Pandora's Box (1992)

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Pandora's Box (1992)

Postby <insert> on Thu Jul 21, 2005 3:29 pm

Pandora's Box (1992)
Series by Adam Curtis

Image


IMDb

DivX, 640x480 46 mins x 6 episodes

Rebroadcast 2005 on UKTVHistory

01 The Engineer's Plot.

The revolutionaries who toppled the Tsar in 1917 thought science held the key to
their new world. In fact, it ended up creating a bewildering world for millions
of Soviet people. In this light-hearted investigation, one industrial planner
tells how she decided the people wanted platform shoes, only to discover that
they had gone out of fashion by the time that the factory to manufacture them
had been built.

02 To The Brink of Eternity.

Focusing on the men of the Cold War on whom 'Dr Strangelove' was based. These
were people who believed that the world could be controlled by the scientific
manipulation of fear - mathematical geniuses employed by the American Rand
Corporation. In the end, their visions were the stuff of science fiction
fantasy.

03 The League of Gentlemen.

Thirty years ago, a group of economists managed to convince British politicians
that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain great again. Pandora's
Box tells the saga of how their experiments have led the country deeper into
economic decline, and asks - is their game finally up?

04 Goodbye Mrs Ant.

A modern fable about science and society, focusing on our attitude to nature.
Should we let scientists be the prime movers of social or political change when,
for instance, DDT made post-war heroes of American scientists only to be put on
trial by other scientists in 1968? What kind of in-fighting goes on between
rival camps before one scientific truth emerges, and when it does emerge, just
how true is it?


05 Black Power.

A look at how former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah set Africa ablaze with his
vision of a new industrial and scientific age. At the heart of his dream was to
be the huge Volta dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an
advanced utopia. But as his grand experiment took shape, it brought with it
dangerous forces Nkrumah couldn't control, and he slowly watched his metropolis
of science sink into corruption and debt.

06 A is For Atom.

An insight into the rise and fall of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and
politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source
of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the
Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants.
Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl which changed views
on the safeness of this invisible fuel.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For 15 years, Adam Curtis has concentrated on a cultural history behind the
politics of the 20th century and beyond. In 1992, he made Pandora's Box, six
"fables" on the consequences (often dangerous) of political and technocratic
rationality, especially when used to crush common sense and a clear reporting of
the facts. Nothing concerns Curtis more than the way public relations and spin
doctoring have become ways of masking the true nature of modern history - and
nothing is so vital to the new forms of modern bureaucratic totalitarianism, the
dulcet "order" that has come to fill the ground left by fascism and communism.
In other words, the "enlightened" problem solving favored in the most advanced
countries, but employed to obfuscate democratic impulses.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adam Curtis is a British television documentary producer. He currently works for
BBC Current Affairs. The Guardian wrote:

[Curtis] is perhaps the most acclaimed maker of serious television
programmes in Britain. His trademarks are long research, the revelatory use
of archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth, insistent voiceovers
concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents of recent history, narrated by
Curtis himself in tones that combine traditional BBC authority with
something more modern and sceptical: "I want to try to make people look at
things they think they know about in a new way." [1]
( http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/sto ... 04,00.html )

Curtis's intensive use of archive footage is a distinctive touch of his. An
Observer profile notes:

Curtis has a remarkable feel for the serendipity of such moments, and an
obsessive skill in locating them. 'That kind of footage shows just how dull
I can be,' he admits, a little glumly. 'The BBC has an archive of all these
tapes where they have just dumped all the news items they have ever shown.
One tape for every three months. So what you get is this odd collage, an
accidental treasure trove. You sit in a darkened room, watch all these
little news moments, and look for connections.'

The Observer adds "if there has been a theme in Curtis's work since, it has been
to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times,
and the tragi-comic consequences of those attempts."

History

Curtis previously taught politics at Oxford University but left for a career in
television. He got a job on the show That's Life where he learned to find humor
in serious subjects. He went on to make documentaries on more serious subjects
but retained his playful tone.

Works

1992: Pandora's Box examined the apocalyptic political fallout of nuclear
scienc. It received the BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series. [2]
( http://print.google.com/print/doc?articleid=93LUFMjZ7HC )

1995: The Living Dead argued that fighting World War II was a mistake and
questioned how history is written.

1999: The Mayfair Set looked at how buccaneer capitalists were allowed to shape
the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David
Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, all members of The
Claremont club in the 1960s. It received the BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series
or Strand in 2000. [3] ( http://www.bafta.org/television/archive_2000.htm )

2002: The Century Of The Self (BBC Four) documented the rise of Freud's
individualism led to Edward Bernays's consumerism. It received the Broadcast
Award for Best Documentary Series and the Longman-History Today Award for
Historical Film of the Year.

2004: The Power of Nightmares (BBC Two) drew parallels between the rise of
Islamic terrorists and the US neoconservatives who exploited the terror they
created.





AVI File Details
========================================
Name.........: Pandora's Box 01 The Engineer's Plot.avi
Filesize.....: 391 MB (or 400,677 KB or 410,293,808 bytes)
Runtime......: 00:44:06 (66,157 fr)
Video Codec..: DivX 5.0
Video Bitrate: 1104 kb/s
Audio Codec..: 0x0055(MP3) ID'd as MPEG-1 Layer 3
Audio Bitrate: 128 kb/s (64/ch, stereo) VBR
Frame Size...: 704x528 (1.33:1) [=4:3]
Language.....: English

tv cap - has small watermark





ed2k: Pandora's.Box.nfo  [6.6 Kb] [Stats]
ed2k: Pandora's.Box.01.The.Engineer's.Plot.avi  [391.29 Mb] [Stats]
ed2k: Pandora's.Box.02.To.The.Brink.of.Eternity.avi  [374.67 Mb] [Stats]
ed2k: Pandora's.Box.03.The.League.of.Gentlemen.avi  [373.54 Mb] [Stats]
ed2k: Pandora's.Box.04.Goodbye.Mrs.Ant.avi  [400.23 Mb] [Stats]
ed2k: Pandora's.Box.05.Black.Power.avi  [406.64 Mb] [Stats]
ed2k: Pandora's.Box.06.A.is.For.Atom.avi  [374.00 Mb] [Stats]


torrent: @ UKNova



earlier work from the same guy who bought us The Century Of The Self & The Power of Nightmares.

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Postby <insert> on Sun Jan 28, 2007 5:55 pm

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