Adam Curtis

Discussion and info on people in film, ranging from directors to actors to cinematographers to writers.
Message
Author
User avatar
MichaelB
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
Location: Worthing
Contact:

Re: Adam Curtis

#26 Post by MichaelB » Sun Jun 26, 2011 2:50 pm

Robin Davies wrote:Lovely Adam Curtis spoof here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
It's a shame the comments were disabled, though, as they were hilarious - Adam Curtis fans really don't have a sense of humour!

(Present company excepted, of course.)

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Adam Curtis

#27 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Jun 26, 2011 3:27 pm

The one thing that spoof doesn't have though is the motif of major political or cultural figures looking foolish in stock footage! I can't believe that chap's video argument without that (and he doesn't have the same seductive speaking voice). I also don't buy that just because you can't follow the argument that the piece is totally without worth (which makes this video very similar to the Guardian's exasperated/confused view of the latest series) - try harder! [-(

Maybe the video would work better if immediately followed up with a clip from the great, under-appreciated BBC series Don't Watch That, Watch This which showed that selective editing isn't just funny, it can reveal deeper truths too!

User avatar
Galen Young
Joined: Fri Nov 12, 2004 8:46 pm

Re: Adam Curtis

#28 Post by Galen Young » Mon Jun 27, 2011 10:30 am

Robin Davies wrote:Lovely Adam Curtis spoof here:
Thanks, that was hilarious. Won't change my opinion of Curtis' work -- I'm still a huge fan!

User avatar
ArchCarrier
Joined: Fri Oct 20, 2006 3:08 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Adam Curtis

#29 Post by ArchCarrier » Tue Dec 09, 2014 3:02 pm

Curtis will be back soon with Bitter Lake, "a bit of an epic - it’s two hours twenty minutes long."
I have got hold of the unedited rushes of almost everything the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan. It is thousands of hours - some of it is very dull, but large parts of it are extraordinary. Shots that record amazing moments, but also others that are touching, funny and sometimes very odd.
These complicated, fragmentary and emotional images evoke the chaos of real experience. And out of them i have tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan.
A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.
Here's the trailer

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Adam Curtis

#30 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Dec 31, 2014 1:27 pm

Here's the latest Adam Curtis segment from last night's 2014 Wipe programme, deveoping on his previous "Oh dearism" segment into an idea of 'non-linear war'.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Adam Curtis

#31 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:50 am


User avatar
ArchCarrier
Joined: Fri Oct 20, 2006 3:08 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Adam Curtis

#32 Post by ArchCarrier » Thu Jan 29, 2015 10:35 am


User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Adam Curtis

#33 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jan 31, 2015 5:30 pm

I loved Bitter Lake. It is very much of a piece with the previous Adam Curtis documentaries (particularly the soundtrack of John Carpenter and tracks by Burial), though it is also in some ways more ragged and fractured due to dealing with lots of outtake, B-roll, not intended for broadcast footage. In its messy, sproket-laden, burnt out, out of focus, roving footage it can at times feel a little like Decasia, albeit not as extremely decayed as that film! But that is what makes it so compelling too in adding a sense of versimilitude and beautiful (or terrible) imagery captured by chance, and it also adds to the big unstated critique (which I think is telling since there are a lot of stated critiques throughout!) of the film that there are all of these news crews shifting people into position or barging in on people before setting up their 'professionally composed' shot, showing how manufactured imagery is and that behind the image there is a crew setting up the circumstances, liaising with representatives, or sticking on a naively patronising screening of an episode of the BBC's Blue Planet series for Afghan elders to lure them into (Western) audience pleasing poses. And alternatively on the other side there are militant Wahhabi-styled fighters trying to create an extreme form of historical caliphate states who at the same time are filming everything, or having their intimidating press conferences interrupted by their mobile phone going off!

This is close to being an equivalent of Hearts & Minds for a century of conflict in the Middle East, especially in the brilliantly provocative late section exposing the complete failure of the British forces in Helmand province in Afghanistan to understand any of the different factions using them, instead just randomly killing 'the bad guys' and creating even more havoc.

