A Balanced view of History
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 3:49 pmWriter and Producer Adam Curtis in an interview with Errol Morris in 2005:
I’m very suspicious of this idea of a balanced version of history, All history is a construction – often by the powerful. What I do is construct an imaginative interpretation of history to make people look again at what they think they know. I like to ask people, “Have you thought of this?” Like zooming up in a helicopter and looking at the ground, looking at the world in a new way. Because I think that so much of this interpretation of events is a deadening repetition agreed upon by certain people, a sort of collectivity of news reports. And often it’s completely wrong. But somehow, they all agree on it. People criticized my film by saying things like, “Why aren’t you balanced? What aren’t you putting in the other views?” And my response was, “What if the other view is wrong?” That’s the real problem of the balanced view - what’s called ‘perceived wisdom.’ What if perceived wisdom’s wrong? What if – when you go and look at the evidence for sleeper cells in America – there doesn’t appear to be anything there? You know, that’s the difficult area. And so it becomes up to you to judge whether to go against perceived wisdom or not.
This is just one thought captured in a long and interesting discussion. Both of these film-makers are fascinating people. I love Curtis’s philosophy of looking at History as the unintended consequences of ideas. That’s an idea which resonates powerfully in The Century of the Self as well as The Power of Nightmares which is the subject of this interview.
