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Adam Curtis

The Greatest Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of

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The Greatest Filmmaker You've Never Heard Of

The Greatest
Filmmaker
You’ve Never
Heard Of

Radical documentarian Adam Curtis has had a platform on the BBC for 40 years, yet nobody seems to know his name

by Michael Gaughn

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March 6, 2023

How can somebody be making large-scale documentaries about high-profile subjects on the BBC for four decades and still be treated as essentially an underground filmmaker? I keep asking intelligent, perceptive, otherwise attuned people if they’ve aware of Adam Curtis, eager to stumble across a single other being who shares my wonder at what he’s accomplished, yet always come up empty. After a while, it creates a Carnival of Souls kind of alienation, as if Curtis and his films exist in some parallel world where he just can’t be perceived. 

Yes, he’s a deeply radical, subversive filmmaker—but he’s on the BBC, for chrissakes, so it’s not like he’s shouting on street corners or plotting in some dank basement. It’s true, though, that he just doesn’t fit the BBC mold. Rarely using originally shoot footage, he instead plunders the network’s archives for evocative images and moments that often don’t literally illustrate his points but instead act in a kind of frequently ironic counterpoint. And the footage is often low-res and all over the map quality-wise, sometimes wandering into sub-VHS territory. There’s not a dime wasted on slick graphics, silly animation, or lame reenactments, the final product instead feeling handmade, like you’re looking at a rough cut instead of something meant for release.

Maybe most damning of all on a mass-acceptance level, you have to pay attention during every second of a Curtis documentary for the experience to mean anything at all. There’s no Felix the Cat redundancy between what is said and what is shown, and often the deepest meaning lies in an unstable zone somewhere between those two points; no Mickey Mousing of music and visuals, the cues and interludes often leaving you wondering what the music has to do with what you’re watching, and yet the pairings always feel eerily right.

He’s not pedantic, never telling you what to think or feel but instead laying out threads and urging you to follow them yourself, to make your own connections. He offers suggestiveness, not certainty—which of course couldn’t be more antithetical to the spirit of the age, where everything has to be an unambiguous guarantee, a trivial variation of whatever went before so the audience is never in any meaningful way engaged or challenged but instead left undisturbed in its slumber. But he’s never sloppy about developing his themes—there’s always a rigor behind what can often just seem like a bunch of “what if?” riffing.

The most ironic thing might be that, although he doesn’t follow any of the traditional rules of documentary filmmaking and doesn’t indulge in the kind of fawning Documentary Lite glibness that pockmarks Netflix like acne, his films are hugely entertaining, often laugh-out-loud funny, in a mordant, puckish way; moving without being sentimental; disturbing without being gratuitous. (The funniest bit might be Acoustic Kitty, a house cat the CIA spent 25 million dollars reengineering to turn into a surveillance device, only to see it get run over by a cab while crossing the street on the way to its first assignment.)

What’s probably most powerful is that Curtis’s films are documentary as art—or, more aptly, art in the form (or guise) of documentaries. His ability to create evocative, often unsettling, moods, a self-consistent and expressive experience that can stand on its own separate from the narration or even the putative themes, is astonishing, and ultimately gratifying. To use a word most people approach with distaste, his films are, in their gritty way, poetic, in a medium—the TV documentary—not exactly known for its poetry.

It’s symptomatic of his work that I can’t give you a single emphatic reason for checking it out. It’s the whole package or it’s nothing. But that package is endlessly intriguing and provocative, constantly wary of the official cultural narratives while never succumbing to the simplistic certainty that mars most radical work. It doesn’t pretend to have a definitive explanation for the unholy mess of the contemporary world but does offer a way of thinking—and feeling—it through. You won’t find it in any way reassuring but, if you’re open to the experience, can find yourself profoundly stirred without feeling manipulated. Curtis is bracing, not soothing, a way to be focused, made aware, not seduced.

And what does all this have to do with the modern tricked-out home theater? On a performance level, not much—on a demo-material level, nothing at all. It comes down to whether you have a theater because you want a machine for producing extreme sensations—a kind of shock generator—or because you love movies. Those two poles are becoming more and more antithetical, like split pieces of matter hurtling off into divergent sectors of the void. But if you prefer exploring the depths to skating on the surface, being engaged to being diverted, stimulated to being abused, Curtis provides a badly needed alternative to shock & awe cinema.

He never underlines it, and it just arises naturally from his work, but his films are a potent reminder of what defines the art of the movies, what lies (or should lie) at their heart. There are no stars, no sets, no exotic locations, no sumptuous cinematography, no dehumanizing special effects, no extravagance at all. Actually, it’s all about the editing—which might be his most subversive move, because it reaffirms that anyone can create cinema—as long as they have some substance to their self and something worth saying.

