| Adam Curtis | |
| Education: | Mansfield College, Oxford (BA) |
| Birth Name: | Kevin Adam Curtis |
| Birth Date: | 26 May 1955 |
| Birth Place: | Dartford, Kent, England, United Kingdom |
| Years Active: | 1983–present |
| Occupation: | Documentary filmmaker |
| Awards: | BAFTA (1993, 2000, 2006, 2023) |
Adam Curtis (born 26 May 1955) is an English documentary filmmaker.[1]
Curtis began his career as a conventional documentary producer for the BBC throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. The release of Pandora's Box (1992) marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history.[2]
His style has been described as involving, "whiplash digressions, menacing atmospherics and arpeggiated scores, and the near-psychedelic compilation of archival footage", narrated by Curtis himself with "patrician economy and assertion".[3] His films have won five BAFTAs.
Adam Curtis was born in Dartford in Kent,[4] and raised in nearby Platt.[5] His father was Martin Curtis (1917 - 2002), a cinematographer with a socialist background.[6]
Curtis won a county scholarship and attended the Sevenoaks School. It was there that an influential art teacher introduced him to the work of Robert Rauschenberg.[7]
Curtis completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in human sciences at Mansfield College, Oxford. He began a PhD and taught in politics, but ultimately became disillusioned with academia and decided to leave the profession.
Curtis applied to the BBC and was hired to make a film for one of its training courses, comparing designer clothes in music videos to the design of weapons. He was subsequently given a post on That's Life!,[1] a magazine series that juxtaposed hard-hitting investigations and light-hearted content. He was a film director on Out of Court, a BBC Two legal series, from 1980 until 1982.[8]
Curtis is inspired by the sociologist Max Weber, who, he argues, challenged the "crude, left-wing, vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society".[6] Curtis has answered questions on his politics in interviews over his career but has answered inconsistently, making it hard to label his politics.
In a 2012 interview, Curtis remarked on his political outlook stating fondness for libertarian ideas but states his politics are unique and differ depending on the issue. Curtis also rejects being labelled a leftist, calling the idea ‘rubbish’, saying:
In a 2021 interview, Curtis stated having sympathies to radicalism and that progressivism is his politics. He notes again his political inconsistency, saying:
In a 2022 interview, Curtis reiterated the neoconservative interpretation of "The Century of the Self", but added it's not what he himself believes. This time, Curtis states that he doesn’t know his exact politics, saying:
Curtis cites the U.S.A. trilogy, a series of three novels by John Dos Passos that he first read when he was thirteen, as the greatest influence on his work:
Other creative influences are Robert Rauschenberg and Émile Zola. Curtis makes extensive use of archive footage in his documentaries. He has acknowledged the influence of recordings made by Erik Durschmied and is "constantly using his stuff in my films".[9]
Discussing his process in an interview with fellow documentary-maker Jon Ronson for Vice, Curtis said his extensive work with footage acquired from the BBC Archives is often led by 'instinct and imagination', with the aim of creating 'a mood that gives power and force to the story I'm telling'.[10]
Instead of specially composed music, which Curtis has said "creates a sort of monoculture", he uses tracks from a variety of genres, decades, and countries, as well as sound effects that he discovers on old tapes.[11]
According to a profile of Curtis by Tim Adams, published in The Observer: "If there has been a theme in Curtis's work ... it has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragicomic consequences of those attempts".[12]
In 2005, Curtis received the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival.[13] In 2006, he was given the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Creative Contribution to Television at the British Academy Television Awards.[14] In 2009, the Sheffield International Documentary Festival gave Curtis the Inspiration Award for inspiring viewers and other documentary filmmakers.[15] In 2015, he was awarded the True Vision Award by the True/False Film Fest.[16]
Curtis's critics have accused him of exaggeration and distortion, even wilful misrepresentation.[17] [18]
