In doing so, he emphasizes the decompositional tendencies of twentieth-century imperialism. Indeed, while some left-wing commentators, such as Michael Parenti, stress the coldly calculating, clinical nature of Western interventionism, Curtis suggests that its operations are often quite irrational – perhaps increasingly so – as he sets out to show the often unintended and frequently deadly consequences of Western meddling in the Middle East.


Images of some of the abuses and indignities suffered by Afghans at the hand of Western forces in recent years – bombings, detainments, retinal scanning – are mostly presented without voiceover; but together they present a picture of the West’s recent Afghan campaign that is starkly at odds with the one presented by mainstream news media and television drama. Yet much of the film’s interest lies in its documentation of the cultural, as well as the military implications of Western intervention in Afghanistan. One of its most wince-inducing scenes, in fact, shows an earnest British art critic rather haplessly trying to explain the momentousness of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal installation to a classroom of understandably perplexed Afghan women. It's an attempt at cultural imperialism gone horribly wrong.

Bitter Lake is oddly evocative, its argument illustrated and enriched by haunting music, archive film and revealing rushes of television news footage. Curtis works in the tradition of what film theorist Patricia Pisters, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, has recently called 'filmmaker-metallurgists', bending the 'matter-flows' of the archive to create alternative histories. Watching Curtis's ‘outtake’ sequences - the news films that never made it to our screens - you feel a strong sense of the uncanny. Curtis’s material exposes, in Freud's famous formulation, that which ‘ought to have remained hidden and secret’. As we listen to a group of US marines - shrouded, symbolically enough, in darkness - boasting of being ‘natural born killers’, we are made privy to the obscene underside of Western rhetoric about democracy and freedom. The footage of an armed attack on President Karzai's motorcade, meanwhile, is both horrific and - perhaps because of its graininess and the absence of any voiceover - dreamlike. But however unreal such scenes may seem, they reveal ugly realities of Afghan realpolitik then and now. At its best, Bitter Lake invokes a form of political uncanny, staging a return of our repressed knowledge about Afghanistan's bloody history, unearthing 'strangely familiar', half-forgotten stories about the country’s imperialist past. 

Curtis also suggests something of how the confusions and contradictions of Western geopolitical strategy are reflected and refracted in popular culture via references to the Afghan version of The Thick of It and to Tarkovsky's Solaris, repeatedly comparing the disorienting effects of Soviet (and later Western) involvement in Afghanistan with those of the noxious, hallucinogenic ocean in the classic film. But the analogies are mostly left implicit. In fact, Bitter Lake, perhaps to a greater extent than other Curtis documentaries, is largely a writerly text: the viewer is invited to forge connections between seemingly disparate textual elements.

When Curtis himself tries to join the dots, however, the result is not always convincing. The elliptical nature of this film sometimes makes it is hard to be certain exactly what is actually being claimed. And where Curtis is more explicit, there is often something disingenuous about the argument. As in The Power of Nightmares, Curtis seems to take at face value the US ruling class's post-9/11 claim to want to ‘liberate’ the Middle East into democracy, arguing that this noble vision failed. I'm not so sure: no doubt many US politicians and top brass genuinely bought into their own rhetoric - but surely not all of them did. Curtis also claims that Western politicians since the close of the twentieth century have collapsed their explanatory narratives into ‘simple stories of good versus evil’, thus obscuring the truth, for example, about what has been happening in Afghanistan and why allied troops were sent there. But this is an odd proposition insofar as this kind of Manichean simplification has always been an important element of Western interventionist propaganda.


By acknowledging of the role played by Saudi oil and opium production in the fortunes of Afghanistan, Curtis mostly avoids the impression given in some of his other documentaries that history is driven by the ideological convictions of cliques, political leaders and Great Men, rather than material imperatives. But there are still traces of idealism in some of Curtis's faux-naif pronouncements; 'in 1978, they decided to have a revolution' is perhaps the most ridiculous of these. 
At such moments one become aware of the contrast between the rich, materialist analysis of Curtis's archive material and the rather attenuated, idealist nature of some of his theses. But this is nevertheless an engaging film that brings to light some of the brutality and bloodshed caused by Western imperialism in the Middle East.

    Archives

    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010

    Categories

    All
    5G
    9/11
    Adam Curtis
    Advertising
    Afghanistan
    Alastair Campbell
    Angelina Jolie
    Anti-fascism
    Ashley Madison (hack)
    Aung San Suu Kyi
    Barack Obama
    Bbc
    Black Lives Matter
    Bnp
    Bosnia
    Brexit
    Burma
    Cancel Culture
    Censorship
    Channel 4
    Charlie Hebdo
    China
    Christopher Hitchens
    Christopher Nolan
    Class
    CNN
    Conspiracies
    Cornelius Cardew
    Covid-19
    Czech Republic
    Daily Mail
    Dalai Lama
    David Berman
    Donald Trump
    Economics
    Egypt
    Environment
    European Union
    Extinction Rebellion
    Facebook
    Falklands
    Fascism
    Feminism
    Film
    Free Speech
    Gaza
    Google
    Greece
    Greta Thunberg
    Guy Hibbert
    Hillary Clinton
    Hong Kong
    Immigration
    Internet
    Iran
    Iraq
    Isis
    Israel
    Itn
    Japan
    Jeremy Clarkson
    Jeremy Corbyn
    Jia Zhangke
    Johann Hari
    John Molyneux
    Jordan Peterson
    Katie Hopkins
    Ken Loach
    Kony 2012
    Labour Party
    Lawrence Hayward
    Libya
    Malala Yousafzai
    Marcuse
    Margaret Thatcher
    Marxism
    Mental Illness
    Music
    Myanmar
    Neoliberalism
    News International
    New Statesman
    New Zealand
    Niall Ferguson
    Noam Chomsky
    Norway
    Ofcom
    Osama Bin Laden
    Owen Jones
    Pakistan
    Palestine
    Paul Mattick Jnr
    Peter Bowker
    Peter Kosminsky
    Populism
    Press Tv
    Quentin Tarantino
    Racism
    Reality Tv
    Red Poppy
    Reith Lectures
    Rihanna
    Riots
    Robin Williams
    Russell Brand
    Russell T. Davies
    Scotland
    Silver Jews
    Single Mothers
    Sky Tv
    Slavoj Zizek
    Stephen Fry
    Stephen Poliakoff
    Stereotypes
    Strikes
    Suicide
    Syria
    Television
    Terrorism
    Terry Eagleton
    The Express
    The Guardian
    The Mirror
    The Sun
    Thomas Piketty
    Tony Grounds
    Tunisia
    Vaclav Havel
    War
    Washington Post
    Winston Churchill
    Wire
    Yugoslavia

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.