Latest news with #AdamCurtis
The Guardian
12 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Film-maker Adam Curtis on why this moment feels so weird
Adam Curtis is a journalist who delves deep into the BBC archive to make films about the ideas and feelings that define our times. In his latest series of films, Shifty, Curtis charts how Margaret Thatcher and her government transformed Britain by transferring power to the world of finance and by promoting a radical individualism. In conversation with Michael Safi, Curtis discusses the way his films try to capture what an idea feels like, how the ideas of the 1980s have led us to feelings of powerlessness and melancholy, and how new ideas are the key to a different future. Support the Guardian today:
Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
The ‘end of history' was the source of our ills
All the best scenes in Shifty, Adam Curtis's new documentary about Britain in the late 20th-century, concern the Millennium Dome. With skilfully spliced footage of its gaping interiors and weirdly looming riverside bulk, the dome is transformed into an almost gothic symbol of fin de siècle spiritual vacuousness. A planning committee decides that it is to have a 'spirit zone', but nobody can decide what religions should be represented there. In a drab conference room a man with an uninspiring powerpoint enthuses that the phrase 'HOW SHALL I LIVE?' should be projected onto a blank wall instead. Isn't that a bit 'banal', wonders Simon Jenkins. He is quickly shouted down. You don't have to buy all of Curtis's arguments — was Margaret Thatcher really the sole author of modern hyperindividualism? — to appreciate his refreshingly eerie and desolate portrait of that much-mythologised period, the 'end of history'. To many today, the late 1990s and early 2000s are a lost Edwardian summer of stability and peace. The endless trend pieces about 'Nineties nostalgia' are more than mere fluff. The undying popularity of Friends, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones among those not alive to see them first time round, and the lucrative resurrections of Oasis and Pulp, represent something real. For people my age and younger, the vanished era of post-Cold War tranquillity is as psychologically significant as the Second World War was to some baby boomers; it is the same painful sense of having just missed a glorious cresting wave in the tide of history. But rather than envying the heroism of our fathers, we covet their low house prices and political stability. To many Gen Zers (almost half of whom tell pollsters they wish TikTok didn't exist) the last years before iPhones have an archaic charm. Apparently banal clips of Noughties life acquire viral currency as artefacts of an innocent time before digital corruptions — the latest TikTok phenomenon is footage of the band MGMT performing dorkily at Yale to a conspicuously non-smartphone waving audience. According to the popular story, a series of earthquakes shook us out of paradise: 9/11, the 2008 crash, social media, mass migration. But as Curtis shows, our unhappy age is a natural evolution of, not an aberration from the 1990s. History doesn't rupture, it mutates. The myth of the blissful end of history is just as bogus as the myth of the long Edwardian summer (in the years before the First World War, readers will recall, Britain was on the brink of civil war over the question of Home Rule for Ireland). The seeds of our present discontent were already germinating in that lost Eden at the end of history. The world Curtis portrays in Shifty is quite spookily familiar. The sleazy politicians of John Major's decaying government (the Starmer administration fleetingly strikes the viewer as almost attractive) have lost both public trust and the capacity to direct events. In the furious eyes of miners filing grimly out of shuttered pits in County Durham you glimpse the first sparks of the populist conflagration soon to engulf western democracies (and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the AI-driven white collar deindustrialisation to come). Above it all, the unaccountable barons of high finance perch in their glittering silver towers. Off screen in America, political polarisation was already carving ideological rifts down Thanksgiving tables. Newt Gingrich had long since resolved that politics was a 'war for power' and embarked on his attritional battles over the budget with Bill Clinton. The scandal over Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and the Republicans' subsequent impeachment campaign split the country with almost Trump-era vitriol. In elite universities a movement known as 'political correctness' was campaigning to jettison pale stale writers from the canon, prompting one of the great public intellectuals of the age, Robert Hughes, to warn against the politicisation of art and a burgeoning cult of 'victimhood'. There were no smartphones, true. But the advent of 24-hour news represented a media revolution nearly as important. One of the most effectively jarring moments in Curtis's series juxtaposes the hectic, adrenalised tone of 1990s TV news with a clip showing the staid formality of the BBC in the 1960s. The contrast is almost as stark as