The Loving Trap is a short film by Ben Woodhams about famed BBC documentary film producer Adam Curtis. Ben makes the case that Curtis’ films are made in a way that the audience is always wow’ed by style over substance, and they end up detracting from his message which he says usually amounts to a “drunken late night Wikipedia page”. Ouch!

Ben Woodhams: “In a landmark new documentary produced for YouTube, Adam Curtis has not examined his career and laid bare his style in the light of some confused academic papers he stumbled across on the internet. Instead, I have plundered various video archives and ripped him off, up, down, left, right and back again.”

I think Ben makes a decent point but I completely disagree with it. I think the style of quick edits, stock footage, etc. plays with the viewers emotions in such a way that the films completely suck you in. These techniques are used by all film makers, Curtis just happens to be really damn good at it. You might call it post modernism? While the technical methodology of his films is certainly propaganda-esque, I hardly think it detracts from his message, which has been spot on for nearly two decades. In fact I would argue that Curtis is the most powerful documentary film maker of the last 100 years and will likely be remembered as such.

Maybe I’m wrong?! Comments were turned off on the original source video but are are welcome here. I also upscaled the source to 720p as the original was just 360p. Enjoy friends and much thanks to Ben for releasing with a CC license.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode

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