Curtis administered a blog subtitled 'The Medium and the Message' hosted by the BBC and updated between 2009 and 2016.[19]
| Year | Title | Subject | Parts | Channel/Venue | Notes & Awards | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1983 | Just Another Day "Selfridges" | Behind the scenes at Selfridges, a department store on Oxford Street, London.[20] | S01E03 | BBC Two, 29 March 1983[21] | ||
| 1983 | Just Another Day "The Seaside" | A typical day in Walton-on-the-Naze.[22] | S01E06 | BBC Two, 19 April 1983[23] | ||
| 1983 | Trumpets and Typewriters: A History of War Reporting | The history of war correspondents. | BBC One, 19 July 1983[24] | |||
| 1984 | Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster.[25] | The system-built housing of the 1960s. Narrated by David Jones.[26] | BBC Two, 4 September 1984[27] | |||
| 1984 | Italians: "The Mayor of Montemilone" | The politics of a small Italian town and its communist mayor, Dino Labriola.[28] | S01E04 | BBC One, 26 October 1984[29] | ||
| 1984 | The Cost of Treachery | The Albanian Subversion, in which the CIA and MI6 attempted to overthrow the Albanian government and to weaken the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in 1949, and the role of double agent Kim Philby. | BBC One, 30 October 1984[30] | |||
| 1987 | 40 Minutes "Bombay Hotel" | The luxurious Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, contrasted with the poverty of the city's slums. | BBC Two, 30 April 1987[31] | |||
| 1988 | An Ocean Apart | Explores the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States from World War I to the 1980s. | 7 | BBC One, 20 April 1988[32] | ||
| 1989 | 40 Minutes "The Kingdom of Fun" | Documentary about the Metro Centre in Gateshead, developed by entrepreneur John Hall. It compares Hall's plans to regenerate North East England with those of Labour politician T. Dan Smith. | BBC Two, 19 January 1989[33] | |||
| 1989 | Inside Story: "The Road to Terror" | How the Iranian Revolution turned from idealism to terror, drawing parallels with the French Revolution two hundred years earlier. | E06 | BBC One, 14 June 1989[34] | ||
| 1992 | Pandora's Box | The dangers of technocratic and political rationality. | 6 | BBC Two, 11 June 1992[35] | Originality and Best Factual Series, BAFTA Awards 1993[36] | |
| 1995 | The Living Dead | The different ways that history and memory (both national and individual) have been used and manipulated by politicians and others. | 3 | BBC Two, 30 May 1995[37] | ||
| 1996 | £830,000,000 – Nick Leeson and the Fall of the House of Barings | Nick Leeson and the collapse of Barings Bank. | BBC One, 12 June 1996[38] | An Inside Story special. Later titled 25 Million Pounds. | ||
| 1997 | Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh | The story, dating back to the 1950s, of the search for a cure to cancer, and the impact of Henrietta Lacks, the "woman who will never die" because her cells never stopped reproducing. | BBC Two, 19 March 1997[39] | |||
| 1999 | The Mayfair Set | Looks at the birth of the global arms trade, the invention of asset stripping, and how buccaneer capitalists shaped the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, Sir James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland - members of the elite Clermont Club in the 1960s. | 4 | BBC Two, 18 July 1999[40] | Best Factual Series or Strand, BAFTA Awards 2000[41] | |
| 2002 | The Century of the Self | How Freud's theories on the unconscious led to the development of public relations by his nephew Edward Bernays; the use of desire over need; and self-actualisation as a means of achieving economic growth and the political control of populations. | 4 | BBC Two, 17 March 2002;[42] art-house cinemas in the U.S. | Best Documentary Series, Broadcast Awards;[43] Historical Film of the Year, Longman-History Today Awards;[44] Nominated for Best Documentary Series, Royal Television Society[45] | |
| 2004 | The Power of Nightmares | Suggests a parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and neoconservatism in the United States, and their mutual need, argues Curtis, to create the myth of a dangerous enemy to gain support. | 3 | BBC Two, 20 October 2004[46] | Best Factual Series or Strand, BAFTA Awards 2005[47] | |
| 2007 | The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom | Explores the modern concept of freedom, specifically, "how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic creatures led to today's idea of freedom". | 3 | BBC Two, 7 March 2007[48] | ||
