Shifty: Understanding the seismic shift in UK society
New series from British documentarian Adam Curtis is dizzying exploration of life in Britain
As the world teeters on a knife edge of uncertainty, with the dark shadow of global conflict in a still nuclear age re-emerging, conditions are ripe for British documentarian Adam Curtis to offer one of his provocative film essays that attempts to untangle how we got here and what can be done about it.
In a three-decade career, Curtis, who began his career as a politics lecturer before leaving academia for a job at the BBC, has distinguished himself as the UK’s singular re-assembler of archive material in a series of films influenced by the collage artworks of Robert Rauschenberg and the modernist literary collage of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A Trilogy. In archive-rich docuseries, distinctive for their big ideas and whimsical digressions, Curtis has attempted to tackle a variety of aspects of late 20th and early 21st century social reorganisation. He has attempted to trace how the will of those at the top of western democratic society has been forced on to those at the bottom,...
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