I’ve barely said anything at all about Curtis, and have unfortunately had to leave most of what’s best about his work unsaid. Unlikely to ever appeal to more than a subset of the film-going public, he seems destined to remain a cult figure. But where “cult” usually means half-baked or trivial, that’s not him. Curtis is must-see for anyone who’s a fan of movies and not just of movie-watching.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

Streaming Curtis

As with almost all content online, Curtis’s films come and go apparently at whim, and since many of them are multi-part, you can find yourself, as I did with Can’t Get You Out of My Head, having to go to six different sites to watch the installments. Curtis’s situation is more Whack A Mole than most, with All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and HyperNormalisation available for streaming on Amazon but with none of his other titles in sight. You can see The Power of Nightmares and some of his other work on the BBC’s iPlayer—but only if you’re in Britain. Some of his films have made it to DVD, but don’t tend to be available anymore. I haven’t come across any Blu-ray alternatives. The links below were live at the time of publication. Who knows if that will still be true even a few days from now.

All Watched Over by Machines of
Loving Grace, Pt. 1

The Century of the Self, Pt. 1

The Power of Nightmares, Pt. 1

Hypernormalisation

Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Pt. 1

TraumaZone, Pt. 1

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Review: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)

review | All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

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Another of Adam Curtis’s full-frontal assaults on contemporary culture, this BBC documentary is intensely cinematic throughout

by Michael Gaughn
February 13, 2021

Before diving in, I need to provide some context for why I’m reviewing a 2011 BBC series made up mainly of some pretty low-fi found footage. To the first point, when I stumbled upon this, Amazon Prime had labeled it as a 2020 release (which is when, I’m guessing, somebody spliced together the three episodes of the series). As for Point Two: This is, despite its lowly origins, the single most cinematic experience I’ve had in years.

Of course, I don’t need to be sold on watching anything with Adam Curtis’s name on it. He and Errol Morris (The Fog of War) are the two most innovative documentarians of recent times, and Curtis’s Century of the Self (about the rise of modern marketing—and social control—springing from the ideas of Freud’s nephew Edward Bernais), The Power of Nightmares (about September 11th and how Bin-Laden and the Americans essentially collaborated to create the myth of Al Qaeda), and HyperNormalization (about the consequences of embracing societal and virtual simplifications) are stunning, troubling, unequaled works. It’s impossible for anyone with an open mind to approach his series and not have their worldview turned on its head. 

To define my terms: Most of what passes for documentary filmmaking in the mainstream (and by mainstream, I mean TV networks, cable channels, and, primarily, streaming services—and primarily, within streaming services, Netflix) is really the bastard child of any legitimate documentary impulse, being more exercises in propaganda, marketing, and entertainment than any valid attempt to truly document anything. The filmmakers tend to know what they think and feel about a subject before they begin the project then spend the duration of the film continually reinforcing what they already believe, using their certainty and insistence to get you to buy into it too. 

That’s not Curtis. He poses things. While he has definitely done his due diligence, he also knows a video and audio presentation is a pretty flawed way of dealing with anything of substance, that, even if we won’t acknowledge it, we tend to go to media for a continual stream of diversions. But he also knows the importance of having an audience. So his series tend to be exercises in connecting up big things in unexpected ways, with some of those connections tentative, balancing his material between “this is” and “what if?” and, out of both a sense of responsibility and a desire to engage viewers in a way they’re not used to from TV, allowing for enough play that you ultimately have to think a lot of this through for yourself. 

Obviously, that’s a deeply frustrating experience for anyone who’s used to being told what to think or doesn’t want to think at all, which is why Curtis is frequently labeled a “cult” personality by both his admirers and detractors. (How anyone can have a recurring presence on the BBC and still be considered cult is a mystery to me.) For others, like me, his work is consistently liberating, partly because it runs so determinedly against the mainstream and so adamantly refuses to go to pat places. For all his well-seasoned British manner, Curtis is beneath it all a punk.

One more digression before I jump in, but it’s essential: Curtis is very much the child (or spawn, depending on your viewpoint) of documentarian Bruce Conner, specifically of his breakthrough 1967 short film Report, which used found footage from the mass media to offer an alternative take on the Kennedy assassination. The whole found-footage thing has become commonplace of course—stiflingly so—but nobody was doing it when Conner came up with Report, which treats its subject both seriously and with a deeply subversive wit.

