| Adam Curtis | |
|---|---|
Adam Curtis at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2005 |
|
| Born | Adam Curtis 26 May 1955 |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Documentarian |
Adam Curtis (born 1955) is a British BAFTA winning documentarian and a writer, television producer, director and narrator. He works for BBC Current Affairs.
Contents |
Curtis was born in 1955. He attended the Sevenoaks School, whose fellow alumni include musicians Tom Greenhalgh and Mark White of The Mekons, along with Andy Gill and Jon King of Gang of Four.
Curtis completed a Bachelor of Arts in Human Sciences at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, where he studied genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, politics, anthropology and statistics. After graduating, Curtis was a Tutor in Politics at the University of Oxford.
He left academia to make a career in television, obtaining a post on That's Life!, a programme that often placed serious and humorous content in close juxtaposition.
Curtis makes extensive use of archive footage in his documentaries. He has acknowledged the influence of recordings made by Erik Durschmied and to "constantly using his stuff in my films".[1] An Observer profile said of Curtis' style:
The Observer adds "if there has been a theme in Curtis's work since, it has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragicomic consequences of those attempts."[2]
Curtis received the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2005.[3] In 2006 he was given the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Contribution to Television at the British Academy Television Awards. In 2009 Sheffield Doc/Fest awarded Curtis the inaugural Sheffield Inspiration Award for his inspiration to documentary makers and audiences.
| Year | Documentary | Subject | Parts | Broadcast on | Awards |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1983 | Just Another Day: Walton on the Naze | Various long-standing British institutions. | |||
| 1983 | The Tuesday Documentary: Trumpets and Typewriters | The history of war correspondents. | |||
| 1984 | Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster.[4] | The system-built housing of the 1960s. | |||
| 1984 | Italians: Mayor of Montemilone | With Dino Labriola | |||
| 1984 | The Cost Of Treachery | The Albanian Subversion, a 1949 plot in which the CIA and MI6 attempted to overthrow the Albanian government to weaken the Soviet Union. The counter-agent within the intelligence rank, Kim Philby. | |||
| 1987 | 40 Minutes: Bombay Hotel | The luxurious Taj Mahal Palace & Tower in Mumbai, contrasted with the poverty of the slums of the city. | |||
| 1988 | An Ocean Apart | The process by which the United States was involved in the First World War. | Episode One: "Hats Off to Mr. Wilson". | ||
| 1989 | 40 Minutes: The Kingdom of Fun | Documentary about the Metro Centre in Gateshead, developed by entrepreneur John Hall. The programme compares John Hall's plans to regenerate the North East, with those of T. Dan Smith. | |||
| 1989 | Inside Story: The Road To Terror | How the Iranian Revolution turned from idealism to terror. Draws parallels with the French Revolution two hundred years earlier. | |||
| 1992 | Pandora's Box | The dangers of technocratic and political rationality. | 6 | BAFTA: Best Factual Series [1] | |
| 1995 | The Living Dead | The way that history and memory (both national and individual) have been used by politicians and others. | 3 | ||
| 1996 | 25 Million Pounds | Nick Leeson and the collapse of Barings Bank. | San Francisco International Film Festival, 1998: Best Science and Nature Documentary | ||
| 1997 | Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh | The story, dating back to the 1950s, of the search for a cure to cancer and the impact of Henrietta Lacks, the "woman who will never die" because her cells never stopped reproducing. | Golden Gate Award, 1997[5] | ||
| 1999 | The Mayfair Set | How buccaneer capitalists were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, all members of The Clermont club in the 1960s. | 4 | BAFTA, 2000: Best Factual Series or Strand[6] | |
| 2002 | The Century of the Self | How Freud's discoveries concerning the unconscious led to Edward Bernays' development of public relations, the use of desire over need and self-actualisation as a means of achieving economic growth and the political control of population. | 4 | BBC Four, art house cinemas in the US | Broadcast Award: Best Documentary Series; Longman/History Today Awards: Historical Film of the Year; Entertainment Weekly, 2005: fourth best movie |
| 2004 | The Power of Nightmares | Suggested a parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and Neoconservatism in the United States in that both needed to inflate a myth of a dangerous enemy in order to draw people to support them. | 3 | BBC Two | BAFTA, 2004: Best Factual Series[7] |
| 2007 | The Trap — What Happened to our Dream of Freedom | The modern concept of freedom.[2] | 3 | BBC Two | |
| 2007 | — | Television news reporters. | 1 | Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, third episode of the fourth series | |
| 2009 | — | The rise of "Oh Dear"-ism. | 1 | Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe | |
| 2009 | It Felt Like A Kiss[8] | Mixed media.[9] Broadcast July 2. | 1 | ||
| 2010 | — | Paranoia and moral panics. | 1 | Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, fourth episode in the second series | |
| 2011 | All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace | The computer as a model of the world around us. | 3 | BBC Two[10][11] | |
| 2011 | Every Day Is Like Sunday (working title)[12] | The dramatic downfall of the newspaper mogul who used to dominate Britain before Rupert Murdoch arrived. | 1 |
|
|||||