Bitter Lake:A Political Narrative

Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker whose films are collages of footages from the BBC archives.
"Increasingly, we live in a world where nothing makes any sense,” says Adam Curtis.low.”  His film "Bitter Lake" questions the veracity of stories “Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow " 

He questions the veracity of the stories reported in the media and also explains why the big stories that politicians tell us have become so simplified that they no longer explain the chaotic and complex and disorderly world around us. "Bitter Lake (2015) is a political narrative which attempts to explain complex, interconnected stories of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, US ,The Soviet Union, and UK in a humourous way using candid unedited , jumbled up shots .Shots that record amazing moments, but also others that are touching, funny and sometimes very odd. These complicated, fragmentary and emotional images evoke the chaos of real experience. And out of them Curtis 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.

Though the story is about bloodshed, conspiracy and bitter ironies its charm lies in its wobbliness. Curtis has used archive film, he must have scoured virtually everything that’s ever been filmed in Afghanistan, and spliced in Solaris (the Russian sci-fi movie), Blue Peter, dogs, Carry On (up the Khyber), the Afghan version of The Thick of It . Then cherry-picked his vast record collection to lay on top … unless he does that first, then finds the pictures and stories to go with it, because music is not incidental, it’s very much part of this. Dancing, too, is important, often combined with witty juxtaposition, so that the dancers are dancing to the wrong music. While camels make the sound of boats … well, they are ships of sorts, I suppose.

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jan/26/bitter-lake-review-adam-curtis-afghanistan



https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/