The Living Dead (television documentary series)
| The Living Dead | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Adam Curtis |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 3 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Edward Mirzoeff |
| Producer(s) | Adam Curtis Susan Gautier-Smith Annabel Hobley |
| Cinematography | Michael Eley |
| Running time | 180 mins (in three parts) |
| Production company(s) | BBC |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC Two |
| Picture format | 4:3 |
| Audio format | Stereo |
| Original release | 30 May – 13 June 1995 |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by | Pandora's Box (1992) |
| Followed by | The Mayfair Set (1999) |
The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past is the second major BBC television documentary series by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It was originally broadcast on BBC Two in 1995. In the series, Curtis examines the different ways that history and memory (both national and individual) have been used and manipulated by politicians and others.
This episode, broadcast on 30 May 1995, examines how the various national ideals and memories of the Second World War were effectively buried, rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War era, only to violently resurface later with events such as the protests of 1968, the emergence of the Red Army Faction, and the turmoil of the Yugoslav Wars.
For Germany, this process began at the Nuremberg Trials, where the use of the film The Nazi Plan was intended to reveal the criminality of the Nazi state, and attempts were made to prevent defendants—principally Hermann Göring—from providing any rational or contextualized argument for their actions during the war. Subsequently, however, bringing lower-ranking Nazis to justice was all but forgotten in the interests of maintaining West Germany as an important new ally in the Cold War. For the Allies, faced with a new enemy in the Soviet Union, there was a need to portray World War II as a crusade of pure good against pure evil, even if this meant creating a mismatch by denying the memories of the individual soldiers who had actually done the fighting and knew it to have been far more ambiguous.
The title of this episode comes from a veteran's description of the uncertainty of survival in combat. A number of American veterans related how, years later, they found themselves plagued with previously-suppressed memories of the brutal things they had seen and done.
In this episode, broadcast on 6 June 1995, the early history of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) use of brainwashing and mind control is examined. Its thesis is that a search for control over the past, via medical intervention, had to be abandoned, and that in modern times, control over the past is more effectively exercised by the manipulation of history. It concludes that despite successful attempts to remove memories of the past, doing so often left an emotional void that was hard to refill.
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