Adam Curtis

At the start of the 1990s the Soviet Union – one the largest empires in the world – imploded.

It was not a slow collapse like the British Empire, but one that collapsed suddenly – in just a few months.

In the west we didn’t really see or understand what then happened because we were blinded by victory in the cold war. In reality what the Russian people experienced was a profound disaster which left behind it deep scars and a furious anger – that led to what is happening in Russia now and in Ukraine.Read More »

Love, power, money, ghosts of empire, conspiracies, artificial intelligence and You. An emotional history of the modern world by Adam Curtis.Read More »

BBC documentary in three parts written and produced by Adam Curtis on the history and influence of the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalism and neoconservatism

Part 1 Baby It’s Cold Outside (originally broadcast on October 20, 2004)
Part 2 The Phantom Victory (originally broadcast on October 27, 2004)
Part 3 The Shadows in the Cave (originally broadcast on November 3, 2004)
Read More »

The Century of The Self
4 Part series on how psychoanalitic theory was used by advertisers and governments in an attempt to control the public.
01 Happiness Machines: Edward Bernays and the invention of public relations and modern advertising
02 The Engineering of Consent: How the US Government turned to psychoanalytic principles after WWII as a reaction against the Nazi state. Focusing on the rise and fall of Anna Freud.
03 There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads. He Must Be Destroyed: How the reaction against Freudian ideas in the 1950s and 60s ended up making it even easier to control the public
04 Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering: How the left turned to psychoanalytic principles to regain power in the US and Britain in the 1990s.Read More »

Newest series of polemical essay film/documentaries by Adam Curtis is both maddening and occasionally brilliant… frustrating for their reductivism and eliptical approach to complex subjects, but frankly staggering for the allusive leaps of the narrative. Truly inspired selection of music on the soundtrack, also. Anyways:

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

A series of films by Adam Curtis about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.Read More »

from Wikipedia:
It Felt Like a Kiss is an immersive theatre production, first performed between 2 and 19 July 2009 as part of the second Manchester International Festival, co-produced with the BBC.Themed on “how power really works in the world”, it is a collaboration between film-maker Adam Curtis and theatre company Punchdrunk, with original music composed by Damon Albarn and performed by the Kronos Quartet. The visitor is immersed in sets based on archive footage from Baghdad, 1963; New York, 1964; Moscow, 1959; in the Amygdala, 1959–1969; and Kinshasa, 1960. The title is taken from The Crystals’ 1962 song “He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)”, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King.Read More »

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC documentary series by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It began airing on BBC Two on 11 March, 2007.

The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”Read More »

HyperNormalisation tells the extraordinary story of 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. And, where events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control – from Donald Trump to Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, and random bomb attacks. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening – but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.

‘The film shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West – not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves – have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us, we accept it as normal.Read More »

Quote:
Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis – leaving us bewildered and disorientated.

Bitter Lake is a new, adventurous and epic film by Adam Curtis that explains why the big stories that politicians tell us have become so simplified that we can’t really see the world any longer.

The narrative goes all over the world, America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia – but the country at the heart of it is Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is the place that has confronted our politicians with the terrible truth – that they cannot understand what is going on any longer.Read More »