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Pandora's Box
1992 · TV series · documentary · 55 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Adam Curtis
Pandora's Box is a six-part 1992 BBC documentary television series which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.
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14 comments on Hacker News
See also the Phillips machine for macroeconomic modelling, demonstrated in the 1992 Adam Curtis documentary "Pandora's Box":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBuWUQ24vU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine
A more "normal" demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkNaZJmii28
> The release of Pandora's Box (1992) marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. His style has been described as involving, "whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics and arpeggiated scores, and the near-psychedelic compilation of archival footage", narrated by Curtis himself with "patrician economy and assertion".
Is this guy in fact the inventor of the annoying modern style of political documentary, where I have to listen to anxiety-inducing drones and the worst kind of movie-trailer voice, nonstop for an hour at least? The one used by shittiest propaganda tv channels? And for some inexplicable reason also borrowed by Youtube personalities that supposedly appeal to thinking, educated people in opposition to that propaganda tv.
It was very probably Zizek who talked about this. And definitely a talk rather than words I read. Sorry I can't be more helpful. For the Nuremberg angle then see Adam Curtis's "Pandora's Box" in which the trial of Eichmann is centre stage of one episode. Eichmann effectively cannot comprehend there was anything morally questionable about the 'final solution' and instead of apologies or reflection he repeatedly doubles down and hammers home his reasonable justification for the slaughter.
> I honestly can't tell if it's meta-parody. And that's why I'll keep watching.
I'm kinda in the same boat. But I think one of the things I like about Curtis is that he's made me read more about things I didn't know about.
For example I'd never given much thought about Afghanistan (other than Afghan coats) until the Soviet Union invaded. I was an early teenager (I'm in my mid 50s now), but reasonably interested in world politics, and even back then, and the Afghan war seemed like another cold war proxy conflict, and same old same old.
There were many events like that for me, and then I bumped into Curtis in 1992 and his Pandora's box series and I was sort of wowed at his take on the world. These wee snippets of, often obscure, history made tantalisingly accessible and fascinating by the way he assembles his final cuts, so much so that I went off and bought books on history rather than be informed by the opinion pieces in the Times (London), The Guardian etc. I will caveat that I realise history books are not free of bias.
Whatever he's doing I think it's a good thing. Sure he often reaches no conclusions but he throws many ideas at us to make us think. Maybe proper historians rue the day he got the cart blanch from the BBC to make these films and series and don't find them "academic" enough. And maybe his work is just a form of meta-parody art, but there's always something in these films to tickle your grey matter.
Finally, if anyone's interested in a docu-fictional story about the British Empire's comeuppance in Afghanistan the I'd recommend the first book in George MacDonald Fraser's "Flashman" series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashman_(novel)
Yes but the RBMK is still an irresponsible design: highly positive void coeficient, no containment, then the control rod misdesign which was fixed. VVER reactors (Russian PWRs) are much more safer by contrast. Of course it was profitable, it ran on natural Uranium and it was cheaper to build (no containnent).
You should watch the "A is for Atom" episode from Adam Curtis "Pandora's Box" series. It also talks about US designs and how they upscaled the naval PWRs to utility level which was not deemed safe by nuclear scientists of the time.
All his documentary series are worth watching. These are
Hypernormalisation
Bitter Lake
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Every Day is like Sunday
The Power of Nightmares
The Century of the Self
The Trap
Pandora's Box
The Mayfair Set
Inside Story
Inquiry. The Great British Housing Disaster
The last one is particularly relevant after the Grenfell Tower Fire.
Adam Curtis created a documentary that features interviews with Thomas Schelling and others quite a bit; talking about MAD and the nuclear strategy of the US during the cold war. The whole series is incredible IMO but part 2 is probably the best of them.
Pandora's Box "To the Brink of Eternity" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TRHcNDYpFU
Check out the rest of Curtis' documentaries as well.
One eyeopener was part of his Pandora's Box series, A is for Atom, where he looks into the buildup of nuclear reactors on both sides of the cold war.
In particular how said reactors, at least in the US, were basically (massively) scaled up submarine reactors.
There's also a good documentary about the lead up to various nuclear power issues in the Adam Curtis documentary 'A Is For Atom' :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Box_%28TV_series%29#Part_6._.22A_Is_for_Atom.22
Speaking of that I recommend watching Pandora's Box documentary. It is fun and pretty well made (although the quality on youtube is rather low).
Here is where they start talking about Gosplan -- the central economic planning department:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=h3gwyHNo7MI#t=1493
It is funny to hear how they tried to control things. At some point during Stalin's time they planned how many people to arrest and where. No matter if they were guilty or not. The it talks how they tried to modulate various controls -- they measured success by amount of raw material consumed, so all of the sudden they ended up with oversized couches, and trains were being run for thousands of miles empty just to burn the fuel so everyone can get a bonus during the years' end. Then they started to fix prices for everything. That ended in disaster of course and so on.
Then have to like the taxi driver driving past Gosplan and saying "how they hell do they come with such ridiculous plans".
EDIT: They also mention Victor Glushkov, the father of Soviet Cybernetics. Here is a documentary about him as well. It is putting it in good light as if Soviet Cybernetics used in planning would be successful. It is a propaganda film. But it is fun to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMS1hBhV2-4
He talked about paper-less office and economy back in the 60s.
This reads like an Adam Curtis documentary (a good thing), and several of the episodes of more famous documentaries touch upon some of the themes here.
The episode of "Pandora's Box" called "The Engineer's Plot" describes the rise of cybernetic thinking in the Soviet Union--less so the early resistance to it. It describes some of the insane rituals that developed out of the entrenched management hierarchies that computing was grafted on to. It effectively shows the endgame of the Soviet cybernetic experiment.
More recently, the episode "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts" of the documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" describes the development of cybernetics in the US and the resistance to it from environmentalists (outside the scope of the article). It gives portraits of some of the main characters this article talks about, though.
Except that farmers are also addicted to the hormones and other supplements that cause animals to grow larger and quicker, which in turn requires antibiotics to deal with the subsequent infections. Modern agriculture is on a downward spiral of alternating new practices with needing to mitigate health effects.
This American Life had a great TV episode on modern pig farming that I highly recommend watching on this subject. I believe it's this episode titled Pandora's Box:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-31gON1Ius
I agree, even if you don't agree with Adam Curtis's politics, his documentaries are very thought provoking and well worth watching. Some of my favourites include "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream", "The Century of self", "Pandora's Box", "All watched over by Machines Loving Grace". If you enjoyed this particular blog post, check out "The Power of Nightmares".
I have now finished The Living Dead and am halfway through Pandora's Box. Some observations with your permission.
Adam Curtis most definitely does not make music videos around conspiracy theories. He makes intellectually challenging documentaries based on absolutely stunning archive footage and refreshingly radical observations.
He seems to apply a kind of a dialectic method. For instance in the Living Dead he combines three quite remote subjects. The first episode is how the WW2 was painted as the battle between good and evil, while some think that in a war bad things happen at both sides. The second one is about cold war brainwashing techniques both in the U.S. and in Russia. The final one is all about how Margaret Thatcher bought Winston Churchill's dream of a Greater Britain. Looks like the last one is the point he really wanted to make and the two first are just preliminaries, although extremely insightful.
He is also obsessed about the relativity of truth and the feasibility of rational planning and free will. Which are not subjects readily emptied methinks.
And I don't find his voice annoying at all. So all in all, my first impression is extremely good and I have already recommended him to a couple of friends.