As the world teeters on a knife edge of uncertainty, with the dark shadow of global conflict in a still nuclear age re-emerging, conditions are ripe for British documentarian Adam Curtis to offer one of his provocative film essays that attempts to untangle how we got here and what can be done about it.
In a three-decade career, Curtis, who began his career as a politics lecturer before leaving academia for a job at the BBC, has distinguished himself as the UK’s singular re-assembler of archive material in a series of films influenced by the collage artworks of Robert Rauschenberg and the modernist literary collage of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A Trilogy. In archive-rich docuseries, distinctive for their big ideas and whimsical digressions, Curtis has attempted to tackle a variety of aspects of late 20th and early 21st century social reorganisation. He has attempted to trace how the will of those at the top of western democratic society has been forced on to those at the bottom, and how this has reshaped the world into an increasingly self-obsessed global society, both more connected and more disconnected than before.
In Shifty, his new five-part BBC series, Curtis combines archive from news reports, TV shows, vox pops, home videos, celebrity coverage and his own previously filmed interviews to create a dizzying and multistranded exploration of the sweeping changes to life in Britain at the end of the 20th century when, as each episode reminds us, “the foundations of power [began] to move” and things became “shifty”.
The series’ opening episode, The Land of Make Believe, makes its intention to debunk the nostalgic conservative view of the Thatcher era clear from its first clip, which shows a group of children led by Jimmy Savile knocking on the door of the new prime minister.
Margaret Thatcher and her economic policies of monetarism and free market worship form the basis of the introductory chapter. Curtis makes his case for a fundamental shift in Britain that began in the late 1970s, with previous sources of social stability dissolving as the final vestiges of the Empire came tumbling down and Britain was forced to reconsider its place in the world.
The breaking down of the old ideas of Britain and Britishness opened the door for a new value system that was inward looking and self-interested. Despite the social chaos that Thatcher’s attacks on industry and the miners unleashed, once the genie was out of the bottle, it could never be returned.
Curtis’ curious eye roves across the 1980s, taking in everything from the Falklands War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and to the rise of sensation and sales over truth as epitomised by the Murdoch tabloids, to the transformation of houses from homes into assets in sprawling, multimillion pound property portfolios and a lack of opportunity amid violent racism and xenophobia. All of this plays against a smartly curated selection of eerie library industrial sound effects and pop music that encompasses everything from Joy Division to the Bee Gees and two-tone ska.
As the series progresses, and individualism and the glorification of technology bash down all the old certainties, Curtis shows how profit inevitably destroyed social unity and drove inequalities to irreconcilable new divides. In these new mash-ups of glimpses of the past lie the seeds for all the ills that plague present day Britain, with its anti-immigrant anger and housing crisis woes.
The appearance of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and New Labour in the final episode, The Democratisation of Everything, initially seems to offer the hope of a new political class intent on returning to the basics of serving society. However, it soon becomes clear to Curtis that this idealism was quickly replaced by the acceptance of the increasingly pessimistic self-obsessed view of human nature that the previous decades of Conservative rule had entrenched.
The introduction of managerial techniques developed in the private sector and the reliance on cut-throat deals between corporations and the government to manage state resources served only to allow for today’s ills of overpriced and unreliable rail services, polluted water systems, runaway housing prices and the white elephant of the Millenium Dome.
Though the series ends before the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit and Donald Trump, it’s clear from Curtis’ conclusion that he sees a connection between the huge shifts that tore old Britain apart and where it finds itself now. As he told the art publication Frieze in a recent interview, “Those of us who lived through this period experienced something that was equal parts exciting, extraordinary and horrible — and, somehow, we’ve ended up here, in this uncertain place. We can’t see the future and we constantly replay the past to ourselves. That’s where I started: with a sense that something is ending.”
Curtis doesn’t claim to know what comes next, but his distinctive remixing of the past in Shifty offers viewers a new way to think about how we could balance the need to look inward with a way of looking forward that offers new hope and acknowledges that the reins of power have now passed from finance to the tech bros.
- ‘Shifty’ is available to stream on YouTube.
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