| 2007 | The Rise and Fall of the TV Journalist | Short film chronicling the transformation of mainstream media and the balance of political power in the last few decades by looking at how the role of the broadcast journalist has changed since the 1950s.[49] | Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, third episode of the fourth series | |||
| 2009 | Oh Dearism | Short film about how mainstream media simplify complex events and present them as "scattered terrible things happening everywhere, Oh Dear", leaving the public feeling powerless to do anything about them. | Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, third episode of the first series | |||
| 2009 | It Felt Like a Kiss[50] | Collaboration with theatre company Punchdrunk and Damon Albarn.[51] | Manchester International Festival | |||
| 2010 | Paranoia and Moral Panics | Short film using the paranoia of Richard Nixon to explore how a similar outlook on life has been propagated on a larger social scale in the new media age and the resulting moral panics and immobilisation of politics. | Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, fourth episode of the second series | |||
| 2011 | All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace | Argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity, and instead have "distorted and simplified our view of the world around us". The title is taken from a 1967 poem of the same name by Richard Brautigan. | 3 | BBC Two, 23 May 2011[52] | ||
| 2011 | Every Day Is Like Sunday | The rise and fall of press baron Cecil King, and the changing relationship between the public, politics and the media. | His personal blog; not a full documentary, but "a rough cut".[53] | |||
| 2013 | Everything Is Going According to Plan (Massive Attack v Adam Curtis)[54] | Collaboration with Massive Attack. Based on technocrats and global corporations establishing an ultraconservative norm, with the internet providing a "fake, enchanting world, which has become a kind of prison".[55] | Manchester International Festival | |||
| 2014 | Oh Dearism II | Short film examining the global events of 2014 to reveal a chaotic morass, the reporting of which is increasingly difficult to comprehend in the context of the 24-hour news cycle and the internet (special feature on Russian Vladislav Surkov). | Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe, 30 December 2014 | |||
| 2015 | Bitter Lake[56] | How Western leaders' simplistic good vs. evil narrative has failed in the complex post-war era, and how many Islamic terrorist groups have their origins in the U.S.'s long-standing alliance with Saudi Arabia. | BBC iPlayer, 25 January 2015[57] | |||
| 2016 | Living in an Unreal World | Short film for Vice Media about the illusion of stability, freedom, and prosperity in the West, comparing it to life in the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Ends with a trailer for HyperNormalisation.[58] | VICE (Facebook), 15 October 2016[59] | |||
| 2016 | HyperNormalisation | "How we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion where those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed and have no idea what to do". | BBC iPlayer, 16 October 2016[60] | Nominated for Best Single Documentary, BAFTA Awards 2017[61] | ||
| 2017 | MK Ultra | Dance collaboration with Rosie Kay Dance Company. Explores project MKUltra and conspiracy theories including the Illuminati, themes later reworked into Can't Get You Out of My Head.[62] [63] [64] | Live performance. Commissioned by Birmingham Repertory Theatre, DanceXchange, Warwick Arts Centre & HOME[65] | |||
| 2019 | Untitled | Collaboration with Massive Attack. "How we have moved into a strange backward-looking world, enclosed by machines that read our data and predict our every move, haunted by ghosts from the past".[66] | Mezzanine XXI tour | |||
| 2021 | Can't Get You Out of My Head | A six-part BBC documentary series that "tells the story of how we got to the strange days we are now experiencing. And why both those in power – and we – find it so difficult to move on". It "explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power".[67] | 6 | BBC iPlayer, 11 February 2021[68] | ||
| 2022 | [69] | Seven hour-long films about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and subsequent rise to power of Vladimir Putin as the President of Russia, seen through the eyes of Russian people at every level of society. | 7 | Premiered at Telluride Film Festival, 2022[70] BBC iPlayer, 13 October 2022[71] | Best Specialist Factual, BAFTA Awards 2023[72] | |
| 2024 | The Way | 3 part drama series co-created by Curtis.[73] | 3 | BBC One |