Overview
This project grew out of my lifelong interest in music, documentaries, and media history. As a pianist, composer, and electronic music producer, I’ve always experienced sound as a way of understanding the world. In my dissertation, I examine how repurposed music in the essay films of Adam Curtis functions as a language of political and cultural critique.
Curtis is a singular figure in contemporary media. With unrivaled access to the BBC archives, he has built a career reassembling decades of footage into sweeping counter-histories. His films combine political argument with unexpected musical pairings — sometimes ironic, sometimes haunting, always destabilizing. For over thirty years, Curtis has experimented with the essay film form, producing works that blur the boundaries between journalism, art, and cultural critique.
I argue that his audiovisual juxtapositions invite viewers to interrogate their own pleasures, memories, and identifications with popular culture — and, in doing so, to recognize how personal enjoyment is always bound up with political ideology. Studying Curtis is important because his work makes visible (and audible) how sound and image shape not only how we remember history, but also how we live politics emotionally.
At the heart of this project were several guiding questions:
- How does repurposed music in documentary film shape our perception of history?
- In what ways do soundtracks evoke memory, affect, and cultural identification?
- Can music operate as a form of archival evidence, alongside image and text?
- How does Adam Curtis’ use of popular and classical music function as a critique of dominant journalistic narratives?
- More broadly, what do these techniques reveal about the politics of pleasure in contemporary media culture?
Using methods from sound studies, semiotics, and documentary analysis, I show how music can structure our experience of history in ways that news alone cannot. Across Curtis’ body of work, repurposed soundtracks not only evoke emotion but also reveal the hidden ties between cultural hegemony and individual subjectivity.
Theoretical Foundations: Traditions of Reappropriation
Avant-garde Montage
Early Soviet filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov pioneered montage, showing how cutting together disparate images could generate new meaning beyond what each image contained. Montage became not just an aesthetic technique but a political one, capable of unsettling the viewer’s perception of history.
Surrealism and Détournement
Surrealist collages and Situationist film practices emphasized estrangement—making the familiar strange. By remixing ordinary materials, they revealed the hidden ideological structures of everyday life. Guy Debord’s practice of détournement (rerouting cultural products toward critical ends) is a precursor to today’s remix culture.
The Essay film
Originally coined by Hans Richter in 1940, the term "essay film" refers to a hybrid film form which exists on a spectrum between the documentary and experimental video art. Scholars have analyzed the essay film according to Aldous Huxley’s definition of the essay as drawing on “the three poles of description: the personal and the auto-biographical . . . the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular . . . and the abstract-universal” (Huxley, 1958, qtd. in Rascaroli, 2008).
Filmmakers like Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Jean-Luc Godard developed the essay film, a hybrid form blending documentary, fiction, and personal reflection. These works use archival material not simply as illustration but as a way of questioning how memory and history are constructed, and their use of repurposing drew attention to the constructed nature of film and reflected an awareness of the historical film archive. Curtis’ films extend this tradition into the digital era.
Decidedly closer to the avant-garde, their essayistic films revealed how both personal and collective memory can be constructed through film, and how important meaning can be achieved through assemblages that exist between fact and fiction, the actual and the staged.
Found Footage and Remix Studies
Curtis’ techniques can also be observed in relation to the found footage films and political remix videos that developed in the 1970s. Found footage discourse was reinvigorated in the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by the growth of film studies departments; the introduction of historiographical theory; and the emergence of videotape (Corner, 2009).
From Bruce Conner’s collage films to contemporary political remix videos, found footage has been used to critique mainstream narratives. Scholars such as Jaimie Baron (on the archive effect) and Eduardo Navas (on remix culture) have theorized how recycled materials shape cultural memory and resist—or get absorbed into—dominant ideologies.
With the advent of video, dominant narratives could be newly interrogated and critiqued through the reappropriation of television footage.
“Television history as collective memory is the site of mediation where professional history meets popular history” (Edgerton, 2000, p. 9).
Out of propaganda, The Atomic Cafe constructs ironic counter-propaganda; out of compiled images from various sources it constructs a straightforward dialectic between the past and the present” (1999/2000, p. 35) Like the works of de Antonio, The Atomic Cafe plays on “the complexity of the relationship between historical referent and interpretation. . . . It enact[s] a fundamental doubt concerning the purity of [its] original source material and its ability to reveal a truth that is valid, lasting and cogent” (Stella Bruzzi, 1999/2000, p. 13).
Remix theory
The most recent discourse in which to contextualize Adam Curtis’ work is the post digital field of “remix studies” (Conti, 2014; Doyle, 2017; Gallagher, 2017a, 2017b; Kuhn, 2012; Manovich, 2007; Navas, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2017; Smith, 2009). Eduardo Navas defines remix as “specific forms of expression using pre-existing sources (sound, image, text) to develop work that may be considered derivative while also gaining autonomy” (2017).
