Sound And Vision: Adam Curtis
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at Weyes Blood's God Turn Me Into A Flower, directed by Adam Curtis.
As a director Adam Curtis is mostly known for his found-footage documentaries that fully consist of existing material. His style consists of repurposed footage, with heady and incendiary narration (mostly through intertitles or sometimes voice-over) recontextualizing the imagery, and making grand inquisitions into the political turmoil of today. His works are almost epic in scope, and associative in the connections they make. It is very much a possibility in an Adam Curtis film to see a slightly comical or off kilter news footage clip, which he then ties into the history of surveillance, or topics like Reagonomics. You must be quite well-read to be able to follow some of the connections he makes, and even then, it often doesn't always make full sense.
His films toe the line between historical recontextualization and an almost conspiracy-like mindset. They can seem like the ramblings of a mad man, but they are also thoroughly researched, even impressively so. That is the thing with an Adam Curtis piece: he is almost certainly smarter than you, and he is not willing to bow to your level. I, for one, often feel myself being sidelined. Works like Hypernormalisation, Bitter Lake, Shifty, and The Power of Nightmares have a lot I admire. I also feel they fly over my head, oftentimes.
The same can be said for his sole music video, for Weyes Blood's God Turn Me Into a Flower. Here you get a sense tho, that the overwhelm is by design, and that it doesn't really matter if you don't get every reference. We see footage from an entire century of media imagery, mostly from the sixties, seventies and eighties, focusing on (mostly) women in a state of overwhelm. Be it sadness or joy, there is something purely emotional about the vulnerability on display. The context of the footage doesn't really matter that much, it is about the core emotions being shown. Some of the clips are from features, and therefore staged. Some are from big news events. Others are from concert audiences, or anonymous people in the streets. Even a dancing barbie doll cameos. But still, there is a sense of rapturous ecstasy in both the music and the imagery.
Which is why the connections to current day events feel jarring, at times. When a male prisoner holds up a sign saying "suicide soon", or a protester sprays graffiti on a facade of a building stating "Burn the banks", or a kid makes an anxious plea in the light of school shooting in the final imagery of the video... it stops the ecstacy right in it's tracks. But that whiplash might again be the point. This is about the overwhelm and emotionality of history. The fleetingness of our news cycles. And the things that all humans go through. A music video that makes the case that all these current events are blips in time, drops in a big stream of human tears. Be they tears of joy or sadness.
Weyes Blood and Adam Curtis made this music video stemming from a friendship. Curiously the friendship started when she visited London at the time of the Queen Elizabeth funeral, coincidentally. A big historical event, leading to some very stark political commentary, some humanistic steam-of-consciousness in music video form. It's all too fitting within Adam Curtis' oeuvre.
