Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis shares a look at some key moments from his latest series, Shifty.
Curtis has previously taken viewers to places like Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union in TraumaZone, and to the war in Afghanistan in Bitter Lake.
Now, in his five-part BBC series Shifty, Curtis turns his focus to Britain at the end of the 20th century.
Life in Britain today has become strange – a hazy dream-like flux in which no-one can predict what is coming next.
As always, Curtis uses his unique style, combining strange archive footage to show, as he puts it, how
In Shifty, footage of key political figures from the time – Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair – appears alongside odd clips from the BBC archives, such as avant-garde hairdressing contests, suburban line dancing, and kids hot-wiring a tractor
For those new to his work, the documentaries might seem hard to follow, so we talked to Curtis to choose and explain some of the main clips from the series.
Curtis also came up with a title for each clip to help viewers better understand the odd and unclear world of Shifty. One part focuses on how musical remixes became popular in the 1980s, and what that meant for society – or, in Curtis’s words.
We are trapped by a cascade of endlessly replayed images, songs, dreams from the past. That’s the way this series was made, so I’m just as bad. If it’s become a prison, I may be one of the jailers.
One way Curtis brings back the past is by reusing an interview with Sir Alan Budd, which he originally filmed for the 1992 documentary Pandora’s Box.
The people making the policy decisions… never believed for a moment this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working class.
In a strikingly honest interview, the former chief economic adviser to the Treasury during Thatcher’s time expresses concern that
I’ve always been fascinated by that interview that Budd gave. It’s one of the few moments of honesty I’ve ever had from someone in power like that being interviewed.
says Curtis
As a young BBC worker, Curtis was part of That’s Life. The show mixed consumer issues with fun stories – most famously, a dog that could ‘say’ the word sausages.
It showed me that you could go from a badly-built housing estate built on poisonous waste ground to a talking dog.
Curtis credits his ability to juggle tragic and comic tones to this early role
In Shifty, scenes of social unrest are shown next to Bruno, a dog who is, as his vet says, “changing his sex” – with male organs fading and female ones appearing.
The way she’s sitting and her hair. it felt like a past that was about to go.
Curtis says that it was Bruno’s owner that drew him to the clip
They are these creatures who live with us who probably have a lot of hidden knowledge about us.
Animals in his work can often represent our secret lives, he says
For Curtis, animals also balance what he calls the “highly pretentious” parts of his work: “They just entertain people.”
In this clip, a Cambridge University archivist takes one of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s handbags out of a box, pointing out that it still strongly smells of her perfume.
In the same way, Thatcher’s influence is seen throughout the series, as it shows the impact of her policies in the 1980s and 90s.
A collective model of society, where people came together in factories, were exploited, then realised they had power as a collective group.
Before Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Curtis argues there was
He feels, however, that the closure of industries like mining led to “a society full of fragmented individuals who were powerful in the way they thought about their own desires, but actually on their own were powerless.”
Even so, Curtis views Thatcher as a “tragic figure”, who set off forces she couldn’t control.
She was the last politician who had an idea of how to change the country. She wanted to create a society in which politics doesn’t have as much effect as it did, and should allow individuals to be loose and free.
he explains
Another figure who appears often in Shifty is scientist Stephen Hawking, whose ideas about multiple universes shook our understanding of reality.
While making the series, Curtis started to see a connection between Hawking and Thatcher, he says.
She believed that rationality applied through money would regenerate the country. He believed that the rational power of mathematics will lead you to a unified theory that will explain the whole world.
What interested Curtis about Hawking was how his logical theories took him to “ever more irrational assumptions”.
When he says that matter is eaten by black holes, other scientists say that cannot be true. So he says there must be other universes where they don’t eat the matter, so it balances out. To me, that’s absurd.
But Curtis started to feel moved by Hawking’s human side, like in a clip where he says goodnight to his child.
One of the themes in Shifty is what Curtis calls “the rise in confidence among people to talk about your own feelings, your own experience”.
This appears in one of the filmmaker’s favourite clips, where two boys in Swindon talk about the banning of the song Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood because of its sexual content. The clip, from a set of BBC public access shows in the 1980s, ends with one boy suddenly saying the government should legalise cannabis.
Their boldness in criticising the BBC while being on it shows a lack of respect for authority that Curtis believes would have been unthinkable twenty years earlier.
It also gave Curtis a chance to use the song Relax, one of several pop tracks in the series.
The song plays into the show’s idea that late 20th-century Britain was “wild and extraordinary, and had some very good trashy music in it, but it also unleashed a corrosive force”.
Source: BBC