It Felt Like a Kiss

The film covers America between 1959 and 1966 using archive footage. There is no narrator, no interview, no explanation. There is only short text on the screen. The images come from news archives, institutional records, advertisements and old films, with the pop songs of the period underneath. Doris Day, Rock Hudson, the young Saddam Hussein, the Congo, experiments on monkeys and Vietnam come together in one edit. Adam Curtis directs. It was made for the BBC and first presented together with a theatre company as a walk through installation in a disused building; the audience moved through the building after watching the film. Curtis's method is to build an argument by joining archive material. The argument here is that the power assembled in the years when America was shaping the world eventually turned on its own people, and nobody noticed. The use of sound is its strongest side; images of violence are matched to cheerful pop songs, and the pairing works disturbingly well. The method is contested. Curtis implies causality between the events he connects, and that is the most common criticism made of his work. It runs about fifty minutes. Who it is for: viewers who like archive based essay film and Adam Curtis's work. Who it is not for: there is no narrative, the claims are not demonstrated, and the logic of the montage is demanding.