To Navas, remix is fundamentally a discourse.
By positioning Adam Curtis’ films within these traditions, I argue that his juxtapositions of music and archival footage are not just stylistic flourishes. They participate in a lineage of cultural practices that use reappropriation as a language of critique, exposing the entanglement of pleasure, ideology, and historical narrative.
Methodology: Multimodal Textual Analysis
My methodology was designed to understand how meaning emerges when image, text, and sound are brought together — and how music, in particular, can reshape our encounter with archival material.
Multimodal Semiotics
Drawing on Roland Barthes, I began from the idea that images and captions operate as systems of signs. Barthes’ concepts of denotation, connotation, and anchorage helped me ask how meaning is stabilized or destabilized when an image is paired with a particular text or context.
Building on W. J. T. Mitchell’s work on image–text relations and his analysis of the essay film as a mode of critical reflection, I approached Adam Curtis’ work not as conventional documentary but as an audiovisual essay—a form that thinks in images and sounds rather than through exposition alone.
Mitchell’s insights into the dialogue between visual and verbal sign systems shaped my method: meaning in Curtis’ films arises from friction and resonance across modes—between the grain of archival footage, the cadence of narration, and the affective pull of popular music. This multimodal framework treats the essay film as a thinking form, one that performs theory through montage, association, and juxtaposition rather than through linear argument.
The Archive Effect, Remediation, and Recontextualization
Here, I draw on Jaime Baron’s concept of the “archive effect” — the sense of historical authenticity and temporal distance that emerges when viewers recognize footage as archival. Curtis’ films depend on this effect yet deliberately destabilize it through what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call remediation — the process by which new media refashion and absorb older forms.
Remediation is not a neutral process of quotation; it is an act of transformation. Curtis re-mediates mid-century BBC documentaries, newsreels, and public information films through contemporary digital editing, pop soundtracks, and nonlinear sequencing. These interventions expose how the technologies of reproduction themselves shape our experience of history. What appears to be an archival recovery is, in fact, a reconstruction — a rewriting of collective memory through the aesthetic logic of the present.
In this, Curtis’ work resonates with Paul Arthur’s observations on the essay film, where juxtaposition and recontextualization function as forms of argument. For Arthur, the essay film’s power lies not in narrative coherence but in the collision of fragments — the way disparate images and ideas generate reflection through their proximity. Curtis’ montages operate in this same register: they do not explain history but make us feel its contradictions.
Through this dual lens of the archive effect, remediation, and essayistic juxtaposition, Curtis’ films become more than compilations of found footage — they are experiments in historiography, showing how meaning arises from the reassembly of cultural memory.
Sound, Music, and the Affective Turn
Scholarship on film music reveals that non-diegetic music has long played a role in guiding the audience’s attention and ensuring their psychological engagement. Jean Mitry has argued that, since the earliest functions of music in silent film, the “rhythm of music [has] mediated between real time as experienced by the audience and the diegetic or psychological time adhered to by the film” (1964/1963, qtd. in Gorbman, 1980, p. 186).
To this semiotic and archival framework, I extended the analysis to sound and music—not as supplements to image, but as active agents in the production of meaning. Following Claudia Gorbman’s insights into classical film scoring and Michel Chion’s concepts of synchresis and acousmatic sound, I examined how Curtis’ use of music fuses disparate materials into coherent—or intentionally dissonant—perceptual wholes.
Chion’s notion of synchresis—the spontaneous, almost involuntary fusion of sound and image—proved essential. In Curtis’ films, this fusion often creates an affective surplus: a charge of emotion, irony, or estrangement that exceeds the denotative content of the footage itself. A pop track from the 1980s, when paired with images of Cold War bureaucracy, can generate a sense of temporal dissonance, collapsing the boundaries between private nostalgia and public history.
Thus, the recontextualization central to Curtis’ method is not only visual but aural. Sound and music extend the logic of remediation into the sonic domain, transforming archival material into an emotional and intellectual event. The resulting montage does not simply comment on history; it performs its tensions through rhythm, resonance, and affective contrast.
Analysis
The analytical chapters focus on three of Adam Curtis’ major essay films — The Power of Nightmares (2004), It Felt Like a Kiss (2009), and HyperNormalisation (2016) — each representing a distinct stage in his evolving meditation on media, ideology, and emotion. Viewed together, these works trace a twenty-year inquiry into how collective feeling is engineered, circulated, and remembered through audiovisual form.
Across these films, Curtis develops what might be called a politics of affective montage. Through the interplay of archival footage, voice-over, and popular music, he constructs historical narratives that are both analytical and experiential. His films invite viewers not just to understand ideology but to feel it — to recognize how pleasure, nostalgia, and fear are interwoven into the very fabric of political life. The soundtracks, assembled from fragments of pop culture and experimental music, act as connective tissue between the personal and the geopolitical, between the sensory and the historical.
