My lingering feeling that he sucks/is an op is growing. I’ve long figured that nobody truly subversive would be getting published by the BBC. The majority of his latest work is a borderline anti communist hit piece tbh.

  • glimmer_twin [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I just watched a 5 minute stretch where he just says “Deng believed...”, “Deng planned...”, Deng this, Deng that. No direct quotes. No dates, no references. Just Curtis telling me this is how it was, laying decades of Chinese national policy out and portraying it as a deliberate pre-planned scheme by Deng. I’m not a Dengist by any means but it seems a poor way of doing history/sociology/whatever the fuck he thinks he’s doing

    • PermaculturalMarxist [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      To put it in Marxist terms, Adam Curtis is an idealist, and that is his greatest fault as a social scientist. It's like if you took Jürgen Habermas and made him a documentary filmmaker.

    • spectre [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      That's the thing with AC though, I see his films as more of an art project based on history, rather than any sort of authoritative source on anything. I enjoy his work just because it gets the brain juices flowing a bit, rather than because he is "right" or anything.