Baker, Emily; (2025) Between Citational Genealogy and the Counter-Archival Uncanny: Adam Curtis and the Democratisation of the Archive. In: Ring, Annie and Bollington, Lucy, (eds.) Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture. (pp. 45-62). Legenda: Oxford, UK.

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Abstract

Can’t Get You Out of My Head, a six-part documentary film series made by Adam Curtis, was released on the BBC iPlayer in February 2021. Media scholars such as James Bennett have taken the launch of the iPlayer as their first example of the disruption to the ‘structure of television’s scheduled flow’ in this new era of digital and thus personalised viewing. Curtis declared himself aware of the extra freedom this immediate release to iPlayer would give him; yet apart from being longer, in many ways the series’s form and content adheres to his signature style, inaugurated with the release of Pandora’s Box (1992, BAFTA winner for Best Factual Series in 1993) and refined over the course of a number of series and stand-alone documentaries. Baker argues that Curtis’s series can benefit from being understood as a genealogical study of the present, aware of its own discursive will-to-power, and at the same time, maintaining openness to multiple possible readings. Understanding it in this way should subdue critiques that label Curtis’s work as ‘incoherent and conspiracy-fuelled’. While the BBC documentary-making tradition is clearly folded into his work, Curtis’s citational use of the BBC, and other, archives produces a clear counter-archive to the hegemonic discourses of power that the BBC was often complicit in producing, reflecting and/or underpinning.

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