Adam Curtis and the Artistry of Good Storytelling

By Henry Valentine-Ramsden

(You can read the parent post to this essay here.)

In ancient Greece, the term techne referred to those crafts which were, for lack of a better definition, ‘not quite art’. For the Greeks, this included shipbuilding, medicine, and a variety of other skills that were considered more crafts than they were art forms. The term was applied to skills that had some end in mind- medicine for the sick, ships for fishing etc. For the Greek patrician class, these crafts were not considered to have aesthetic value in a way we would regard today. When a craft was presented as an aesthetic product this class often held the snobbish view that this was an inappropriate arena for aesthetic considerations. Obviously thinking on this subject has progressed down the ages, but here we are 21 years into the third millennium, at it again. When does ‘mere techne’ receive aesthetic quality? 

The concept of human excellence, as defined by Anderson, attempts to get at this: when craft, or techne, becomes art. An example of where this concept of human excellence could be applied is in the work of Adam Curtis. Adam Curtis makes documentaries. For good reason, films are excluded from this concept of human excellence as they are more of an artistic product than an example of a perfectly executed craft. However, the first reason I think Curtis’s documentaries deserve consideration in this series is that they are explicitly presented as journalism. Journalism is the craft, much like writing history, of constructing a narrative with facts that resemble the true series of events. The second reason Curtis’s documentaries deserve consideration is that they are almost wholly the product of one person. Documentaries often have dozens of artists, producer’s etc. that ultimately make the film what it is. They are a product of many different talents. This makes it more difficult to assign the collective project to one particularly brilliant craftsman. Curtis, however, edits and produces his own documentaries. He is notorious for his deep knowledge of the BBC’s media archives and intelligent use of images, music, and narrative. This requires a high degree of technical skill.

In his seven-hour epic Can’t Get you Out of My Head, all these skills are on show. Political documentaries are often dry affairs that seek a kind of sandpaper objectivity that grates the mind of any flesh and blood homo sapiens. In contrast, Curtis’s work is decidedly wet. Crucial to the understanding of how this qualifies as a skill is a recognition that the work is billed as an ‘Emotional History of Our Time’. The documentary is created with the intention to recreate the “feeling of now”. Curtis’s goal is to recreate what he thinks are the emotions and thought patterns of what it felt like to exist in the periods under description. The scope of this project requires a bewilderingly large number of stories and conceptual connections. That these connections were made successfully requires an enormous capacity for creative storytelling honed after decades of creating stories (journalism) out of the miasmatic fudge of details that is our daily news diet.

Here is a short example of this narrative flexibility:

Within five minutes, you are dazzled by five different events overlayed with a conceptual framework for understanding those events in their context. Music and intelligent shot selection all feature here. In Curtis’s documentaries, these kinds of narrative leaps are made constantly. For example, in the first episode of Can’t Get You Out of My Head Curtis asks us to consider the connections between an upper-crust British socialite’s affair with the Marchioness of Londonderry, the Discordianism of Kerry Thornley, British oppression of Kenya, Mao’s wife Jiang Jing’s experience of individualism and the John Birch Society of 1950’s suburban America. Curtis narrates these connections with a terse script that wastes little time. The engagement with the narrative is kept alive with emotionally engaging shots and music. For example, in one segment sleepy music accompanies a flyover shot of a shipwreck, followed by a sleepy English town carnival, ending with footage of British colonial soldiers haranguing Kenyans interned in concentration camps. These kinds of interludes are common in the documentary and can last minutes before the script continues. In a phrase: these interludes get a rise out of you. 

A literary corollary for these interludes would be ‘the camera eye’ and ‘news reel’ segments of John Dos Passos’s excellent U.S.A. trilogy. The segments provide a poetic ‘blast interlude’ of contemporary events along with steam-of-consciousness poetic blasts that washes over the reader. An example from the first of the trilogy (42nd Parallel) outline the emotional energy of early twentieth century America: 

                                                                News reel 

BRITISH BEETEN AT MAFEFANG 

For theres many a man murdered in Luzon 

CLAIMS ISLANDS FOR ALL TIME 

Hamilton club listens to oratory by Ex-congressman posey of Indiana

 

                                                            Camera Eye (1) 

when you walk along the street you have to step carefully always on the cobbles so as not to step on the bright anxious grass-blades 

easier if you hold Mother’s hand and hang on to it that way you can kick up your toes but walking fast you have to tread on too many grassblades the poor hurt green tongues shrink under your feet 

maybe that why those people are so angry and follow us shaking their fists

These segments are interspersed throughout a standard story following the lives of individuals alive at the opening of twentieth-century America. The intention is to create a specific feeling in the reader in a similar fashion to Curtis’s work—though using different tools, of course. We are given a variety of perspectives ranging from the very big, newspaper headlines, to the very small, a child’s subjective confusion in the face of an angry mob. The author uses these pieces to create both historical context and pathos for a country still so young and full of opportunity. We cannot become the child, but we do inhabit its world view through the author’s intelligent use of form and language. 

This skill requires a technical quality that, in my view, creates the aesthetic out of the techne. The content of the documentary, whether you agree with Curtis’s narrative of events or not, is constantly thought provoking and is ingeniously displayed through the intelligent use of the tools available. The use of music, the staging and positioning of story lines, and the deft use of imagery all combine to achieve their desired effect. Many of the examples in this series on human excellence create a kind of awe at the grace and skill of the crafts on show. This is certainly the feeling I had watching an expert journalist at work, displaying his technical, artful prowess.