Adam Curtis at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2005
Adam Curtis (born 1955) is a Britishtelevisiondocumentary maker who has during the course of his television career worked as a writer, producer, director and narrator. He currently works for BBC Current Affairs. He is noted for making programmes which express a clear (and sometimes controversial) opinion about their subject, and for narrating the programmes himself.
After attending Sevenoaks School (a member of the 'art room' that produced influential musicians, Tom Greenhalgh, Kevin Lycett and Mark White of The Mekons along with Andy Gill and Jon King of the Gang of Four) Curtis studied for a BA in Human Sciences (which included courses in genetics, psychology, politics, geography and elementary statistics) at Oxford University. Curtis subsequently taught politics there but left for a career in television. He got a job on the show That's Life! where he learned to find humour in serious subjects. He went on to make documentaries on more serious subjects but retained his playful tone.
Curtis's intensive use of archive footage is a distinctive touch of his. An Observer profile said:
Curtis has a remarkable feel for the serendipity of such moments, and an obsessive skill in locating them. 'That kind of footage shows just how dull I can be,' he admits, a little glumly. 'The BBC has an archive of all these tapes where they have just dumped all the news items they have ever shown. One tape for every three months. So what you get is this odd collage, an accidental treasure trove. You sit in a darkened room, watch all these little news moments, and look for connections.'
The Observer adds "if there has been a theme in Curtis's work since, it has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragi-comic consequences of those attempts."
Curtis received the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2005.1 In 2006 he was given the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Contribution to Television at the British Academy Television Awards.
Curtis was reputed to be on the editorial 'steering committee' of the weekly email gossip newsletter Popbitch2 but the editor of the newsletter clarified that in fact he was simply a friend of the magazine.3.
Documentaries
1988: An Ocean Apart. Episode One "Hats Off to Mr. Wilson” (concerning the process by which the United States was involved in the First World War).
1995: The Living Dead investigated the way that history and memory (both national and individual) have been used by politicians and others.
1996: 25 Million Pounds a study of Nick Leeson and the collapse of Barings Bank. Won the Best Science and Nature Documentary in the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival.
2002: The Century Of The Self (BBC Two) documented how the rise of Freud's individualism led to Edward Bernays' consumerism. It received the Broadcast Award for Best Documentary Series and the Longman-History Today Award for Historical Film of the Year. It was released in the US through art house cinemas and was picked as the fourth best movie of 2005 by Entertainment Weekly.
2004: The Power of Nightmares (BBC Two) suggested a parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and Neoconservatism in the United States in that both needed to inflate a myth of a dangerous enemy in order to draw people to support them. It received the BAFTA Award for Best Factual Series in 2004.4
2007: Curtis provided a tongue-in-cheek version of his own documentary style for a section about television news reporters in the third episode of the fourth series of the BBC Four programme Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.[5]
