Adam Curtis is a British documentarian who uses archival footage to craft sweeping narratives that attempt to explore the contours and history of the modern world. I’ve followed his work for years and, agree or disagree with his framing, I’ve always found his work fascinating and thought provoking. His newest 6 part series has been put on youtube by a fan and I suggest giving it a watch. If you want to know what it’s about, here’s some snippets from a review of the series from the Guardian: “Adam Curtis’s new series of films...are a dazzling, overwhelming experience. The six hour-and-bit long documentaries set out to tell no more and no less than how we got from there to here. “We” being largely the west, both under our own political, industrial and sociocultural steam and as influenced and inextricably linked to China and Russia, “there” being roughly the mid-20th century and “here” being the polarised, tech-crunched, fragile, teetering edifice we call “now”. ..... “Curtis’s overarching thesis is made clear at the beginning, perhaps to avoid accusations that a documentary-maker, too, can be one of the tricksters and manipulators of reality at which his creation is about to take aim. “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make. And could just as easily make differently – David Graeber 1961-2020” runs the opening caption.“ .... “The power dynamic, how it shifts, how it hides and how it is used to shape our world – the world in which we ordinary people must live – is Curtis’s great interest. He ranges from the literal rewriting of history by Chairman Mao’s formidable fourth wife, Jiang Qing, during the Cultural Revolution to the psychologists plumbing the depths of “the self” and trying to impose behaviours on drugged and electro-shocked subjects. He moves from the infiltration of the Black Panthers by undercover officers inciting and facilitating more violence than the movement had ever planned or been able to carry out alone, to the death of paternalism in industry and its replacement by official legislation drafted by those with hidden and vested interests. The idea that we are indeed living, as posited by various figures in the author’s landscape and (we infer from the whole) the author himself, in a world made up of strata of artifice laid down by those more or less malevolently in charge becomes increasingly persuasive. Whether you are convinced or not by the working hypothesis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is a rush. It is vanishingly rare to be confronted by work so dense, so widely searching and ambitious in scope, so intelligent and respectful of the audience’s intelligence, too. It is rare, also, to watch a project over which one person has evidently been given complete creative freedom and control without any sense of self-indulgence creeping in. It is always exciting to be in receipt of the product of a single vision.”
