Adam Curtis
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“I Had the Will and the Emotional Momentum… the Movie was Hyper-Topical, Being Made Basically in Real Time”: Dasha Nekrasova on Her Jeffrey Epstein Horror Film, The Scary of Sixty-First
Dasha Nekrasova wanted all the exteriors in her directorial debut to have the ambience of Christmas in New York. First up: leering gargoyles lining the 15-foot front door of Jeffrey Epstein’s Upper East Side apartment building. Clearly, Nekrasova doesn’t share the same merry Christmas cheer as most. In The Scary of Sixty-First, two roommates move into a semi-furnished apartment that may have been owned by the pedophile billionaire. When an amateur detective hyped up on amphetamines and conspiracies shows up to investigate Epstein’s life and death, the roommates are infected with the haunted truth of their new home. Creating a […]
by Taylor Hess on Dec 2, 2021 -
Choose Your Own Future: Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head
While Adam Curtis has been making films since 1983, he first gained a kind of international recognition that once might have been termed “cult” with The Century of the Self (2002) and The Power of Nightmares (2004). These films source-coded the psychological and political terrains of the neoliberal landscape, deftly flaying away the already-decaying narratives of the Bush/Blair era. Deploying a voiceover pitched somewhere between Marxian don and MI-5 briefing, the twisting, layered narratives of Century and Nightmares articulated answers that were neither easy nor comforting, but answers all the same. Contemporary society was a managed “dreamworld,” and the stories […]
by Brendan Byrne on Apr 8, 2021 -
“I’m Not Interested in Cinema”: Adam Curtis on Bitter Lake
This weekend the True/False Film Festival will bestow its annual True Vision Award to BBC house provocateur Adam Curtis “in honor of his dedication to and advancement in the field of nonfiction filmmaking.” Although the 59-year-old Curtis doesn’t think of himself as a filmmaker, it seems like an apt choice; he’s become one of the cinema’s essential purveyors of historical counter-narratives. In films largely made for TV and internet audiences consisting mostly of found footage collage techniques, he uses an aesthetic language as indebted to experimentalist Bruce Connor as it is to the sensationalist evening news of the 1980s, making the […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 5, 2015