I think this is perhaps the first documentary film to even begin to have tackled the complexities of international power politics in the region, perhaps because it deals with a lot of subjects that are likely still extremely sensitive now, particularly the subject of the United States's 'special relationship' with Saudi Arabia and also the UK arms industry's role in supplying such regimes (which is the kind of stuff that Mark Thomas was talking about in his brilliantly militant Channel 4 TV series in the late 1990s). There's a lot of amusingly 'incriminatory' footage in this section (some from the BBC children's programme Blue Peter!) of the President of Afghanistan being kowtowed to by Margaret Thatcher or the Queen, while Princess Diana follows on behind!

This film covers so many subjects yet manages to create a disturbingly coherent narrative out of it. Beginning with President Roosevelt meeting and pledging support to King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, something which Curtis's narration suggests kicks off the modern cycle of US support for the regime up to the present, the film goes on to cover the FDR style creation of dam projects to create fertile land (eventually to be used for opium poppies, showing that long before there was concern over terrorism coming back to attack Western countries, the drug trade was already doing the same thing); the repression of militant Wahhabism within Saudi Arabia whilst encouraging the same in countries safely further away, such as Afghanistan; the Arab-Israeli War of the 1970s and the oil crisis, which segues into the rise of the banks and decline of Western political power; the backdrop of the Cold War in the section dealing with the idealistic regime change of the Soviet Union leading to the decade-long war in Afghanistan; the Mujahideen giving way to the Taliban, Bin Laden and then ISIS. Of course 9/11 is in there too.

Throughout there is this overriding sense that the Western powers have a kind of smug, simplistic way of dealing in the region (from politicians to soldiers to journalists) which is perhaps emphasised by the lack of communication and use of outside imposed figureheads or pre-existing authorities to govern through, creating a supposedly comforting sense of self-rule but which seems to completely ignore the complex realities of the situation and seems to see the Afghans as a faceless mass to be herded like sheep (or destroyed like cattle) rather than individuals with their own lives and localised conflicts that might have nothing to do with anything going on on the national level.

The use of film footage is excellent too. I think I really should have chosen Carry On Up The Khyber for my war list in place of Zulu! And the use of the inscrutible sea in Solaris as a metaphor for the psychological effect that Afghanistan had on the Soviets (and the Western powers a decade later) is beautifully apt.

The structure of the film is fascinating too. It starts off in the mode of say The Power of Nightmares or The Trap with Curtis's confident and authoritative narration talking us through the historical events, yet after a couple of minutes of this the film is punctuated by contemporary narration-less B-roll footage of the current situation, say a sweep of a house or people getting forcibly retina scanned, or footage from a terrorist attack on President Karzai's motorcade, or a riot after a mistaken air strike. Then the narration will come back and the film switches back and forth between the two throughout. It is as if we are seeing the context that the ahistorical Western forces operating in the present are not privy too. Their obliviousness allowing for a certain degree of (self) protective cultural lack of awareness towards those they have to govern. And there is a lot of neocolonialist-seeming cultural trampling going on here from all those vying for power in the region, but particularly in the 1970s extreme tourism film, or the lady for some reason trying to teach a class about conceptual art! Balanced of course by the Taliban destroying sculptures and film footage. You've lost your heritage but here's a signed toilet instead.

It is a scary, relevant, funny, horrible, jawdropping and necessary film. And some of the juxtapositions of imagery from this discarded footage are shattering.

Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Adam Curtis

#34 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Oct 22, 2016 7:32 pm

The latest Adam Curtis piece HyperNormalisation tackles ideas of a connected world moving beyond the control of politicians through meditations on managed disillusion, reality undermining, corporate takeovers, Trump, Assad and Syria, Gaddafi, risk management through suicide bombings and cyberattacks, UFOs and Roadside Picnics, virtual reality and feedback loops. With an added layer of body horror from the aftermath of massacres to the mass aerobics of Jane Fonda workouts.

