Curtis’s trademark “collage” style of filmmaking has gained him recognition-as well as parodies
© BBC
Adam Curtis documentaries are as much about creating moods as telling stories. He has spent his career forging grand narratives about the way the world works by assembling rare fi lm footage and setting it to pop and dance soundtracks-all with his own distinctive clipped, deadpan voiceover. It’s become something of a brand, and turned him from a cult documentarymaker into a cultural phenomenon. His fi lms betray years of digging through the BBC archives. He has an eye for emotionally compelling footage: a wild bird befriending a soldier; a teenage black girl’s call for violence; crazed Afghan hounds juxtaposed with the state visit to London of the last Afghan king.
While his films have covered a wide territory-the British establishment, the war on terror, political propaganda-they are animated by a concern for human freedom, and what Curtis sees as the “pessimistic managerialism” curtailing it.