Adam Curtis 'Power of Nightmares' has a new documentary..trailer here
It's an irony, given his obsession with our surveillance culture, that if you were to cast the voice of Orwell's Big Brother, Adam Curtis would be hard to beat. The BBC documentary-maker – justly celebrated for series that include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace – speaks with such paternal conviction, such stylish wisdom, that given half a day in a film archive you suspect he could have you believe pretty much anything. This Manchester international festival collaboration with Bristol-based trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack is billed as a playful showdown, a versus, in the manner of a rap contest or a prize fight; the vast derelict train depot in which this battle is being staged over 10 nights offers a suitably raw-boned backdrop for the high-decibel stand-off – earplugs are given out at the door – but it quickly becomes clear that soft tones of Curtis are the likely winner.
Within the spooky, stripped-back space, unused for 20 years, behind Manchester Piccadilly station, 1,500 people are surrounded on three sides by huge translucent screens on which Curtis's dystopian film essay, Everything Is Going According to Plan, is projected, using all the digital drama of Massive Attack's regular technicians, United Visual Artists. At the far end the band provide the live soundtrack to the footage – mostly powerfully driven cover versions, ranging from Siberian punk to Barbra Streisand – and occasionally emerge from the shadows to become part of the film itself. The audience, many of whom have come to dance, stand pretty much motionless throughout, rapt or trying to keep up with the dizzying and seductive images that Curtis presents and sometimes sonorously narrates. From time to time you are reminded that this is a musical as well as a visual adventure – particularly when guesting Liz Fraser, once of the Cocteau Twins, steps forward to sing, with her rare dreamlike clarity, The Look of Love or later in haunting Russian – but mostly, even if the bass is making the walls shake, it is the film that overwhelms your attention.
Curtis is the most influential documentary storyteller of our times, with his application of Zapruder-inspired forensics to every corner of our culture, and his wit. He works through surprising oppositions of time and space, sifting the chaotic strands of TV imagery to find threads of global narrative. It is his theme that we have become passive receivers of a 24-hour news agenda that keeps us both permanently fearful and permanently restless; and that we have been manipulated by commercial interests to be perfect consumers, always wanting the next new thing, the experience that will finally make us happy. His films play on that understanding, using fast-cut YouTube attention-deficit techniques to attempt to make sense of the world technology is making for us.
The other documentaries he has done are on youtube and are a must see for any conscious human being
The Century of the Self,
The Power of Nightmares
and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace –
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