The section of the supercomputer facility managing risk reminded me a little of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series! I also love the imagery juxtapositions as usual - the almost synaptic-flashing lights of banks of networked computers reminiscent of the fireflies on the empty patch of grass from earlier in the film!

It is also amazing to see a piece which somehow manages to make one feel sad for Colonel Gaddafi, getting his grievances and delusions played into (with an amusing dig at David Frost attempting to do a Nixon interview piece on the Libyan leader!) and then being dropped at a whim.

I also loved that comment about the echo chamber anger for Trump "occurring in cyberspace, so it had no effect whatsoever". I wonder if that is a little self-reflexive point made by Curtis towards the way that his films are now only distributed online by the BBC rather than broadcast, and therefore having to vie for attention with animal videos and conspiracy theory pieces!

By the way, if you want to add a bit of levity to the proceedings this gentleman has created an Adam Curtis stock situations bingo card!

User avatar
Red Screamer
Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 12:34 pm
Location: Tativille, IA

Re: Adam Curtis

#35 Post by Red Screamer » Sat Jan 28, 2017 6:33 pm

Jonathan Rosenbaum's insightful essay on Curtis from 2008.

User avatar
DarkImbecile
Ask me about my visible cat breasts
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Re: Adam Curtis

#36 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon May 21, 2018 7:48 pm

Image
Image

User avatar
Omensetter
Yes We Cannes
Joined: Sat Apr 23, 2011 8:17 pm
Location: Lawrence, KS, U.S.

Re: Adam Curtis

#37 Post by Omensetter » Tue May 22, 2018 10:36 am

I need the visit the Filmmakers forum more often; I had no idea there was an Adam Curtis thread.

That that's apparently real is astoundingly awesome, as someone who addictively rewatches his documentaries.

I can actually see these appealing to Kanye given their digressive nature.

User avatar
DarkImbecile
Ask me about my visible cat breasts
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Re: Adam Curtis

#38 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue May 22, 2018 10:44 am

It’s amazing that nearly 30 million people (plus all those who saw the thousands of retweets) were probably just exposed to Curtis for the first time. If even 0.01% of those people actually watch some of his work, that’s hundreds of thousands of new viewers, which is an objectively good result (and an increasingly rare notch in social media’s plus column these days).

User avatar
solaris72
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:03 pm
Location: Baltimore, MD

Re: Adam Curtis

#39 Post by solaris72 » Tue May 22, 2018 12:11 pm

The link to the Rosenbaum essay a few posts up is now dead, so here's a working link.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Adam Curtis

#40 Post by knives » Tue Dec 15, 2020 6:58 pm

Just watched Hypernormalization, and I’m curious how this is any different from crackpot, half researched conspiracy videos like Zeitgeist besides the BBC imprint and veneer of left wing intelligence that comes with quoting artists like Gibson and Tarkovsky and get lazy pot shots in on Trump and Brexit? I literally can’t see the merit to this film and even Colin’s erudite comments don’t seem to develop a distinction unless one does, as it seems Colin does, view the film as an apocalyptic fiction based on the documentary format. This was my first Curtis, just to clarify.

User avatar
furbicide
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2011 4:52 am

Re: Adam Curtis

#41 Post by furbicide » Tue Dec 15, 2020 9:23 pm

What exactly struck you as false/questionable? I didn't know enough about Syrian history or the 1975 New York bankruptcy crisis to spot any obvious howlers, but have heard vague suggestions in the past of Curtis having a tendency to take liberties with historical narrative (albeit nothing specific).

But even putting that to one side, I'm surprised you see no merit to the documentary formally! I find Curtis's work and this film in particular really bold and exciting, and such a breath of fresh air from banal, artistically uninspiring (and, if we accept the critique above, equally dubious and manipulative) documentaries like The Social Dilemma – can't tell you how much I was wishing Curtis had taken the reins on that one while watching it.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Adam Curtis

#42 Post by knives » Tue Dec 15, 2020 10:50 pm

As a fiction I see much potential merit to the formal aspects. The larger idea of the film of humanity needing simple solutions and its willingness to hide from reality into its own self built one away from truth is an important one that he clearly conveys. To clarify myself, I see why someone could be attached to this approach as like all good conspiracies he makes it very attractive to be thinking that way.

