Abstract
Adam Curtis is a BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker who employs borrowed images from the past to construct complex accounts of the political present. Produced primarily for the medium of television (the BBC), though this has expanded in recent years to include digital platforms, his films consist of an idiosyncratic use of archived image and sound fragments: Hollywood and British films, news footage, expert vox pops, television shows, corporate training films, drone footage, film music, sound effects, and so on. These fragments are generally overlayed by a serious ‘matter of fact’, journalistic voice-over narration (Curtis himself), that tells the story of our times. Curtis is wellknown as a polemicist. His films directly question and challenge the proficiency of political elites.