In this week’s episode, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish debate Curtis’s 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’s 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 more.
Links & Things Adam Curtis’s YouTube channel, where most of his works—including Pandora’s Box (1992), The Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004), and Can’t Get You Out of My Head—can be viewed for free Nick Bradshaw’s interview with Curtis in the April 2021 issue of Sight & Sound Three films by John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective on Ovid.tv Nine films by Bertrand Tavernier (R.I.P.!) on Criterion Channel This 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.
