Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Titled after the poet Richard Brautigan's 1967 panegyric to the pastoral
role that might be played by technology, All Watched Over loosely
focuses around how computers became ubiquitous tools with far
reaching ideological implications. The three episodes cover novelist
and philosopher Ayn Rand's influence on the powerful economist Alan
Greenspan, alongside Silicon Valley and computer utopianism, how
cybernetics and systems theory impacted on ecology and
environmentalism, and finally, relationships between genetics, the
selfish gene theory and racism in the Congo. But even this is a harsh
simplification of the mesh of associations that Curtis builds in the
series. Not only is it difficult to summarise, it's hard to see how he can
hold it together without being ponderous. "I'm serious about it but I'm
also playing with you. I'm not a preachy, John Pilger-y I-believe-thisdeeply. I'm saying we live in a very, very, very rigid, conservative time
and am just asking have you thought about reconfiguring it and looking
at it like this? And I do the same with music. Have you thought that I
could put silly dancing music over Islamist terrorists? See what that
feels like." I reply that it feels ridiculous. "Well then, you're not that
It's moving stuff, and I ask what he thinks about the criticism that he
manipulates people by seducing them into his narrative; cherry-picking
a disparate collection of subjects, mixing them about and re-editing
them into a fiction-like narrative? He seems exasperated. "Yeah, of
course it is [manipulative] because what do you want me to do, make a
boring programme? No, I want to make programmes that mesmerise
you and provoke you, so you're going 'hmm I like that, hmm, no I don't
think that!' I want you to get engaged. So of course I'm playing with
you. But that's what a good film maker does. It's an emotional thing. I
think I'm quite honest about it, because here you are, you're saying
don't you do this, and I'm like, well yeah, I do! And half of it is just the
fun of finding the right music. I used that [Eno] track because with that
series I was more angry than I normally am. Normally I'm quite
playful, and looking askance at things. With that, I was really angry
because I thought a lot of my colleagues were misreporting something
really badly. I'm not saying there wasn't a terrorist threat, I'm just
saying they were distorting it. I knew that to do that, I had to bust
through, and if you listen to that track, it builds in mood and kicks off,
and it felt that it was a very good way to actually tackle something like
that."
Though popular in its own way, 'pop trash' isn't the first thing that
comes to mind when describing Another Green World. And when
Curtis goes on to talk about Burial, early Shostakotvich, Philip Jeck or
Tod Dockstader (who he names as a hero) in the same breath, I get the
feeling that (alongside having a broad understanding of what 'pop trash'
is) he's continually trying ideas on for size, re-framing and modifying
them, embracing them, changing them or dispensing with them. This
omnivorous appetite for subjects, ideas and material demands a high
degree of associative skills. It also necessitates flexibility and creativity
when it's time to fit it all together coherently. "I have what's called a
pattern brain. I pattern music together and I pattern ideas together,
sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. What I'm intrigued by
more and more is that increasingly we live in an emotional time, and
people pattern in a much more emotional way than they used to... And
the collage with music, they're much more open to that."
Curtis started his TV career in the early 80s and, broadly speaking, has
made films that look at the relationship between politics and the
exercise of power, and how through them ideas like genetics, game
theory and crowd psychology have been used and abused. More often
than not, Curtis shows how these systems result in failure and tragedy.
Though it sounds like sobering material, Curtis's approach is far from a
talking head with "a little bit of music way in the distance, telling you
what's what", or the worthiness of what he calls "posh documentaries
for a particular class". It was with 1992's Pandora's Box a series
focusing on science and its relationship with politics and power that
his films started to reach a wider audience. Rather than the standard
science TV animations and reenactments, it is made up of footage from
news flashes, car adverts, sci-fi films and self-shot interviews, all
underlaid with harshly cut noises and 'pop trash'. It's an approach that is
consistent throughout all his films. In subsequent series like The Living
Dead, Century Of The Self and The Trap, Curtis tapped into archives
of films and sound, taking the fragments of important and tragic events
and re-splicing them to form a kind of slapstick or screwball video
essay. It's a formula that can dust off tired narratives, freeing them from
fossilised histories and making them into something intellectually and
emotionally engaging and fun to watch.
fragments. Possibly torn between TV's remit of entertainment-at-allcosts and a rigorous intellectual engagement with his subject no matter
how complicated, his stories become frenetic and unravel. Public
reaction to his recent series was polarised, especially the final episode
where he mixed together several stories: Colonialism, racism, the
selfish gene theory and Congo's trade in raw materials for computers.
Watching it was exhilarating but left me wondering what, if anything
apart from a stream of interesting facts, had emerged? "The third film I
made was really experimental and I thought I'd gone bonkers as I was
literally putting two stories together, which did join up at the front and
then joined up at the end. But I was trying to say there was an
emotional relationship between the two. That, as our faith in being able
to change the world predictably has declined the end of that liberal
dream an emotional view of ourselves as fundamentally stuck
creatures driven by things inside us, has risen up. I'm not positing a
direct causal relationship, I'm saying that the two things are happening
simultaneously and I have a good end point and start point where they
literally are together. So I'm trying to actually do an emotionally
coherent film as much as an intellectually coherent film because I
actually think that increasingly a lot of people think like that. They're
ready for that."
Curtis refutes any suggestion that he is an artist, instead insisting that he
is wholly a journalist. He says the recent films were trying to link
people's everyday experience to wider social and political events: "I
sort of think I got it right in the last film, sort of. Because what [I did] is
use music to evoke the feelings, the emotions and put it against or with,
big things out there. I haven't got it quite yet. But I know that
journalism has been so boring at the moment because it's either about
'you, you, you, you', what songs you like, what you feel today, where
do you want to go to today, all that. Or it's big, grand narratives but
done in a very dry and boring way. The trick, in the future, will be to
put them together... To be blunt, music's probably the link."
I ask if he's reacting against a widespread stultification of culture.
Curtis responds: "I'm part of the problem I go back into the past,
rework it and come back and go 'have you thought about thinking
about it like this?' I'm not actually recording the now and making it
seem like a new thing, no one does that, have you noticed this? No one
does. And no one does music that makes one feel like the now." Curtis
moves on to Hauntology: "It's quite a good phrase really, we are
haunted by the past at the moment. And I think it's because we haven't
got any ideas about how to move on. Or it could be that it's the down
side of a market democracy It might be that if you actually try and
create a society that is driven by market ideas (in other words, what
you or I want is then given to us) then you tend to get a very static
society because you're actually consciously against innovation that isn't