Had he taken a longer view or more clearly showed his narrative as just a pocket I’d be more willing to see merit, but by so closely conforming to conspiratorial ideations it destroys that theme as now it is about the story. So what if he is a better filmmaker than Gibney or some other hack? If he ties the merit to his point and he renders his point grotesque what worth is there?

I’m not an expert either in Libya or any other things in the film, but if you, as Curtis seems to, what to make claims on documentary veracity then like with any other non-fiction work cite your sources and make your film verifiable to the layman. The way the film is told absolutely everything could be made up. I was half anticipating an Alexander Kluge, who does this thing in a far more clear headed way in my opinion, integration of unreliable narrator to be exposes.

I realize that a literal take on my suggestion of citing sources would be a boring and hackneyed film, but documentary as an artistic form if it continues to want to relay facts and be held as a valid voice in the conversation needs to learn how to make cinematic footnotes and works cited pages. If that’s beyond Curtis then that only serves to highlight the failure of his format.

I’m reading right now The Death of Expertise, thanks Dom for the rec a billion years ago, and in it he discusses in depth the need to trust experts, but also for experts to explain their fallibility in clear terms. Curtis, as far as I know, is not an expert of American or middle eastern history nor an expert in technology. As a result of his layman status he has an even larger responsibility to clarify his sources and admit his fallibility. There are many ways he could have done that, some of which I’ve mentioned here, and his failure to do so puts into question his whole film the same way a book failing to do so would undermine its authority.

User avatar
furbicide
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2011 4:52 am

Re: Adam Curtis

#43 Post by furbicide » Tue Dec 15, 2020 11:17 pm

I get what you're saying, but some artforms are more given to footnoting than others – I don't see that Curtis not doing so puts him in a fundamentally different category to most other documentarians. The same goes for, say, newspapers; we tend to accept facts in the quality press as given and don't have the opportunity to cross-check them unless we perform our own independent research.

So I guess, again, I'm just wondering if there was anything that specifically seemed inaccurate, manipulative or obfuscated to you. You say that it seems he is trying to convey a conspiracist viewpoint (which may be fair, though it wasn't my impression; I see his films as far more about a chaotic world spinning out of control than one with hidden puppeteers pulling the strings), that on its own doesn't necessarily invalidate anything he's saying; the world does, arguably, function in parts as organised conspiracy, if you consider that decisions that significantly affect our lives are made (say, between politicians and big business) behind closed doors on a fairly regular basis. If there are reviews out there (and there may be, I haven't looked*) that demonstrate that Curtis has, say, thoroughly misrepresented recent Syrian history and the development of suicide bombing as a resistance tactic in the Islamic world, then that would be damning and would diminish his work. But that's not what you're saying, right?

Otherwise, what makes him a great documentarian, in my view (and much better than someone like Gibney) – beyond his films' considerable formal merits – is that he presents the world in an unfamiliar way, makes interesting connections and zooms out on historical and current events to make an argument for how they might be linked. He is crafting an effective (some may say seductive) narrative. The same can be said for the best historical writing.

*Edit: I've found one here that perhaps echoes some of your criticisms:

https://lwlies.com/articles/adam-curtis ... d-tactics/

I think some of these punches land better than others. Yes, Curtis does have a penchant for generalisation, no question ("the bankers", "the politicians", etc.), and that is an obfuscatory trait. But the author also seems a little unnecessarily put-off by Curtis's bluntness: for instance, he disapprovingly citing the film's reference to Iraq War intelligence being based on The Rock (which in fact seems to have been 100% true, and was reported upon the conclusion of the Chilcot Inquiry: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... was-908984 ). Why not remark on such weird-yet-true historical events baldly, rather than softening their impact through appeals to "ambiguity" or "dual perspectives"? I also think the reviewer misunderstands Curtis's use of the hip-hop routine we see near the end, which I saw as more of a matter-of-fact comment on "how we live now", as subjects staring at our own performance (maybe it's ominous, maybe it's humorous; why not all of the above?). I find the director's use of archival curios like that interesting precisely because they are so often presented as non sequiturs – which, if anything, actually serves as a defence against accusations of didacticism. He gives us a didactic voiceover, no question, but the footage combines into something stranger and harder to pin down, not merely illustrating the claims. That's an unusual approach to documentary, and I think it's one of the reasons I find his work so fascinating. (It's also bizarre that the reviewer sees Curtis as an above-it-all, ideology-free centrist; to me, he seems quite clearly to be coming from a broadly Marxist/Marxian viewpoint, as is evident in his other work.)

