FILM: 'Bitter Lake'
Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 4:42 pmFILM: 'Bitter Lake'
[ http://thetyee.ca/Culture/2015/02/13/Bi ... ign=160215 ]
Adam Curtis's new epic, 'the story of Afghanistan,' is a veritable sea of images, music and ideas.
By Dorothy Woodend, 13 Feb 2015, TheTyee.ca
Adam Curtis's newest film Bitter Lake was released online a couple of weeks ago. In the words of the filmmaker, it is "the story of Afghanistan and what has happened there over the past 60 years."
If you're familiar with Curtis's previous work (The Century of the Self, The Trap), you know what to expect. Bitter Lake employs similar techniques of historical mashup, music, and a barrage of ideas and images, with Curtis narrating in the milk-pale accent that comes from a formidable English education.
The film had its premiere at the Rotterdam Festival before being released on the BBC iPlayer, and the timing is curiously ideal. Stories about people being beheaded, thrown from buildings or burned alive flood the news. How did we come to this place? If you want a detailed, almost to a fault, explanation of how ISIS came to be, Bitter Lake is an excellent primer on the rise of fundamental extremism, beginning in the sands of Saudi Arabia.
The death of King Abdullah a few weeks back suddenly brought the Kingdom of Saud back into the news. But Curtis's argument is that the Saudis were there all along and have played a very large role in the increasingly violent and unstable world in which we now find ourselves. He summed it up in an article for the Telegraph:
"In 1929, the King of Saudi Arabia machine-gunned many of the Wahhabist radicals in the bleak sand dunes of Arabia because they wanted to go on and create a caliphate across the Islamic world. Ever since then, the Saudi royal family have tried to deal with this unstable force by exporting it beyond their borders. Bitter Lake shows how, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Saudis encouraged its young radicals to go and fight in Afghanistan. They brought Wahhabist ideas with them to the camps in the mountains. To begin with those ideas lay dormant -- but when Afghanistan collapsed into chaos in the 1990s, Wahhabism became more and more influential. It powerfully influenced bin Laden's thinking -- and then spread further, through the chaos of Iraq after 2003. As it did so, it reverted to the dream of creating a caliphate based on an imagined vision of the past. Out of this has come ISIS and the horrors in northern Syria. And ISIS, with its stark simplification of the world into black and white, is just the enemy that fits with the Western political vision. The jihadists and our leaders are locked together into a bubble that divides the world into Goodies and Baddies."
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Sinking in
The film takes its title from a meeting held between King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and Franklin D. Roosevelt on a boat in the middle of the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal. The meeting took place not long after another curious get-together between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt (the Yalta Conference). Both events had a rather significant impact on the state of world history. At Bitter Lake, the U.S. and the Saudis signed a secret agreement that guaranteed the U.S. would receive secure access to oil and in exchange the Saudis would benefit from American military expertise. But there are two meanings to the title of Curtis's film: the first is readily apparent; the second more oblique, referring as it does to the body of water at the centre of Andrei Tarkovsky's science fiction epic, Solaris.
MORE:
[ http://thetyee.ca/Culture/2015/02/13/Bi ... ign=160215 ]
[ http://thetyee.ca/Culture/2015/02/13/Bi ... ign=160215 ]
Adam Curtis's new epic, 'the story of Afghanistan,' is a veritable sea of images, music and ideas.
By Dorothy Woodend, 13 Feb 2015, TheTyee.ca
Adam Curtis's newest film Bitter Lake was released online a couple of weeks ago. In the words of the filmmaker, it is "the story of Afghanistan and what has happened there over the past 60 years."
If you're familiar with Curtis's previous work (The Century of the Self, The Trap), you know what to expect. Bitter Lake employs similar techniques of historical mashup, music, and a barrage of ideas and images, with Curtis narrating in the milk-pale accent that comes from a formidable English education.
The film had its premiere at the Rotterdam Festival before being released on the BBC iPlayer, and the timing is curiously ideal. Stories about people being beheaded, thrown from buildings or burned alive flood the news. How did we come to this place? If you want a detailed, almost to a fault, explanation of how ISIS came to be, Bitter Lake is an excellent primer on the rise of fundamental extremism, beginning in the sands of Saudi Arabia.
The death of King Abdullah a few weeks back suddenly brought the Kingdom of Saud back into the news. But Curtis's argument is that the Saudis were there all along and have played a very large role in the increasingly violent and unstable world in which we now find ourselves. He summed it up in an article for the Telegraph:
"In 1929, the King of Saudi Arabia machine-gunned many of the Wahhabist radicals in the bleak sand dunes of Arabia because they wanted to go on and create a caliphate across the Islamic world. Ever since then, the Saudi royal family have tried to deal with this unstable force by exporting it beyond their borders. Bitter Lake shows how, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Saudis encouraged its young radicals to go and fight in Afghanistan. They brought Wahhabist ideas with them to the camps in the mountains. To begin with those ideas lay dormant -- but when Afghanistan collapsed into chaos in the 1990s, Wahhabism became more and more influential. It powerfully influenced bin Laden's thinking -- and then spread further, through the chaos of Iraq after 2003. As it did so, it reverted to the dream of creating a caliphate based on an imagined vision of the past. Out of this has come ISIS and the horrors in northern Syria. And ISIS, with its stark simplification of the world into black and white, is just the enemy that fits with the Western political vision. The jihadists and our leaders are locked together into a bubble that divides the world into Goodies and Baddies."
- - - - SNIP - - - -
Sinking in
The film takes its title from a meeting held between King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and Franklin D. Roosevelt on a boat in the middle of the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal. The meeting took place not long after another curious get-together between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt (the Yalta Conference). Both events had a rather significant impact on the state of world history. At Bitter Lake, the U.S. and the Saudis signed a secret agreement that guaranteed the U.S. would receive secure access to oil and in exchange the Saudis would benefit from American military expertise. But there are two meanings to the title of Curtis's film: the first is readily apparent; the second more oblique, referring as it does to the body of water at the centre of Andrei Tarkovsky's science fiction epic, Solaris.
MORE:
[ http://thetyee.ca/Culture/2015/02/13/Bi ... ign=160215 ]