WELCOME
More Adam Curtis! Following on from his uncanny evocation of the myriad precursors of Al Quaeda’s 9/11 attack in American popular culture’s own cinematic imaginaire a few issues back, a couple other examples of the BBC archival spelunker Adam Curtis’s remarkable documentary flair.
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For further background on Curtis himself, check out our Issue 120 HERE.
IN THE A-V ROOM
Two more from Adam Curtis
While the Band Played On, 2012
It Felt Like a Kiss, 2009
For starters, While the Band Played On from 2012,
a ten-minute collage drawn from over 2000 video snippets of people dancing, all culled from the BBC’s own monumentally vast archives (for more from Curtis himself on his own process in this instance, see HERE)…
…the first time through set to a jauntily propulsive score, “Hallogallo” from the German 1970s band Neu, see HERE.
…and then again, a second time, exactly the same visuals, set to a far darker post-apocalyptic mélange of musical motifs, see HERE.
The contrast is startlingly effective—eye-opening, nay ear-welling, nay mind-blowing—so completely diametrically opposed do the two reels (the two versions of the same reel) end up seeming. Just seem for yourself!
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And then, It Felt Like a Kiss, from a few years earlier (2009)
an hour-long fever dream of a free-associative experiment, a bit more conventionally Curtisian though unlike anything by anybody else you’ve ever seen…
…somehow weaving together a theory of or vantage on the fifties and the sixties across the American Imperium featuring everyone from Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev to Rock Hudson and Doris Day & Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran & Lee Harvey Oswald and Charlie Manson & Patrice Lumumba and Carol King to Enos the space-faring chimp and “Everyone Above Level 7 in the CIA” (and that’s not the half of them). And just wait till you see what hotel room the people who made the 1959 rom com Pillow Talk managed to slot Ms. Day into. Talk about dispositive proof (of something or other).
For the Curtis film’s trailer, click HERE, and to view the whole thing online, click HERE.
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See you next week!
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