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Adam Curtis

#44 Post by knives » Wed Dec 16, 2020 12:04 am

The lack of a verifiable component is the big sticking point for me, but to give a specific example, which I was intending to do before getting sidetracked, Curtis claims as a way to support his thesis that the comforting lie of the permanent Cold War led experts to not realize the obvious situation of the USSR’s collapse. In addition to some obvious hindsight bias going on by Curtis I had actually just read about that very thing in Nichols book. He talks about it only briefly, but as an expert gives a different impression. There were definitely many prominent voices that fit Curtis’ statement, but they were also speaking to other experts who did think something was up. In an ironic move for a movie warning us about our tendency to simplify things it has fallen into that same trap.

That’s a solid example, but I found other things more wrong faced. For instance a huge plot point is this self feeding cycle between Reagan and Gaddafi built on America deliberately blaming Libya for Syria’s crimes and Libya taking credit for the sake of attention. Those claims are all made through the narration without any visual support. Obviously the three players of this drama are real people, but it’s not clear what else is true. That it is all masked in this conspiratorial language where all malfeasance is deliberate and this hyper reality was intentionally sought out.

Conspiratorial thinking is an increasingly big problem and something which promotes it in my mind should be treated wearily especially when as is here it puts out old conspiratorial hands like banks controlling the world and it’s all connected babbling.


Maybe footnotes as in print isn’t for cinema, but the medium needs to develop verification language. Good newspaper journalism has ways of holding themselves to accountability such as accurately naming their sources and having resources on file to be brought out when things are called into question. Dan Rather was fired for failures to uphold journalistic standards. Where are those accountabilities for documentary?

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Adam Curtis

#45 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Dec 16, 2020 5:09 am

I am afraid that I do not have the ability to give a political defence of the work of Adam Curtis, but I would say that the thing that most attracts me to his documentaries* is often not so much any political point being made but the sheer verve and skill of the filmmaking on display. I find watching his work thrilling (which could be seen as dangerous in its seductiveness too) such that it papers over the cracks in the narrative where the critical analysis of the ideas should be stronger. Its more about flow and often cheeky juxtapositions of music and imagery, especially in the later non-televised, made for the internet works Bitter Lake and HyperNormalisation, and especially the installation piece It Felt Like A Kiss where the omniscient narration is minimised or even entirely absent and replaced by pithy surtitles under imagery that may or may not bear any actual relevance to the action, but are more free-associational in their linkages.

I would also argue that despite tackling extremely politically relevant subjects, Curtis's work has always been less about the 'flow of historical events and figures' (though he often uses such figures as structuring frameworks in the televised BBC series) than about the psychological thought processes behind the events. What people were thinking that made them approach the wider world with a kind of lack of humility towards upending things (Usually a classical British or American education in the best private schools! Only emphasised more when students come from around the world to study and internalise specific agendas to then return to their own countries and put into practice, with more or less success in doing so. This might be getting into the limitations of 'soft power' and 'Western educational influence' that are more implicit in the works however) and what caused them to take the 'real world' actions that shaped the world we all have to inhabit today. From terrorists, to Blair and Bush, to the men behind faceless think tank corporations, all have brought certain agendas (that may only have ever existed within their own minds) to bear on the world, often with bloody consequences. Its usually all to do with a desire for constant 'change' regardless of whether desirable or not. Which kind of gets into Curtis's later argument about 'non-linear war' that is deeply tied into media and how it presents authority figures, as shown by Putin acting in paradoxical stage-managed ways to always put any opponents on the back foot, which of course Trump later took to even more absurdist extremes.

