Films with: Curtis, Adam

All watched over by machines of loving grace

A television series about how humans have been colonized by the machines we have built. Although we don't realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. Love and power: Traces the influence of Ayn Rand's ideas on American financial markets and the technology industry. The abuse of vegetational concepts: Investigates how machine ideas such as cybernetics and systems theory were applied to natural ecosystems, leading to the false idea that there is a balance of nature, and to human beings, in attempts to build societies without central control. The monkey in the machine and the machine in the monkey: Looks at the selfish gene theory and ideas of social evolution and how they may have influenced ideas of racism and colonialism, especially in the Belgian Congo.

DVD 11846

Century of the self

Four programs describing the psycho/social issues affecting 20th century consumerism against the backdrop of the development of Freudian psychology.

DVD 5507

Mayfair set

The programme looked at how buccaneer capitalists of hot money 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 London's Clermont Club in the 1960s. It received the BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series or Strand in 2000.

DVD 11847

Pandora's box

Pandora's box is a six-part documentary 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.

DVD 11848

Power of nightmares the rise of the politics of fear /

Explores the origins in the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today.

DVD 5858

Trap what happened to our dream of freedom?

What does freedom actually mean today? This series of films argues that our freedom is a limited kind of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was apparently derived from techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War. Genetic biologists, anthropologists, radical psychiatrists and free market economists took it further until it became a new system of invisible control.

DVD 10108