that which divides Newsnight from TikTok. By the 1990s, television was fragmenting into an infinity of cable news channels. Anybody who has read Neil Postman's polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) knows that his criticisms of TV — its inanity, its lack of deep context, its weird juxtapositions of the trivial and the serious — precisely anticipate the smartphone. Screens were already isolating us in the 1990s. Curtis supplies tragicomic footage of an elderly couple sitting side by side in morose silence, hypnotised by a documentary about turtles. Membership of clubs and churches declined, and television was rated the most popular leisure activity. The five hours a day the average person dedicated to TV in 1990 seems restrained compared with the virtually constant smartphone use that characterises many modern lives, but it's also hard to argue that it represents the quasi-Amish technological continence of Gen Z mythology. Though the romanticisation of the 1990s is not exactly baseless — I would rather live in an age before inflated house prices and the automation of the written word — it is overdone. The crises of the present age have helped expose a cultural and spiritual hollowness that was already evident at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps a country that chose to celebrate itself by constructing a huge and vacant white space was always going to end up in trouble
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Adam Curtis's thrilling, maddening and soul-destroying portrait of a faithless, jaded nation
To try to explain what Adam Curtis's latest documentary series is about is like trying to build an igloo out of jelly. In one sense, Shifty (BBC iPlayer) has a simple premise – a jaunty yet thumpingly depressing trot through 20 years of British politics and economics (1979-1999), from Thatcher and monetarism to Blair and the Private Finance Initiative. It is, as the blurb has it, about how 'extreme money and hyper-individualism… undermined the fundamental structures of mass democracy'; it's about how and why British society is now so fragmented, atomised and siloed. Yet that barely scratches the surface of this gloriously obtuse series. It's like being talked at for six hours by a coked-up bipolar genius at an aggressively loud house party. It is a thrilling, maddening, brilliant and soul-destroying portrait of a faithless, jaded nation. As the five episodes take us chronologically through 20 years of British economic policy, leaning heavily on Thatcher's premiership, Shifty has a more traditional shape than many of Curtis's other works (Hypernormalisation, Can't Get You Out of My Head). It also does not feature Curtis's languid, oft-parodied voiceover, relying instead on his trademark stark-white subtitles to give some shape to his traditional carnival of scintillatingly edited archive footage. There is less of the nightmarish incongruousness that marks his work, but it's no less chilling and disorienting for it. There is still plenty, however, of Curtis's mind-boggling leaps. In the first episode, introducing us to Thatcher's policy of monetarism – reduce the amount of money circulating, inflation falls, wages stabilise, industry booms – you'll spend a long time scratching your head wondering what links the death of the Irish author JG Farrell, the remains of a Second World War fighter pilot found in a bog in Sheppey, a transgender dog called Bruno, the National Front and the cheese and onion crisp production line at the Golden Wonder factory. Each episode is like a Magic Eye picture – you just have to relax your eyes and stare and stare and stare. It all comes clear eventually. Well, some of it. The rest of the series is a phantasmagoria of 1980s and 1990s home video and documentary and news footage, with Stephen Hawking, the Old Kent Road, hairdressers, the Duke of Westminster and house parties becoming surreal recurring themes. The picture it paints of the UK, then and now, is utterly bleak, with our institutions being shown as at best hollow. The police come out particularly badly – anyone wincing at Donald Trump's recent heavy-handed approach to protestors will be agog at the scenes of police violence here, while one sequence in which detectives in Reading interview a female rape victim is horrifying. Despite this, Curtis finds an impish gallows humour in the decaying remains of 150 years of British exceptionalism. The first image we see, for instance, is Jimmy Savile introducing some schoolchildren to Thatcher, while a segment on the synthetised pop music of the 1980s warns us not to trust the past because it can be edited, remixed and repackaged – before launching into a pastiche of Curtis's documentaries. Those unconvinced by him will find it all simplistic and cynical, but Curtis has never claimed to be a historian. Instead, Shifty is a remarkable, unreliable and potent chronicle of a society in freefall. 'We are living [Thatcher's] version of Churchill's version of British history,' says Patrick Cosgrave, Thatcher's closest adviser. Shifty is Curtis's version.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shifty review – Adam Curtis's new show is an utter rarity: stylish, intelligent TV with something to say
