Bitter Lake

There are a lot of very detailed and thoughtful reviews of this movie if you want more help determining if you should watch this film. I want to talk about how to watch it. Because you should, if you can stand it. I thought some of the information on the history of the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia and how it affected Afghanistan to be interesting and relevant.

But, as with a few other reviewers, I felt a lot of the footage was unnecessary and distracting. We learn that things aren't always as black and white as they presented to us in news stories - that the messages have been simplified to make it easier to grasp and perhaps to hide mistakes that have been made. But in this "experimental" documentary, the explanations are muddied with clips that perhaps are designed to make us think, but in my case a lot of my thoughts were, "What is the point of this?"

"Bitter Lake" could be an important movie if it were a lean 80 or 90 minutes long instead of 2 1/4 hours.

But if you try watching and find yourself losing patience at times as I did, or if you are hesitant to even start watching, I have a suggestion. Watch the screen only when the narrator voice-over is present. This will give you the bulk of the orderly, historical stuff. Look away when it shifts to people dancing, or a soldier balancing a small bird in his hand. Do text messages during the comedy movie clips, or when the camera focuses for 30 solid seconds on the death stare of a "freedom" fighter. Obviously, this will be more easily achieved watching at home than in a theater, and cost a bit less, also.

Bitter Lake is for the most part a history of interventions in Afghanistan by the US, the UK and also Russia since halfway the 20th century.

The film follows the extremist Islamic idea of Wahhabism. It was transported east through the Arabic world, influencing the formation of the Taliban, Al Quaida and ISIS. All because the US accepted the idea in the partners they dealt with while looking for oil.

It's an interesting documentary, told mostly chronologically. This allows Curtis to compare events through time, for example the Russian invasion to the more recent western occupation.

A lot of the footage that is shown is filmed in Afghanistan and this stresses the constant violence the land has to witness. Because of the many groups involved in each area, enemy is a diffuse term there.

The film is advertised as epic on the BBC Iplayer but could have been shorter. In the first half there were shots in between the narrative that could have been left out. But all in all Bitter Lake offers a perspective that is great at telling us something about the modern world and a lot about Afganistan.

This film marks a new era in online content from both one of the worlds great broadcasters and filmmakers.

Rather than be constrained by the formats of television and convention of breaking things up into mini-series (Curtis has already made several of such landmarks), Adam Curtis has been given the freedom to make a lengthy, challenging feature documentary that has gone straight to BBC iplayer.

The result is a departure from his usual heavily-narrated work to a much more impressionistic piece of cinema that uses the metaphor of SOLARIS for the incomprehensible Afghanistan and related middle east conflicts. Raw footage is able to speak for itself. Typically cutting-room-floor material, such as shaky re-framing between shots is used to express something of complexity, like reading between the lines.

The BBC's job is to be relevant and provide what the market is unable to do. Here, the BBC triumphs, Curtis having the shackles taken off has delivered a giant canvas of grey with various drip patterns, which is the perpetual mess of foreign intervention in Afghanistan and western policy in the middle east. The closer you get, the more complicated it is.

Labor, Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans all get a hiding in the cyclical mess, which is examined via the extensive BBC archives to Which Curtis was given full access to.

Some highlights include:

Art teachers sent from England to the Afghan war effort to educate Afghanis about Marcel Duchamp and the early Avant-Garde.

British "supermarket" for high-tech weaponry, set out like a luxury department store of big-toys whose customers are wealthy Gulf states. In Thatcher-era Britain, this was one of the most thriving industries.

Highly recommended. This marks a new era because instead of bite-sized webisodes, this is a very serious piece of long-form filmmaking being made exclusively for what must become the main platform for public broadcasters world wide (online content). Though counterintuitive to what we perceive online content to be like, work like this is vital both in-itself but for breaking new ground and showing us what is possible with the relatively new platform/medium.

Mike Retter

Adam Curtis is in the business of selling veiled conspiracies. Or better giving conspiracy arguments, while masquerading as reasonable. I like the drastic drop in narration. That is an extra point for a film maker like Adam Curtis. No more "those in power" without giving names or "political leaders" with no references. This time is a blend of footage stitched together rather nicely.

Sadly this movie remains an Adam Curtis product. Curtis has wonderful and strong powers of hindsight. So 30-40 years later the mistakes are clear. The facts are mostly circumstantial. The data scarce. Bonus: the silent parts are mostly irrelevant to the main story and they are brought only to enhance the emotion.

Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

People are immobilised mentally by gratefully clinging to the more glorious story of our attempts to rid the world of evil, to the extent that, as a result, they are no longer able to construct a sensible equation between what is being achieved and the suffering of others. We have become like the Germans were, over which we scoffed and carped and declared our moral superiority for decades, offering, as they did, nothing but adulation for the glorious troops and dismissing the treacherous thought that evil was being done. This is an important historical document confronts us under the pure rules of reason with an intervention by the British Crown in Helmand which was both a terrible and an act of profound evil because despite being told in no uncertain terms that they were about to attack a host of innocent people trying to resist the corrupt local government, we dropped bombs on them thereby turning appalling injustice into a catastrophe for the innocent by an act of supreme evil. The great point illustrated here, which no-one is really picking up, is that the mainstream news never told the country about this possibility, only of our honour and bravery and sacrifice in pursuing the Taliban, which turns out to be dishonest and unbalanced reporting, acting for the state, not the honour of the Press and Media. We can from these brave revelations that if something is not done then Big Brother and The Ministry of Truth will have got its way and vanquished our national sense of fair play and humanity. It is deeply worrying to our democracy and the plurality required of the Mass media that the BBC has prevented this programme from general release and that it will soon be lost to us because DVD's are not possible as things stand and it will be removed from its only source, iPlayer, worryingly for free speech the film has already been stopped on YouTube, what does that say? Adam Curtis has tried everything here to get through our complacency and to awaken us to what is really happening, and it is time that we told our leaders that they must stop and that an independent Judicial Enquiry over which the Government and Crown have no control be undertaken to root out those who commit these awful crimes in our names whilst skulking behind doors of secrecy. It shows that our democracy is a fraud as no-one would have wanted any of this in their name.