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Adam Curtis is one of the most thought-provoking English-language documentary producers around today. His BBC remit allows him an unprecedented degree of freedom from editorial control leaving him to discourse freely, and spend time devoping his themes, which span politics, social science and economics. His interest in the big themes of why we live the way we do makes him inhabit the rarefied zone between contemporary commentator and historian. For example, in the Century of the Self, Curtis lays out a case for the factors that have driven the development of our solipsistic culture, drawing attention to the influence of Freud (and especially Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, the father of public relations industry). See for yourself: His documentaries draw fire from intellectual lemmings who complain that his theses are simply grand conspiracy theories. This is naïve. The objections are probably more to do with the cognitive dissonance that arises in the minds of viewers who are faced with a concatenation of topics that seemed hitherto unrelated, and who seek a more comforting dialectic. In 2005, Cannes festival director Thierry Fremeux was so impressed with his documentary series 'The Power of Nightmares' that he invited Curtis to reedited it as a film for the festival, the first time such an invitation had been extended (it's always the other way around). His new series, 'The Trap' which airs on the BBC this Sunday looks at the development of our concept of 'freedom'. It is must-see broadcast TV, a veritable rarity in this age of time-shifted media consumption.
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