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Posts Tagged ‘adam curtis’

  1. Massive Attack v. Adam Curtis (ACE 3)

    October 24, 2013 by amandae@uoregon.edu

    Adam Curtis is my hero. BBC documentary filmmaker who uses found footage to tell essay-like stories critiquing everything from bureaucracy to psychology to technology.  As New York Magazine puts it, “He’s more like a wildly heterodox, extravagantly assured, occasionally quite loopy and often self-ironizing history lecturer.”

    His most recent inspiration is a live show made with musicians from Massive Attack that immerses viewers in a mediated experience that leads them to question society as well as be entertained.  This I like.

    Technically, his cuts are quick, he edits to music, he weaves narratives from found footage, which is impressive.  In this trailer, his style is early-90’s on purpose -low-tech text–TV footage–presumably because the show is interrogating our mediated world itself, the absurdity of which is easier to see in it’s earlier iterations.

    The trailer, posted below, promises “Donald and Ivana Trump, Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu, Jane Fonda and Ted Turner, Hamid Karzai and his brothers, everyone in Goldman Sachs who made a killing in 2008, the neutron bomb, the Siberian punk movement, Bambi, and all your own worst fears. ”

     


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