Extraordinary. Curtis was a BBC documentarian with a decided socialist streak who pieced together seven hour-long films about the disintegration of the Soviet Union (and subsequent rise to power of Vladimir Putin) in 2022 from random BBC archival footage, so that it could all be seen through the eyes of Russian people at every level of society.
Dystopian, creepy, banal, fascinating. A car crash in slow motion.
You can find it all on the YouTubes, with an incredibly varied soundtrack too.
And if you dig this, you can also track down his other earlier work, including “Hypernormalization,“ a similarly constructed documentary which argues that governments, financiers, and tech titans have, since the 1970s, given up on trying to model the complex "real world" and instead established a simplified "fake world" for the benefit of corporations. Anti-capitalist in excelsis deo. But well worth searching out. 👀
