The Century of the Self

From filmmaker Adam Curtis, a four-part documentary series on “how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy”. Here’s part one:

And continue with the rest in this playlist. Here is a good review:

This is a powerful and arresting documentary series — I ended up watching all four episodes back to back in a marathon effort. It was that gripping. I had felt similarly about his more recent documentary about the rise of neo conservatism and arab fundamentalism and the similarity in their techniques for recruiting followers (and their mutual need of each other in that project) — but ‘The Century of the Self’ (TCS from now on), is much grander in its scope. It seeks to analyse the different conceptions of the self in the twentieth century, and how these conceptions were ultimately used by corporations to manipulate consumers into purchasing their products. Curtis takes large swipes at corporate capitalism in this documentary, but his target is even wider than this — he seeks to tell a story about the relationship between the differing conceptions of individualism and the capitalist, democratic institutions (corporations and governments) which organise themselves around these conceptions.

(thx, kyle)

• Adam Curtis
• movies
• psychology
• Sigmund Freud
• The Century of the Self
• video