Hello and welcome to the latest addition to Adam Curtis's growing compendium of documentaries I have unofficially entitled How Did Things Get So Shit? Let Me Explain in a Weirdly Uplifting Manner. Previous volumes include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, HyperNormalisation, Can't Get You Out of My Head and Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone. Even if you have not had the challenging pleasure of watching, the titles alone should be enough to evoke most of the concerns found therein – the rise of individualism, the fragmentation of old systems, the political vacuums new people and powers have rushed to fill, the death rattle of formerly dependable entities on which western civilisation has traditionally rested and once allowed us to sleep peacefully at night, the creeping destabilisation of all things, and so very much on. The new entrant is a five-part series called Shifty. It is a rare purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy. Come on in, guys, the water's lovely! Though we can't even agree that it's wet any more. In Curtis's trademark telling – a vast, kaleidoscopic assemblage of archive clips from news reports, TV shows, vox pops, pop videos, home videos, celebrity and political profiles and whatever else he has found that serves his purpose, cleverly curated, wittily juxtapositioned and bouncily soundtracked – the decline began, as so many seem to have done, with Margaret Thatcher. The series begins with her opening her study door to a group of children escorted in by her favourite man-of-the-people Jimmy Savile because – well, how could it not? Once that clip had been found, it was going in. From there, we follow Britain through the 1980s – the Falklands, the Troubles, the miners' strike, Kelvin MacKenzie, Wham!'s first tour, the advent of CCTV, the transformation of houses from homes into assets, art and fashion into diffusion lines, all of them uncoupling the old ways from the new powers, truth from reality or Britain from its moorings in some way. On we go through the next decade as old imperial ways, people and myths struggle to survive under the onslaught of new media, new tech, new economic experiments and a new privileging of individual independence, self-interest and the profit motive that was absolutely never going to end badly for anyone. New Labour arrives in the fifth and final episode, however, and the idea of society arranged around working for the common good is restored. I'm kidding! 'They couldn't escape the world they had inherited and its pessimism about human motives.' Not simply regarding the electorate – the venality and sleaze that had enshrouded the Tory party over the preceding years (and may I say that there really should be a public health warning any time clips of David Mellor are to be shown, whether or not you lived through the Antonia de Sancha scandal) had also eroded all remaining trust in politicians and Blairites 'just accepted the belief that politicians were always self-interested'. If you watch party conference clips closely, you can see the light in Gordon Brown's eyes gradually going out. The last noble mien. We stop before Brexit and Donald Trump, but it is clear how Curtis believes the seeds have been sown for all our current sorrows. Is the viewer persuaded? It depends where you start from, of course – I can't speak for anyone who wasn't already halfway there before kick-off as I was – and it will depend perhaps even more on how you feel about this most Marmite of film-makers. Now that I have learned to let his films wash over me, to pay attention but not drill down as they go, then wait and see how they work on my consciousness afterwards, I manage much better and admire much more. But perhaps that is partly a function of context too. It is an increasing rarity to stand in the presence of anyone with an idea, a thesis, that they have thoroughly worked out to their own satisfaction and then present stylishly, exuberantly and still intelligently. The hell and the handcart feel that bit more bearable now. Shifty is on BBC iPlayer now
BBC News
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Adam Curtis takes us into a world gone Shifty
The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis gives a guide to some of the key moments from his new series his documentaries, Adam Curtis has taken us everywhere from Russia during the breakdown of the Soviet Union, in TraumaZone, to the war in Afghanistan, in Bitter Curtis, whose work has been called "dazzling" and "terrifying" by critics, has set his sights on Britain at the end of the 20th century for the five-part BBC series time Curtis's signature style sees him use a bizarre array of archive clips to explore, he says, how "life in Britain today has become strange - a hazy dream-like flux in which no-one can predict what is coming next".In Shifty, clips of the major players of the era – Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair – exist alongside surreal moments sourced from the BBC's extensive archives, like avant-garde hairdressing competitions, suburban line dancing parties and children hot-wiring a the uninitiated, his documentaries can feel impenetrable, so we spoke to Curtis to curate and explain some of the key clips from the new also suggested a title for each clip that perfectly places viewers into the strange and murky world of Shifty. 