Abam Curtis: It Felt Like A Kiss

I found Adam Curtis's new work incredibly disappointing. Unlike with all Curtis's previous works I did not learn anything new of significance. This was essentially a series of now bland a clichéd infobites such as that the CIA tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar, Rock Hudson was Gay, and Sadam Hussein was backed by America. If any of this was news to you you must have been hiding under a rock for the past 20 years. There where a few interesting titbits such as a Sadam Hussein propaganda film that glorified his roll in Bathist take over of Iraq being edited by Terence Young the director of a couple of the James Bond movies but so what? There was also some good archive clips such as a Vietnam vet confessing to American war crimes but this film had nothing of great interest to say other than that the utopian vision America presented of itself in the post-war years wasn't all it seemed and that America's covert foreign policy saw the CIA get up no good but this is hardly front page news. While a shorter version of this film was shown as part of an installation at the recent Manchester International Festival and that as a visceral experience it may have worked entirely differently in that context Curtis has specifically chosen to release (and re-cut) this version online and it fails completely to live up too previous works such as The Power of Nightmares, The Trap and, his most important work, the amazing The Century of the Self. All of these are widely available online and in providing socio-political histories of the 20th century they allow us to see just how we got to where we are today. The original Reithian remit of the BBC was to educate, inform and entertain: these three works do this.