the fever dreams of Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis’s film Bitter Lake (2015), which I finally watched on my friend Gabby’s recommendation, draws on vast amounts of archival footage to map loosely the origins of Western involvement in Afghanistan. Its jarring collages swirl around Curtis’s familiar themes: the financialization of power, cowardly and unimaginative politicians, doomed revolutionaries, alluring coincidences, and the dark ironies of history. He communicates these things bluntly through voiceover, as well as through sans-serif text that blinks across the screen. His editing, though, is much more impressionistic.
Curtis’s use of archival is compelling not just because he chooses widely and well—he has, after all, access to the BBC’s massive archives—but also because he treats archival footage as meaningful in and of itself. Particularly in the recent glut of docu-series, archival footage is often used interchangeably with stock footage, to cover interviews, to lend historicity to graphics or recreations, to provide a generic atmosphere for bygone places and times, or to anachronistically approximate an event for which no footage actually exists. Much archival comes in the form of breaking news montages, in which archival is not recut but rehashed. The artifacts of the past are givens, they preexist, and Getty probably owns the rights. They are to be arranged with the authoritative trappings of journalism and the sparkle of television. They are not reconsidered but emplotted, explained, re-experienced, and consumed.
Curtis is after something else. In Bitter Lake and many of his other films, archival footage has its own suggestiveness, its own dramas, its own frightful perspectives. Shots repeat and stretch out well past the sections that would’ve originally been used for broadcast. Archival sequences leave behind the voiceover for long, associative periods. Cameras are dropped, fumbled with, spattered with blood, and repositioned. At one point, we experience a cameraperson walking past Hamid Karzai’s van to get a better shot of some boys who have come to his window to greet him. Then gunshots ring out—people slow to react, then quick to—more gunshots—camera jostles and flees—turns back toward the van—men now dead on the ground—the van rolling along with its doors open—car horns—gunfire—chaos. At no point is there an explanation of what exactly is happening. At the beginning of Curtis’s 2016 film, HyperNormalisation, the camera lingers on some things arranged by a kitchen sink before panning and tilting down to reveal large smears of blood on the floor. The cameraperson then walks backward, over the bloodstains, out the door. We see what the camera saw.
What Curtis’s archival selections suggest is that the videos that best reflect our feelings about the world are not the videos that try most impartially to reflect it. Rather, the footage that is most “real” and arresting is dreamlike, unstable, serendipitous, confusing, reflexive, accidental, and haunting. What his editing suggests, by eschewing the explanations and clarity of a typical docu-series, is that there is a gap between the actual world and the world we have recorded. Archival footage is not itself the captured past, but rather the artifacts that were generated in the variously motivated attempts to capture it.
My least favorite part of Curtis’s work is his self-assured and oversimplifying narration, though it does sometimes feel as if the torrent of images ends up undermining its confidence. Curtis’s narrations often fall victim to the very thing he accuses those in power of doing: interpreting a complex world in ways so simple that the resulting dissonance leads to a sense of stagnation, dread, and unreality. (“Power,” too, is one of the many words he uses incessantly without much specification, as if all manifestations of it were the same.) But his use of archival footage crackles with such subtlety, irony, surrealism, and dark humor that it more than makes up for it. And in our badly misnamed “Golden Age” of documentary, I will take it.
The first episode of Curtis’s recent TV series, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, opens with an all-caps epigraph from anthropologist David Graeber:
THE ULTIMATE HIDDEN TRUTH OF THE WORLD IS THAT IT IS SOMETHING WE MAKE.
AND COULD JUST AS EASILY MAKE DIFFERENTLY.
ben tapeworm