Shifty

Using archive material from the Thatcher years, Adam Curtis demonstrates a myth that many on the Left will be uncomfortable with; far from being an underhand experiment, Mrs. Thatcher made it clear from the start what her project was all about. The destruction of the Welfare State. The destruction of solidarity. The decimation of the right of the people to be protected from capitalism. But the Left were more interested in making speeches to each other and ideological purity. The media colluded with the Tories, and the hard earned gains of the working class were lost.

Brilliant and unsettling work from a dwindling pool of sharp and empathetic film maker.

The opening scenes are worth the license fee on their own.

I absolutely loved this documentary series. I am 65 and felt like my life was passing in front of my eyes. The nostalgia pangs were bittersweet. To me, it felt true to the times.

The treatment of the Thatcher regime challenges the current perception that her works require some kind of sainthood and present the pain and destructoon visited on so many people by her stiff-necked policies. I remember friends having their flats repossessed and the terrible inequalities created by those receiving double figure interest on savings whilst others were having to pay them out on mortgages. The myth that unions destroyed industry is illustrated beautifully. I would love to see more like this.

I love social documentaries and Adam Curtis' are some of the most interesting and watchable ones being made this century. SHIFTY is his latest effort, which explores the legacy of Thatcherism in Britain from 1979 through to the end of the century. This one's a five-part miniseries that offers an innovative approach by not having any kind of narration. Instead, the director weaves together multiple plot strands each episode, all of them generally linked to the public mood and tackling themes of industry, finance, livelihood and society. There are plenty of terse captions which help to explain what we're seeing, while the footage chosen is extremely interesting, thought-provoking, often shocking in retrospect. Appropriate music enhances the effect in what is a thoroughly engaging documentary overall.

There is something mesmeric about Adam Curtis, that drags you along, in to the dark crevices of the world, whether you want to go there or not. He finds beauty in grime and filth, humour in loss and torment; he documents our age through the telescopic view of a VTR wielding time traveller, cobbling together what look like random bits of YouTube into an amazingly well researched and thought provoking series of essays that explain where we are today. He is a contrarian and a curator, a poet and a polemicist, and he's damn entertaining too.

Shifty is not for everyone, that is clear from the start, with a fractured narrative strung out across multiple audio visual streams in each episode. But once you come to accept the juxtaposition, and once you allow the sound and imagery to flow over you like some sort of educational psilocybin trip you will get much more out of his unique style than you ever thought.

Curtis seems to do the easiest, laziest form of storytelling, putting clips together like a sixth form media studies exercise. But his immense talent lies in the wit and skill he chooses that archive with, and the dexterity he displays in turning something seemingly innocuous into something profound. The BBC clearly trust Curtis, as he has the full run of its vast, unsurpassed archive, and is allowed to use it to tell long format stories that don't appear anywhere else anymore. Each second of footage has been chosen to mean something incredibly specific, and the power of Curtis is that he can do this while always casting a wry smile over it all. We start with Britain's two greatest villains of the 1980s, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the man she made a Knight of the Realm, the very disgraced "Sir" Jimmy Saville, shepherding a group of pre-teen children into a dark room somewhere in Westminster, for God knows what purpose, and then jump to the straightest, most awkward looking exchange of all time while discussing a gay disco that evening, only to next be slam-banged into the communal baths of a long lost South Wales coal mine, that looks like the gayest place in Christendom. And then we meander from there.

It is quixotic and vulgar, shocking and hysterical, understandable and gobbledegook. But it works. Like all of his work, Shifty only gives you the specific Adam Curtis argument that he wants to portray, and it is always left up to you to decide if you agree or whether you want to go away and question it. He will carry on regardless, and drag your cortex off to some other clip only he could find, and only he could use. He is an auteur in every sense. I cannot recommend this enough.

So, why only 8 our of 10? Well, some of this argument is slightly simplistic at times, and doesn't have the Earth shattering wow factor that the Power of Nightmares had (you very much took the red pill during that one), but Curtis still manages to make you think just how did they get away with this. He seems to be a little bit more in entertainment mode during Shifty than in the past, and maybe, just maybe, he knows that he is probably preaching to the converted these days, so why not have some fun while doing it. That said though, there is some harrowing footage in here, that sits very uneasily for a long time afterwards. The sight and sound of poor Thi the elephant being ripped from her family at London Zoo to help cut costs in 1991 is horrific to see, and left me feeling ill. What cruelty we allow in the name of profit. And no, that isn't a spoiler, it's just the way of the world.

Shifty is great, shifty is brilliant, shifty is astounding. And then what?

I grew up in the years Shifty retraces, so how biessed am I? Everything illustrated here, i lived through. Every urgence depicted, i fought through. Every exhilaration depicted i danced through. So i accept i cannot watch this documentary/exploration without a pre-defined view. Adam Curtis either tells me we're going into thatcher years again, or we just need to mind what they were.

This is the kind of work that should be aimed at our younger generations. What do they expect of our powers? What do they believe are our goals? England chose a way should the western world follow?