The power of Curtis
There are few enough people making coherent, provocative, aesthetically persuasive political documentaries. In fact Adam Curtis might be the only one. Now he’s got a blog, so you can keep up with him in the too-long intervals between films.
20 June, 2009 at 10:36 am
His documentaries are brilliantly made… but I nearly fell out my chair the first time I saw Power of Nightmares and heard the voiceover say:
“But a world without fear was not what the neoconservatives needed to pursue their project. They now set out to destroy Henry Kissinger’s vision.”
Which gives you a vague hint of the areas in which he studiously and repeatedly misses the point :)
There’s excellent criticism of Nightmares here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/041118_Power_Of_Nightmares_1.HTM
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/041119_Power_Of_Nightmares_2.HTM
And analysis of Curtis’s response to the above here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/041207_Curtis_Response.html
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed it (“Century of the Self” even more so) but when I read “coherent, provocative, aesthetically persuasive” I only fully agreed on the fact that he’s persuasive. I’d also add “funny” as the bits I love most in his documentaries are the clever and sarcastic use of archive footage :)
20 June, 2009 at 11:26 am
Thanks for that – I’m still playing catch-up with Medialens, and when I first watched The Power Of Nightmares I was deep in lit crit and not very well-informed anything apart from semi-colons. My main grumble with Century Of The Self was the treatment of game theory, which I think can be a lot more subtle and humane than he allows (not that it always is, just that it seemed a little unfair to blame it for late-stage capitalism).
20 June, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Yeah. And still they’re some of the best things on telly :)
Joel Bakan’s “The Corporation” shits on em though IMO. Heartily recommend the book if you’ve not read it.
21 June, 2009 at 7:36 pm
The Corporation, book and film is the business. Cracking stuff. Best of a string of business docs that came out around the same time.
I’ve subscribed to Curtis though. TV like that is shamefully rare.