The Work of Adam Curtis

Why am I feeling the way I am feeling?  

Documentaries are an aesthetic I can't get enough of. When they're well made. Some of my favorite filmmakers work in this very field. Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, The Maysles, Michael Moore are just as exciting to watch as Soderbergh or Fincher. 

About six years ago, the docs of Rodney Ascher took hold of me. The theories of The Shining, sleep paralysis, the Screen Gems logo are some of the subjects he focuses on. Ascher injected life into these subjects. It felt like a fresh and invigorating way of documentary storytelling. The same way I felt when I first watched a doc from Errol Morris or the Maysle brothers. 

I stumbled onto this documentary being praised on Letterboxd, It Felt Like A Kiss. I watched the trailer and it stuck out. There were no talking heads. This was a good thing. It told the story of America's rise to power starting in 1959. There was a dread built up during the 54 minute runtime. Beneath the pop music selections were death, chaos. There's no timelines, actors or script. Jut archival footage cut together with text moving the story along from one parallel to the next. 

For my money, Curtis' documentaries are some of the most exciting art to come out lately. The more I dug, the better it got. Then I got to his 6 part docuseries Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the World. 

Collages are something I dig mucho. Well timed needle drops are transcendent when the editor is able to properly juxtapose image and music. When a montage flows beautifully, it's intoxicating to watch. Add to this, Curtis' narration on whatever topic he is addressing. What you get is something I've been wanting to see pulled off but haven't. Most of the montages I've seen are film centric. Some are pop culture. History, specifically 20th century history is something that has provided a bounty of interest. Bennett Media's montages of the 70s, 80s and 90s were the closest I've seen anyone come to encapsulating the feel of a time through montage and music. If we're talking about narrative features, 

Oliver Stone's JFK and Nixon come to mind. Curtis manages to take all of this one step further. He takes it into journalism. 

The subtitle of Curtis' doc is An Emotional History of the World. We have gone from a confident self to an uncofident self. Riddled with anxiety, fear and uncertainty about the future. If you were going to explain this, the exaplanation would involve what is going on in people's heads just as much as hat is going on in the society around them. Behavorial scientists like Daniel Kahneman are just as prescient as social movements. 

Why am I feeling the way I'm feeling? At the heart of Curtis' documentary, he attempts an answer. 

Adam Curtis is interested in the conflict of individualism and collectivism. We are living in the most individualistic time in history. We have a distrust of each other and those in power. Because of this distrust, we have become more invested in individual wealth than what is good for society. 

In an interview with Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo about the documentary, Curtis explains the organizing principle between all of the footage and historical figures he uses is "what happens to people when they are acted upon by powerful ideas from outside them. The tension between the forces outside us and what happens when those forces get inside our heads is the dynamic of our time."  An example of this is his take on conspiracy theories. Jim Garrison's theory of Time and Propinquity states that you can never know what power is doing because it is too hidden. So what you have to look for are patterns, links and coincidences. The internet oday has people scrolling hrough it searching for patterns. What Curtis argues is that we don't have any logical meanings any longer. What we have now are patterns.

The documentaries introduce me to a whole smorgasboard of songs. The Mekons' Where Were You?, This Mortal Coil Till I Gain Control Again, Song For Zula by Phosphorescent, You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes by Johnny Boy and a bunch more. Then you have the soundtracks to The Thing, The Fog, Poltergeist, Starman and Carrie being used. When you couple the archive footage to this music while Curtis' narration is going on, the result is euphoric. It's akin to how I feel watching GoodFellas or Casino or Boogie Nights. It's just banger after banger and makes you buy everything that's being said.

He's made a doc on technology with All Watched Over By Machine of Grace. Examined theories of human desire and how they're applied to platforms such as advertising, consumerism and politics with the multipart doc The Century of Self. His latest effort is Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, which documents the collapse of communism and democracy in Russia and finds Curtis dispensing with narrative voiceover altogether in favor of simply presenting archival footage. 

Where you can watch