Pandora's Box | |
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Title screen
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Written by | Adam Curtis |
Directed by | Adam Curtis |
Theme music composer |
Jon King Andy Gill |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Original language(s) | English |
No. of series | 1 |
No. of episodes | 6 |
Production | |
Executive producer(s) | Edward Mirzoeff |
Producer(s) | Adam Curtis Daniel Reed |
Running time | 360 mins (in six parts) |
Production company(s) | BBC |
Release | |
Original network | BBC Two |
Picture format | 4:3 |
Audio format | Mono |
Original release | 11 June | – 16 July 1992
Chronology | |
Followed by | The Living Dead (1995) |
Pandora's Box, subtitled A Fable From the Age of Science, is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis looking at the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. It won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 1993.
Curtis deals with, in order: Communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy of the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana in the 1950s, and the history of nuclear power.
The documentary makes extensive use of clips from the short film Design for Dreaming, especially in the title sequence. Curtis's later series The Century of the Self and The Trap have similar themes to Pandora's Box.
This episode, originally broadcast on 11 June 1992, details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialise and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, including a social engineering machine, to make people more rational.