Adam Curtis's Can't Get You Out of My Head

Published: March 30, 2021, 4:43 p.m.

A few weeks ago, the British documentarian Adam Curtis debuted his newest mega-project online: a six-episode, eight-hour BBC series titled, Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. It's the latest in Curtis\u2019s 30-year run of documentaries that stitch together found footage drawn largely from the BBC\u2019s archives into epic origin stories of our political and cultural times. Available in its entirety on YouTube, Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head traces associative connections between a number of figures across history\u2014including Jiang Qing, Michael X, Afeni and Tupac Shakur, Edouard Limonov, and others\u2014to craft a dizzying account of the emergence of the global economy, the rise of individualism, and the spread of conspiracy theories.\n\nIn this week's episode,\xa0Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish debate Curtis\u2019s aesthetic strategies and political arguments with two old friends: Film at Lincoln Center assistant programmer Dan Sullivan, and Violet Lucca, a former Film Comment editor (and the original host of this podcast!) who now works as web editor at Harper\u2019s Magazine. They take on a number of questions in a lively, often impassioned conversation. Is Curtis a journalist, a filmmaker, or a propagandist? Who is the audience for his films? Do his grand theories hold water? And much more. For show notes, go to filmcomment.com/blog/the-film-comment-podcast-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head.\n\nThis episode of the Film Comment Podcast is sponsored by MUBI. Film Comment readers and listeners can get 30 days of great cinema free at mubi.com/filmcomment.