Curtis creates knowing full well that we’ve literally seen it all before—and that’s his whole point. Yes, we’ve seen it but did we get it? Did we just buy into the bright, shiny surface and the pre-packaged context or did we maintain a skeptical distance and at least try to treat it on our terms instead of theirs? The frightening answer, for almost everyone watching his series—and this is Curtis at his most disturbing—is undeniably No. 

So Curtis isn’t for everyone (in fact, he’s for a pretty small subset of everyone). But everything he does is, again, intensely cinematic and, despite its sometimes harrowing subject matter, often entertaining—which helps explain his relative popularity. Someone could watch his series and not grasp a single fundamental point and still have a pretty good time.

The first thing I need to say about All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (a title I promise you’ll never remember) is that it’s hard to find anything to say about it at all—partly because it’s so damned hard to get your arms around (deliberately so) and because, if you allow it to do its voodoo on you, it will leave you literally speechless.

Curtis’s work could be summed up as meditations on society, self, and selfishness—which I say knowing full well I’m being overly reductive. But you’ve got to start somewhere. All Watched Over could be said to ponder the overemphasis on rationality and how it tends to be trumpeted most loudly by the most deeply flawed and insecure. It begins with a meditation on Ayn Rand and by its dizzying and wrenching conclusion shows the devastating (il)logic that leads from Rand, through various too-explanatory models like the various, inherently unnatural attempts to define ecosystem and the vast computer-fed breeding grounds of narcissism, to the emergence of the selfish gene and the sad and somewhat insane ends of two of its proponents, Bill Hamilton and George Price.

But is that really what this series is about? We’re also treated to a disturbing (and exhilarating) tour of the Asian financial crisis and the subsequent backlash that then spurred the American financial crisis; the heyday of commune culture; the rise of the cure-all of self-organizing networks—and, in the series climax, a searing, haunting, ultimately overwhelming recounting of the genocidal consequences of the West’s brutal meddling in every imaginable aspect of the Congo.

All Watched Over is far more coherent than I’m making it sound; it’s just not conveniently linear. It’s also pretty fearless. Curtis tilts boldly at sacred cows ranging from Rand, Alan Greenspan, and the Clintons to The New York Times, Stewart Brand, Dian Fossey, Richard Dawkins, PS2, and, striking awfully close to his home base, David Attenborough and the BBC. 

Try not to be put off by my description. This is nowhere near as abstract and clinical an exercise as I might make it seem. It’s not just engaging but compelling. Even if you don’t get everything Curtis is putting in front of you, you want to. 

And I have to again emphasize how kinetic this all is. Nearly everything we watch now apes the conventions of cinema while dancing comfortably along the surface, oblivious to or dismissive or scared crapless of the depths. Curtis instead grabs your hand and pulls you down to the levels that matter, encouraging you to consider both the surface and the roots, inducing a sense of both terror and joy as you realize the tremendous distance and intricate relationships between them—and how much we’ve lost by coming to invest all our faith in the superficial.

He has never so deftly played with images, with the conscious juxtaposition and manipulation of their styles, their resolution, with their ironic and sometimes incongruous wedding, using edits to create deliberate gaps in which we’re encouraged to insert our own thoughts and emotions. His deployment of audio is similarly masterful, with sound often creating a sense of dread that can seem out of place until you realize, with a shudder, where he’s heading. And then there’s his use of existing music, which transcends the usual, lazy “forget your troubles come on get happy” efforts to get the audience to tune out of anything potentially challenging and instead radically recontextualizes it in a way that reminds me of Kubrick at his best.

As brilliant as Curtis’s other work is—and everything I’ve seen of his has been brilliant—All Watched Over is the best thing he has done to date.  Surprisingly, given how much of his reputation (like Morris’s) rests on his wry detachment, it functions on a more direct emotional level than his other efforts—but that’s just one of its many, many layers. If it were primarily emotional, it would run the risk of becoming sentimental or self-righteous in a hipster sort of way. But Curtis somehow maintains a delicate balance between all the elements of his inherently unstable and inchoate material, jazzed to be dancing on the edge of the void, which gives everything he does the thrill of a crime drama, like he’s constantly just one step ahead of the law.

I hope this hasn’t been hopelessly confusing, because that would be a disservice to Curtis and his creations. But it would also be a disservice to pretend they’re simpler or less troubling than they are. At a time when we’ve actually come to prefer things we can forget about the second we see them, Curtis’s films burn their way into you, like a brand. They’re a reminder that awareness isn’t just an awkward vestige to be purged but an essential part of any inherently and meaningfully human experience. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is cinema by other means—possibly, at a time when the world is purging its birthright en masse, by the only means that matter.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Even though it’s a documentary made of often low-fi found footage, watch it in HD, if possible.

SOUND | And even though it relies on existing sources, the audio is respectable throughout.

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