Project X: Laura Poitras homes in on the dark side of the internet

>Movie buffs who appreciate these allusions, however, will be disappointed to learn that Project X’s title comes not from the 1987 Matthew Broderick chimp movie nor the 2012 teen comedy

>>87863
>Matthew Broderick chimp movie nor the 2012 teen comedy

Project X (1987)
https://youtu.be/gHo8n-6GbIU

Project X (2012)
https://youtu.be/3BEIhA8CcY0

>>87862
>HyperNormalisation,Adam Curtis

HyperNormalisation: A new film by Adam Curtis - BBC
https://youtu.be/AUiqaFIONPQ

>33 Thomas Street is a 550ft skyscraper

Few film-makers, though, have adequately captured the dichotomous nature of the internet as something both omnipresent and entirely abstract, like the air we breathe. That’s what Citizenfour director Laura Poitras attempts in Project X, a remarkable new short launching this Monday on video-journalism platform Field Of Vision. In it, she zeroes in on a single building in lower Manhattan to reveal the invisible pervasiveness of internet surveillance around the globe

Co-directed by journalist Henrik Moltke

http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Moltke_(journalist)

Narrated by Rami Malek and Michelle Williams

Rami Malek and Michelle Williams are two of the most daring and exciting actors working today, and it was a thrill to collaborate with them,” said Poitras in a statement about the film’s release

>>87866

http://bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/02d9ed3c-d71b-4232-ae17-67da423b5df5

The cult doc-maker explores the falsity of modern life in his own inimitable style. Just make sure you put enough time aside to watch it

165-minute opus makes a feature of its sheer unwieldiness, as Curtis veers from social history to conspiracy theory via the odd rambling bar-room anecdote, like a man who’s two-dozen browser tabs into a major Wikipedia binge

He argues that an army of technocrats, complacent radicals and Faustian internet entrepreneurs have conspired to create an unreal world; one whose familiar and often comforting details blind us to its total inauthenticity. Not wishing to undersell the concept, Curtis begins the film with a shot of a torch shining limply into a thicket, so that viewers find themselves literally unable to see the wood for the trees.

The film embraces the peculiarities of online viewing, trusting that its audience – if confused – will skip back 20 minutes to refresh their memories, or supplement Curtis’s argument with research of their own. If its colossal running time means it’s unlikely to be watched in a single sitting, each viewer must decide for themselves how exactly to navigate the experience.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/adam-curtiss-essential-counterhistories

After nearly four decades making television and the occasional theatrical feature, Curtis has settled into his role as British state broadcasting’s grand maestro of Internet-bound, all-archival, contrarian agitprop

His films posit that the official history of the twentieth century—told to us by statesmen and newsreaders, amplified by the mainstream media in all its technologically enhanced forms—is the work of “managers of perception,” people who avoid telling the public the uncomfortable and complicated truths about the world in order to retain power within a status quo that isn’t ever quite what it seems to be

>>87877

https://youtu.be/bvKUN1a2AHE

>>87875

Moltke has also teamed with journalist Ryan Gallagher of investigative news site The Intercept to write an article

In a 1982 piece in the New York Times, architecture critic Paul Goldberger praised 33 Thomas Street as “one of the neighborhood’s few pieces of good modern architecture,” adding that it “blends into its surroundings more gracefully than does any other skyscraper in this area.”

“Other telephone company buildings from that era, designed solely for equipment, all look like horrible boxes,” Goldberger told The Intercept. “This one has an allure of its own to it. … There’s something about that shape. You see it and you don’t see it at the same time.”

Excerpt from “Project X”

https://player.vimeo.com/video/191716278

http://interc.pt/2eGLVYx