4/30/2005|||111490172634895934||||||

POWER OF NONSENSE GOES WEST

The "Power of Nightmares" PR offensive continues. I wonder if any bloggers will be around to hear BBC documentarist Adam Curtis being interviewed at the San Francisco Film Festival tomorrow? It would be nice if someone asked a few hard questions. Somehow I have a feeling that Curtis’s host is unlikely to give him the third degree: Film scholar David Thomson, who will interview Curtis on Sunday when the SFIFF presents the filmmaker with its Persistence of Vision Award for nonfiction filmmaking, called "Nightmares" the "most arresting thing I saw in 2004" and a must-see for "every citizen."

UPDATE: Just in case you assume that only raving right-wingers have doubts about TPON, take a look at Jonathan Raban’s assessment - part of an essay on 9/11 polemics - published in January in the impeccably liberal NY Review of Books. (I linked to it at the time.) Raban has complimentary things to say about the programme (“…it captures an aspect of its subject that has so far escaped even the most skeptical observers of the war on terror.") But even he admits that it is “best watched as an epic political cartoon in the manner of Daumier or Ralph Steadman. It freely bends the facts to fit its vision, it distorts, it overcolors, it grossly—and entertainingly—simplifies..”). Which is exactly how it hasn’t been received in Britain. And why shouldn’t UK viewers assume it's a reliable piece of journalism, considering that it came out of the BBC’s current affairs division?

Here, finally, is what Raban has to say about the portrayal of the villains of the piece:

Curtis's neocons—Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, the Kristols, father and son, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pipes, Michael Ledeen— might as well be equipped with masks, black cloaks, and vampire teeth.

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2005/04/power-of-nonsense-goes-west-power-of.html|||4/30/2005 11:51:00 pm||||||

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