Filmmaker Adam Curtis has been considered one of the most brilliant documentarians of our time with his release of experimental and radical projects, but he still thinks about himself as more of a “journalist.” What Curtis means is that he simply makes his audience look where they haven’t looked before to unveil the world and society as it is.

Curtis tells Billy Perrigo of Time magazine that “one of the problems with historical journalism is that it tends to go for the characters you already know,” which causes the viewer to lose interest. Curtis makes sure to introduce “fresh” and “complicated” characters, prompting his audience to study history in a new light. The British filmmaker is one of the best journalistic documentarians of all time, consistently making some of the most enlightening, brilliant films around.

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History of Adam Curtis

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Adam Curtis originally pursued a Ph.D. in politics but quickly left school because, according to the e-flux Journal, “academia was becoming increasingly cynical and corrupted." Curtis, son of cinematographer Marin Curtis, found his start at the BBC directing a 1980 series called Out of Court. The show focused on crime. E-flux Journal reveals that part of Curtis’ motivation to pursue film was that he recognized that “power [was beginning] to work in all sorts of ways other than how it was understood by political journalists” and he could explore this power through television.

Curtis’ first well-known documentary series came in 1992 and was titled Pandora’s Box. The project examines the consequences of technological and political rationalism, covering Communism in the Soviet Union, game theory during the Cold War, the economy of the UK in the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, and more.

     BBC Films

You might think that plenty of films cover these subjects, and you’d be right, but Curtis truly inspects the world in a special way, interweaving seemingly disparate topics in a truly eye-opening way. After Pandora’s Box, Curtis went on to produce other well-known works such as The Power of Nightmares (2004), HyperNormalisation (2016), and Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021).

Up until his most recent release, Curtis continues to look at power and change from authentic angles and deliver enlightening content. Here are three reasons why Adam Curtis is arguably the best documentarian of today.

Curtis’ Unseen Archive Footage and Reminiscent Soundtracks

     BBC iPlayer

In every one of Adam Curtis’ major projects, there is the inclusion of BBC archive footage to better illustrate the power changes during each period and to help us visualize people’s perspectives in that decade. The BBC explains that the “off-beat” footage and music Curtis employs “help [to] explain the roots of modern conspiracy theories, legal and illegal drugs, and artificial intelligence.” In Curtis’ most recent work, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, he strings together BBC clips that appear simplistic on the surface and are narrated by the secret stories underneath. Curtis combines this footage with ambiance from bands like Nine Inch Nails, Dead Oceans, and Natalie Beridze, creating the rare documentary with brilliant needle drops.

In Can’t Get You Out of My Head, rather than dissecting the complicated history of unexamined individuals, Curtis looks at, according to BBC, “what happens when all sorts of ideas, from power and politics, get into our heads in an age driven by feelings."

Adam Curtis Explains the Hypernormalization of Reality

Curtis is driven by the belief that many documentaries reinforce what the audience already knows, therefore, presenting nothing new. According to The Guardian, Curtis praises projects that “try and explain why reality is like it is.” He tells The Guardian that South Park is his favorite fictional series because it reports on the world every week in a “very original way.” As we already established, Curtis aims for this in his work.

A good example of how Adam Curtis turns over modern-day and history in a new light is in his 2016 project Hypernormalisation. Hypernormalisation was released in a time of uncertainty and during the presidency of Donald Trump. Instead of reinforcing the question “how did this happen”, according to The Quietus, Curtis traces “like how little rivers these things were flowing towards the uncertainty of now, and they joined up in really strange ways."

Adam Curtis Doesn’t Get Stuck on One Narrative

As we have established, Curtis has covered many subjects from climate change to 9/11, but he tries to present the big picture rather than a narrow point-of-view or conspiracy theory. Curtis tells The Quietus that today “conspiracy theorist” is shorthand for anyone who challenges the mainstream narrative. However, the filmmaker’s role is clear. The BBC has tasked him to “provoke people and ask them ‘have you thought about looking at the world this way?’” Curtis doesn’t definitively land on any political side and proceeds to conclude that everyone is flawed. For example, in Can’t Get Out of My Head, Curtis says that British Political Strategist Dominic Cummings “had some good ideas” but was again, doomed to fail because of his limited approach.

Adam Curtis is arguably one of the best filmmakers of today both for his unique, eye-catching style and for his ability to look at things from different angles the way no one else might see them. Curtis’s documentaries are available for streaming on the BBC iPlayer.