Hypernormal Films for Postnormal Times: The Documentary Dance of Adam Curtis

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has created landmark, multi-episode series for the BBC that explore the emotional and social impact of change in dominant forms of power, communication and control. Together, his ambitious visual essays compose a secret history of technology-driven modernity, as a managerial model of radical individualism governed by data-gathering and surveillance replaces traditional mass politics. This process, which Curtis calls “hypernormalisation,” has affinities with the conception of “postnormal times” developed by Ziauddin Sardar. However, the two visions differ in significant ways, while Curtis’s analysis shows signs of evolving as flaws emerge in the stable systems his work foregrounds.