{"id":14713,"date":"2015-01-06T17:50:47","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T17:50:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-film-is-called-bitter-lake-it-is-a-bit-of-an\/"},"modified":"2015-01-06T17:50:47","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T17:50:47","slug":"the-film-is-called-bitter-lake-it-is-a-bit-of-an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-film-is-called-bitter-lake-it-is-a-bit-of-an\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The film is called Bitter Lake. It is a bit of an epic – it\u2019s two hours twenty minutes long.<\/p>\n

It tells a big historical narrative that interweaves America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia. It shows how politicians in the west lost confidence – and began to simplify the stories they told. It explains why this happened – because they increasingly gave their power away to other forces, above all global finance.<\/p>\n

But there is one other country at the centre of the film.<\/p>\n

Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

This is because Afghanistan is the place that has repeatedly confronted politicians, as their power declines, with the terrible truth – that they cannot understand what is going on any longer. Let alone control it.<\/p>\n

The film shows in detail how all the foreigners who went to Afghanistan created an almost totally fictional version of the country in their minds.<\/p>\n

They couldn\u2019t see the complex reality that was in front of them – because the stories they had been told about the world had become so simplified that they lacked the perceptual apparatus to see reality any longer.<\/p>\n

And this blindness led to a terrible disaster – support for a blatantly undemocratic government, wholesale financial corruption and thousands of needless deaths.<\/p>\n

A horrific scandal that we, in our disconnected bubble here in [the west], seem hardly aware of. And even if we are – it is dismissed as being just too complex to understand.<\/p>\n

But it is important to try and understand what happened. And the way to do that is to try and tell a new kind of story. One that doesn\u2019t deny the complexity and reduce it to a meaningless fable of good battling evil – but instead really tries to makes sense of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Adam Curtis – Bitter Lake<\/a><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re outside of the UK, do a search for iPlayer + VPN + proxy when this debuts.<\/p>\n

(via kenyatta<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The film is called Bitter Lake. It is a bit of an epic – it\u2019s two hours twenty minutes long. It tells a big historical narrative that interweaves America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia. It shows how politicians in the west lost confidence – and began to simplify the stories they told. It explains why […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3Pj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}