Dec 17, 2009
Adam Curtis – It Felt Like A Kiss
This post is for those of you who are fans of Adam Curtis’ blog on the BBC website, but happen not to live in areas the BBC allows its online content to be aired.
A while ago, Marissa brought up an interesting idea regarding the obsolescence of storage and reproductive media, and the increasingly accelerated pace of that obsolescence. Lithography, for instance, was replaced by photography within decades at the turn of the 20th century; likewise, now, there is a generation of young people whose exposure to the cassette tape has become a source of parody – a generation unfamiliar and unequipped to mine the oceans of cultural ephemera captured on photographic undigitized film.
This leads to a corollary of Marissa’s thoughts; accelerating obsolescence seems to be directly proportional to accelerating storage capacity. Ownership of that storage has interesting implications regarding the narratives that can be created, ideas addressed by David Joselit in an essay titled Citizen Cursor, citing Bill Gates’ consolidation of stock film footage in his home and the relations between ownership and a “fantasy of possession” and the enslavement of the image.
Anyway, Adam Curtis, being intimately connected to BBC’s, does not own, but has seemingly unfettered access to tell really engaging mind-bending historical tales with supporting filmic evidence – his contextualization of Kabul being one of the most incredible examples of that.
That the BBC should restrict access to his work presents that dichotomy of “fantasy of possession” and the democratization of storage content in the commons.
So I thought I’d go ahead and make his “It Felt Like a Kiss”, which is one of the most enchanting experimental films I’ve ever watched, available here. Enjoy:
