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05/12/2005:

"The film US TV networks dare not show"

There will be no red carpet for Adam Curtis when his film The Power of Nightmares receives its gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. There would be no point: his film has no leading ladies who could disport themselves in backless numbers or lantern-jawed himbos to vogue fatuously before the snappers. Unless, of course, two of his chief protagonists, Osama bin Laden and Paul Wolfowitz, could be prevailed upon to pose together for the world's press on the Grand Palais steps.

"They did offer the full carpet treatment, but I declined," says Curtis. "I just had this horrible thought of me plodding up the steps and lenses dropping all around me." And yet the screening at Cannes is a great honour for Curtis. "They're suddenly talking about me as an auteur," he says. "I just think I'm a journalist. I do feel a bit like an animal in a zoo that's been put in the wrong cage and they'll find out and all go, 'Oi! that's not a giraffe, it's a vicuna!'" A vicuna, as you will know, is a llama-like ruminant.

Last year, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's documentary, described by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw as a "barnstorming anti-war/anti-Bush polemic tossed like an incendiary device into the crowded Cannes festival", won the Palme d'Or. This year something more discreet, but perhaps no less incendiary, is go ing to go off at Cannes in the form of Curtis's Bafta-winning documentary. Like Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith and Woody Allen's Match Point, Curtis's film is not in competition, but it is nonetheless this year's Fahrenheit 9/11, shaking festival-goers out of their aesthetic reveries with a political analysis of the causes and consequences of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

Curtis does not care for the Moore parallel. "Moore is a political agitprop film-maker. I am not - you'd be hard pushed to tell my politics from watching it. It was an attempt at historical explanation for September 11. You see, up to this point nobody had done a proper history of the ideas and groups that have created our modern world. It's weird that nobody had done before me."
Full:guardian.co.uk

Replies: 1 Comment

Friday, May 13th, deep thought posted:

great, another movie with some more lies and a little more truth. what a web they weave.

" . . . But among all the useful institutions, that demonstrate the superior excellence of the Roman government, the most considerable perhaps is the opinion which the people are taught to hold concerning the gods: and that, which other men regard as an object of disgrace, appears in my judgment to be the very thing by which this republic chiefly is sustained. I mean, superstition: which is impressed with all it terrors; and influences both the private actions of the citizens, and the public administration also of the state, in a degree that can scarcely be exceeded. This may appear astonishing to many. To me it is evident, that this contrivance was at first adopted for the sake of the multitude. For if it were possible that a state could be composed of wise men only, there would be no need, perhaps, of any such invention. But as the people universally are fickle and inconstant, filled with irregular desires, too precipitate in their passions, and prone to violence; there is no way left to restrain them, but by the dread of things unseen, and by the pageantry of terrifying fiction. . . "

- Polybius(born 208 b.c.) from "Rome at the End of the Punic Wars"