In that sense the early documentary series purely focusing on psychological topics - Pandora's Box, The Century of The Self - are key, because Curtis has not really changed approach even when tackling subjects like the 2008 banking crisis or Iraq. Its taking a "what the hell were you thinking?" approach and then trying to illustrate both the cultural morass where people who eventually came to have power to manipulate things first began to formulate their ideas (often the mid 20th century post-WWII ideas of freedom, the medicalisation of emotional 'aberration' and psychiatry getting elevated into being 'cure all' solutions for normal human feelings of lack, despair and just sadness in general) and trying to try and point fingers at a 'Patient Zero' (in a playful manner, though it gets much less humourous when the actual 'Patient Zero' monkey in the rainforest beginning the AIDS era turns up) from which all of the dreadful ways of thinking that have so twisted the modern world may have sprung up.

That does get Curtis into the territory of conspiracy theories and ideas of cabals of people working to destabilise the world to fit their own blinkered agendas, and I think he is well aware of that, and how scary yet amusing it can be, in the nebulous use of overarching terms like "them" and "but that's just what they want you to think" throughout a lot of his narrations. But the thing that pushes him away from becoming just another Dinesh D'Souza for me (aside from the political leanings) is that Curtis appears enamoured/enraged not just by how people in positions of power have had shadowy agendas but more that they have screwed up implementing their shadowy agendas so much that they have actually fostered the chaos that they were putatively attempting to pre-emptively counteract! ("Or is that just what they want you to think?" :wink: ) Whether that is on the international stage (and especially in the Middle East) or in application of psychological behavioural theories to the population at large.

The average Adam Curtis documentary feels both despairing at the lunatics in charge of the asylum but also seems to find some sense of consolation in the way that even those in power have little sense or idea of how their agendas are going to play out in practice. The behaviourists of the RAND corporation in the mid 20th century would probably never have imagined how their ideas would be picked up on to shape the world by people with their own agendas. By that extension it is similar to the obvious lack of forethought in the invasion of Iraq for the consequences that would follow come about from simply wanting a simple bad guy to hold responsible for 9/11 (to divert attention from Saudi Arabia; and to consolidate a hold on oil; and to finally get rid of a dictator in Saddam under another pretext), which ironically only caused a new wave of Islamic terrorism to fill the power vacuums that were left in getting rid of the old wave of (mostly Western created) dictators.

The scariest thing about the world from an Adam Curtis documentary is that nobody can predict the chain of consequences that might follow from their actions (which might suggest a bit of humility is needed from politicians in terms of making sweeping changes), and it is only scarier in recent years when politicians such as Putin and Trump have put 'dangerous unpredictability' at the heart of their policy making to such an internationally destabilising effect (arguably the banks too).

It is also why I come at Adam Curtis's work as being quite Ballardian in its own way, in the way that it is a creation made by poring through stock footage, B-roll and music libraries to create a sense of meaning and a 'new world' out of a messily chaotic one where nothing makes (emotional or logical) sense. Curtis's narration often makes him feel a bit like the "T-figure" in The Atrocity Exhibition cutting up the 20th century and collaging it together again to try and make it 'more acceptable' in a psychological way
____

* And yes, the definition of 'documentary' as unbiased and purely objectively critically analytic is a whole area for debate. It is already tricky enough with your staid and classical 'talking head' style documentaries, where questions of who is being interviewed and how much time they are given compared to other interviewees, even how they are edited together with other footage or interviewees (where the next person we cut to may confirm, or completely counter, the previous person's comments!) reveal various agendas of the documentary makers. Or the 'selection bias' of what particular subject (or facet of a larger subject) is chosen to be focused on, and thereby elevated. And there are many other selection biases, visible and invisible which took place in the early stages of production. Even if those biases are approached as sensitively as possible, they can still be limited to who agrees to participate or who is alive to be interviewed, and so on!

