All Roll Is B-Roll: Adam Curtis Goes Quiet
thedriftmag.com
thedriftmag.com
This passage, which I see as being core to the author’s critique, doesn’t really jive with me. Basically he’s saying these movies are enigmatic, they offer space for reflection, they resonate with a lot of people across the ideological spectrum.
Well, you can look at that cynically, or you could say that’s precisely — almost definitionally — what makes them effective art.
To go a little further than that: I don’t think it’s a fair claim. Each of his movies since Bitter Lake have had the same general arc of “emerging ideological apparatus promises to resolve social contradictions and empower the common person, fails to do so.” In this sense, his narrative angle is broadly _anti-confirmatory_.
Then there’s the aesthetic critique, which, whatever. I really can’t fault someone for finding fault with Adam Curtis’s style. And it’s least overbearing in TraumaZone out of all his movies I’ve seen, so I get why this author favors it.
As it happens, I’m about halfway through TraumaZone right now. It’s great. Poses some interesting questions, doesn’t offer any easy answers.
In TraumaZone the subtitle explains what he wants to do this time, "Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy". He wants only that you get a feeling of what it was like to experience what these people experienced and he does that incredibly well as far as I can judge.
From TFA:
> And yet this is hardly a sufficient explanation.
I find it incredible that this isn't sufficient for the author. It fits with everything!
But the author's focus on ambience, Eno and what he calls "texture" I think misses the point. I appreciate Curtis's eschewing of an explicit "voice of God" narration, like you get in most PBS documentaries. The Rorschach Test forces you to peer into the murk; you can't consume these documentaries passively.
That is, they make you think. That different viewers can come away with different takes on a film is a good thing, not a criticism. I think the author is unduly dismissive.
Also Marxist by extension, because Curtis is taking after Debord and baudeillard: wafting underneath it all is a vapor,the commoditization of everything, the flattening of reality, mass media as a factory for dispositions.
Fwiw - I don't necessarily see the great man view, it's more a Ted talky way of anchoring his stories. E.g. sure Clinton xyz, but could just as well be interchangeable usa president xyz.
This in itself is an aspect that should not be undervalued.
I feel like I wouldn't have known about the whole Gadaffi situation if not for Hypernomalisation, but then it's a singular example.
Dutch classified people into Tutsi and Hutu, and how their records helped Hutu find and exterminate Tutsi. The big gotcha being Tutsi and Hutu were genetically similar people with some slight differences.
I challenge you to find a serious political commentator who can identify a coherent vision that governed the administration's decisions beyond "whatever gets my approval rating up".
Most news stories have 30 seconds of footage, and loop it repeatedly. No historical footage, no old interviews being brought up, nothing filmed to help put a story into context.
Even many documentaries I watch, suffer the same problem, a bit of real footage, then jumping straight to interviews with people. Not much historical footage, nothing extra filmed, expect interviews with people.
It's fantastic. It's a picture into Russia over a period of time, and while not comprehensive, it tells a story of the history of Russia through footage taken at the time.
I'd love Adam Curtis to release a version of it with his trademark narration/music/style
Curtis's films are highly enjoyable for me, but much more art than argument. I find the criticism is valid.
That, and as you write: they’re art films; being frustrated as the author was for their lack of clarity or specificity as if they should’ve been straight documentaries is silly. If anything, many documentaries engage in a false determinism where their chosen subject matter is 100% consequential in the slice of history they’re exploring – something Curtis’ work doesn’t do by instead leaving the totality of recent history as a paradoxically more accurate haze of loosely connected events with unknowable detail.
The author takes on a ridiculing tone, painting Curtis as having big ideas but being too naive and infantile to actually develop them, a 16 year old raging at the shadowy elites, it's the system man, puts on RATM. That's the whole content of the critique, especially the first 3/4.
Which is fine, I can see that. And yet. Curtis _does_ have big ideas, just chooses to develop them in an impressionistic manner. He's an artist in a way, a polemicist maybe, philosopher certainly.
The writer is (for now) facing one of his betters, yet intuitively senses something is off, awash in a slight sense of superiority. The way this usually arises is because he's likely saturated by Curtis work, and has "cracked the code", the stylistic choices, the narrative structure. The veil has fallen, and now, as a God, he only sees the void. But that's because he's fully internalized Curtis' message, there's nothing new for him there anymore.
These critiques of Curtis could be parodied just as much as his films.
This one takes his decision to not use his voice as the starting point, but doesn’t really come back around to it in any really meaningful way.
Brautigan's story was a tragic one, and in this poem's suggested naïve future vision - in which the machines we build actually do as we might imagine they ought - maybe suggests that he would never be satisfied by the way in which the world really worked out.
I am a huge and unapologetic fan of Adam Curtis. In All Watched Over, he argues that borderline psychopaths, in the thrall of Ayn Rand's poisonous ideas, built American capitalism. It seems as good a thesis as any, to me.
What I'd like to see is some concrete examples of things Adam Curtis gets wrong.
Unfortunately the article referenced doesn't appear to have the goods, and the crux of it appears to be a critique of the style. I like the style. It's accessible. It's interesting. It's engaging. Which was his intent as he has discussed in interviews.
Funny accusation because that is how I would describe most modern media. It's as if their meta inclusion of anxious self-parody is simultaneously deserving of and suffices for critique.
Curtis needs to make another doco called the "Dislodging of the Self: Individual assessment not required. And that's a good thing"
Which I feel is both giving too much credit to Trump etc. (who were all backed by big financial incentives, which covered up and normalized their insanities and inanities) and too little to modern political movements which have achieved incredible progress by doing boring, factual, useful work.
The work and the way you market yourself to be elected to do the work can be quite different.
You can certainly be too verbose when describing what you are working on and lose the audience. Happened to me many times.
I still can't work out what Curtis actually believes in. I suspect he's some kind of revolutionary.
I suspect that part of the murkiness is strategic: that if he said what he meant, the BBC would stop commissioning his films.
https://twitter.com/cstross/status/417666074298318848
That whole group baffles/fascinates/frightens me:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Spiked
They'd actually make an amazing subject for an Adam Curtis style documentary.
That article by Hancox is a tedious rant, by the way; don't bother.
The ashes of the RCP have come to life in the contemporary Tory Party. I had no idea that Curtis had had connections to the RCP.
The world is full of bizarre coincidences and strange occurences that "don't fit the narrative" and connecting those together appeals to people across the political/intellectual spectrum.
Connecting George Boole to the Voynich Manuscript via 2 degrees of seperation tickles my brain in a weird way that I imagine is similar to the conspiracy theories that drive QAnon.