'One of the few moments of honesty' One section details the rise of the musical remixes in the 1980s, and its societal implications – how, in Curtis's words, "we are trapped by a cascade of endlessly replayed images, songs, dreams from the past".However, he admits, "that's the way this series was made, so I'm just as bad. If it's become a prison, I may be one of the jailers."One way Curtis remixes the past is by reusing an interview with Sir Alan Budd that Curtis filmed for the 1992 documentary Pandora's a remarkably honest interview, the one-time chief economic adviser to the Treasury during Thatcher's tenure worries that "the people making the policy decisions… never believed for a moment this was the correct way to bring down inflation."They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working class.""I've always been fascinated by that interview that Budd gave," says Curtis. "It's one of the few moments of honesty I've ever had from someone in power like that being interviewed." 'A past that was about to go' As a young BBC employee, Curtis worked on That's Life. The show combined consumer affairs with lighter stories – most famously, a dog that could 'say' the word credits his ability to juggle tragic and comic tones to this early role: "It showed me that you could go from a badly-built housing estate built on poisonous waste ground to a talking dog."In Shifty, clips of societal unrest exist alongside Bruno, a dog who is, according to his vet, "changing his sex" – their male organs disappearing and their female ones says that it was Bruno's owner that drew him to the clip: "The way she's sitting and her hair," he says, "it felt like a past that was about to go."Animals in his work can often represent our secret lives, he says – "they are these creatures who live with us who probably have a lot of hidden knowledge about us."For Curtis, animals also counterpoint what he calls the "highly pretentious" elements of his work: "They just entertain people." 'A tragic figure' In this clip, an archivist at Cambridge University takes one of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's handbags out of a box, noting how the bag still smells strongly of her Thatcher's presence can be felt in much of the series, as we see the effects of her policies in the 1980s and 90s. Before Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Curtis argues there was "a collective model of society, where people came together in factories, were exploited, then realised they had power as a collective group."He feels, however, that the closure of industries like mining led to "a society full of fragmented individuals who were powerful in the way they thought about their own desires, but actually on their own were powerless."Despite this, Curtis sees Thatcher as a "tragic figure", who unleashed forces she could not control."She was the last politician who had an idea of how to change the country," he explains. "She wanted to create a society in which politics doesn't have as much effect as it did, and should allow individuals to be loose and free." 'Ever more irrational assumptions' Another recurring character in Shifty is scientist Stephen Hawking, whose theories about multiple universes destabilised how we think about putting together the series, Curtis began to think of Hawking in parallel to Thatcher, he explains."She believed that rationality applied through money would regenerate the country. He believed that the rational power of mathematics will lead you to a unified theory that will explain the whole world."What fascinated Curtis about Hawking was how his seemingly rational theories led him to "ever more irrational assumptions"."When he says that matter is eaten by black holes, other scientists say that cannot be true. So he says there must be other universes where they don't eat the matter, so it balances out. To me, that's absurd."However, Curtis began to be touched by Hawking's humanity, like in a clip when we see him saying goodnight to his child. 'Very good trashy music' One of the threads of Shifty is what Curtis calls "the rise in confidence among people to talk about your own feelings, your own experience".This is shown in one of the documentarian's favourite clips, which sees two boys in Swindon discussing the banning of the song Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood due to its sexual imagery. The clip, from one of a series of public access shows which allowed members of the public air time on the BBC in the 1980s, ends with one of the boys out of nowhere adding that the government should legalise their willingness to criticise the BBC while appearing on it, we see a lack of deference to authority that Curtis thinks would have been unimaginable two decades also gave the filmmaker the chance to use the song Relax, one of a number of pop songs that feature in the song is central to the series's idea that the late 20th century in Britain was "wild and extraordinary, and had some very good trashy music in it, but it also unleashed a corrosive force".Shifty is available on BBC iPlayer on Saturday 14 June.
