[cribbles]

“Curtis’s stitched-together compositions are less collages than they are Rorschach blots: look into their murk, and you can find your own worldview confirmed.”

This passage, which I see as being core to the author’s critique, doesn’t really jive with me. Basically he’s saying these movies are enigmatic, they offer space for reflection, they resonate with a lot of people across the ideological spectrum.

Well, you can look at that cynically, or you could say that’s precisely — almost definitionally — what makes them effective art.

To go a little further than that: I don’t think it’s a fair claim. Each of his movies since Bitter Lake have had the same general arc of “emerging ideological apparatus promises to resolve social contradictions and empower the common person, fails to do so.” In this sense, his narrative angle is broadly _anti-confirmatory_.

Then there’s the aesthetic critique, which, whatever. I really can’t fault someone for finding fault with Adam Curtis’s style. And it’s least overbearing in TraumaZone out of all his movies I’ve seen, so I get why this author favors it.

As it happens, I’m about halfway through TraumaZone right now. It’s great. Poses some interesting questions, doesn’t offer any easy answers.

[denton-scratch]

I was going to comment on the same passage. There's definitely something Rorschach about Curtis's work.

But the author's focus on ambience, Eno and what he calls "texture" I think misses the point. I appreciate Curtis's eschewing of an explicit "voice of God" narration, like you get in most PBS documentaries. The Rorschach Test forces you to peer into the murk; you can't consume these documentaries passively.

That is, they make you think. That different viewers can come away with different takes on a film is a good thing, not a criticism. I think the author is unduly dismissive.

[jahnu]

TraumaZone is in my humble opinion a masterpiece. But to me it doesn't show that his previous work is any less incredible. In his previous work he explicitly sets out a (usually unconventional) thesis and then attempts to explain it in detail.

In TraumaZone the subtitle explains what he wants to do this time, "Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy". He wants only that you get a feeling of what it was like to experience what these people experienced and he does that incredibly well as far as I can judge.

From TFA:

> And yet this is hardly a sufficient explanation.

I find it incredible that this isn't sufficient for the author. It fits with everything!

[kiliantics]

I would like someone with a right wing politics to explain how their worldview is confirmed by his works. To me the messaging seems undoubtedly Marxist and his Wikipedia page mentions that Curtis was influenced by Max Weber. He is also quoted as implying that he is left libertarian, though it's interesting to note that he also implies that he doesn't know that there is already an existing tradition of left libertarianism since he predicts one will emerge.

[thedailymail]

I think the point where the message of Curtis' films most nearly intersects with the conservative mindset is in viewing many (most?) efforts to reform society as doomed or counterproductive.

[orhmeh09]

How does it seem Marxist? I think Marxist type of materialist critique is absent from his works and he tends toward airy notions of "power" and a "great man" view of history.

[trgn]

Marxist, as in his contrasting of power relations (usiLly shadowy owners/bureaucrats vs consumers, if not proles), and explicit in that all operate in global market. Ie dynamics are always worldwide, connected, interchangeable.

Also Marxist by extension, because Curtis is taking after Debord and baudeillard: wafting underneath it all is a vapor,the commoditization of everything, the flattening of reality, mass media as a factory for dispositions.

Fwiw - I don't necessarily see the great man view, it's more a Ted talky way of anchoring his stories. E.g. sure Clinton xyz, but could just as well be interchangeable usa president xyz.

[orhmeh09]

Thanks for your perspective, I have more orthodox understanding of Marxism that leads to different conclusions but I can see the connections you make as well.