But it has only become even more difficult to assess in an age of first person, self-shot vérité 'documentary footage' (which I would perhaps argue are better classed as 'primary source footage' rather than documentaries in themselves, because a documentary by its very nature is something which is taking raw footage and shaping it to a particular agenda. Although even that is more fluid now that individuals do not entirely have to wait for a benign documentarian to come along to shape their story and can now shoot and edit their own narratives themselves if they so wish), which both exist simultaneously to the purely activist (and extremely politically agenda driven) films (i.e. anything by Michael Moore or Dinesh D'Souza. And it could be argued that these documentaries are just glossier versions of people sitting in their bedroom ranting to their webcams, just with a bit of added CG pizzazz, actors and a theatrical release to illustrate their points better) which appear to have caused the upsurgence of the highly glossy 'dramatised documentary' in its turn, where we get actors re-enacting events, or even speculating on future events that may occur (The Age of Stupid comes to mind, with its shrill warning from the future from Pete Postlethwaite's figure)

All this is to say that the only bright spot of the current world situation is that I am looking forward to the next Adam Curtis piece that talks about this, and probably puts the events of 2020 in the context of his previous films, which had already talked more and more about the shift of economic and political power to an ever smaller group of people even before the pandemic caused mass unemployment, the closure and 're-thinking' of industries thought integral to the economy, and certain sectors making more money and consolidating power more than they ever have. Although in some ways he was already talking about all of this decades ago, especially the retreat of politics in the face of the rise of international, unaccountable, 'unaffiliated' (in good and bad ways) corporations promising the world (and more importantly the lifestyle) to those who buy (in to) their products.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Dec 17, 2020 8:14 am, edited 2 times in total.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Adam Curtis

#46 Post by knives » Wed Dec 16, 2020 6:39 am

And that beautifully explains why if the film had been more clearly set its goals as you explain them I’d be much more comfortable accepting it. Instead you have stuff like the Kanye tweet above which accepts the film in the way we’ve been trained to and I can’t follow you down the rabbit hole as I imagine if one of the two approaches is an outlier it would be your sensible one.

beamish14
Joined: Fri May 18, 2018 3:07 pm

Re: Adam Curtis

#47 Post by beamish14 » Fri Jan 29, 2021 6:21 pm

colinr0380 wrote:
Fri Jan 29, 2021 6:09 pm
The trailer for Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, coming to the BBC's iPlayer streaming service from 11th February.
I really wish there was a readily available Blu Ray box of the man's work. They always seem to be accessible via North American YouTube, but still.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Adam Curtis

#48 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Mar 23, 2022 2:06 pm

The latest issue of the RadioTimes has an interview with Charlotte Moore, the BBC's "Chief Content Officer" and has this tantalising brief bit of news about an upcoming Adam Curtis project:
RadioTimes wrote:She is also fiercely proud of a new epic documentary, made by Adam Curtis, in which he will create an "immersive" record of what it was like to live through the collapse of the Soviet Union and all the chaos, violence and corruption that resulted in the 1990s. And how out of that came Vladimir Putin. The footage comes from the original tapes that were used by BBC News crews who were sent out all across Russia from 1985 onwards. As they waited for a presenter or for politicians to arrive, the crews often filmed what they saw around them - a record of life for ordinary people, as a giant empire crashed all around them. Moore says this is an example of the BBC taking public service into a new area - as a different way of understanding the roots of today's geopolitical crisis.

User avatar
furbicide
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2011 4:52 am

Re: Adam Curtis

#49 Post by furbicide » Wed Mar 23, 2022 10:06 pm

Sounds very interesting and timely – can't wait!

User avatar
ex-cowboy
Joined: Fri Nov 01, 2013 9:27 am

Re: Adam Curtis

#50 Post by ex-cowboy » Thu Mar 24, 2022 11:00 am

Sounds excellent. I still have some issues with the content of some of the voiceover but visually and sonically his work is incredibly engaging. Maybe I should post this in the books/other arts section, but on the theme of the end of the Soviet Union, there is an excellent book (well, I haven't finished it, but it's very good so far) called 'Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More' by Alexei Yurchak.

Post Reply