In this analysis, I examine how Curtis’ editing strategies and sound design evolve across these three works — from the ironic counterpoint of The Power of Nightmares, to the immersive emotional density of It Felt Like a Kiss, to the digital estrangement of HyperNormalisation. Together they form an archive of feeling, a sonic-visual historiography that renders the political through the textures of popular sound.
1. The Power of Nightmares (2004) — Music as Ideological Counterpoint
In The Power of Nightmares, Curtis transforms political history into a cinematic essay on fear as a form of collective emotion. The film juxtaposes archival footage of postwar optimism with the rhetoric of the War on Terror, drawing parallels between neoconservative and jihadist movements as mirror ideologies united by a belief in threat. What distinguishes this work, however, is not only its argument but its tone, produced through Curtis’ precise manipulation of sound. Against the grave narration, he places unexpected tracks—post-punk, ambient, and electronic—that create tonal dissonance and emotional irony. This strategy destabilizes the authority of the archival voice, exposing how ideology functions less through facts than through affective charge.
For example, Curtis intercuts the rise of neoconservative ideology in the United States with the parallel emergence of radical Islamism. What might otherwise be a dense political history becomes charged with energy and irony through his choice of soundtrack. Pop and electronic tracks—Joy Division, Brian Eno, and others—create tonal dissonance with the archival narration, prompting viewers to question both movements’ shared investment in fear.
Following Michel Chion’s concept of synchresis, Curtis fuses incongruous sounds and images to produce moments of estrangement: a synth bassline under a speech by Donald Rumsfeld or a pulsing beat over Cold War propaganda. The result is a film that makes ideology felt as a rhythm—a sensory pattern that both seduces and unsettles the viewer. In this way, The Power of Nightmares inaugurates Curtis’ signature method: using music not as commentary but as a counterpoint that reveals the emotional infrastructure of political narratives.
The music refuses the gravity of the spoken word, instead opening a space of doubt and reflection. Through this contrast, Curtis invites viewers to experience history not as settled fact but as contested performance.
2. It Felt Like a Kiss (2009) — Sound as Historical Affect
If The Power of Nightmares exposes the architecture of fear through irony to critique ideology, It Felt Like a Kiss renders fear intimate, and immerses the viewer in its emotional residue—woven into the textures of desire, innocence, and pop. Built almost entirely from found footage, this film traces the intertwined rise of consumer culture, celebrity, and American power.
Here, Curtis’ use of popular music is most pronounced: The Velvet Underground, The Supremes, and Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” structure the film’s emotional logic. The film’s title, borrowed from the Carole King–Gerry Goffin song “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” becomes a refrain for an entire culture that learned to aestheticize violence as love and control as protection.
Drawing on Michel Chion’s idea that music creates “added value,” the soundtrack here does more than accompany images—it transforms them. The exuberance of 1960s pop is laced with menace; sweetness curdles into irony. The result is a portrait of modernity as both seduction and trauma, where collective memory is inseparable from the sonic textures that shaped it.
One of the most striking sequences juxtaposes King’s song with images of 1950s beauty pageants, advertisements that exalt “whiteness” as purity, a father playfully brandishing guns with his children, and scenes of warfare. The music’s spectral tenderness transforms these images: what once signified safety and domestic bliss now reads as coercion, a choreography of submission. Curtis’ montage enacts what Michel Chion calls synchresis—the forced marriage of sound and image that creates meaning neither could produce alone—but here that fusion becomes perverse, revealing the emotional logic of empire.
Elsewhere, Brian Wilson’s “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” plays over a montage of the Beach Boys’ pastel nostalgia and the escalating geopolitical tensions of the 1960s. The song’s yearning harmonies—soaked in reverb and innocence—collide with images of Wilson’s own psychological unraveling, collapsing the dream of American perfection into anxiety and repression. The juxtaposition operates as both diagnosis and elegy: the promise of endless youth and freedom is revealed as an impossible fantasy sustained by denial and control.
In this sense, It Felt Like a Kiss functions as a critique of the postwar American hegemony of the last 75 years—a system that exported its ideals of happiness, consumerism, and moral superiority through images of pleasure. Curtis maps how that hegemony’s emotional grammar was built on contradiction: freedom bound to conformity, love entwined with violence, progress shadowed by despair. Through music and montage, he exposes not only the media apparatus of power but also the affective mechanisms that made its ideology feel good.
Through these moments, Curtis shows how pop music operates as what Raymond Williams might call a structure of feeling—a cultural mood that binds personal longing to national ideology. The film’s very form, oscillating between ecstasy and dread, mirrors the affective contradictions of the modern West: its capacity to turn pleasure into discipline and nostalgia into political paralysis.
3. HyperNormalisation (2016) — The Saturation of the Real
If It Felt Like a Kiss diagnoses the psychic contradictions of postwar America, HyperNormalisation maps their afterlife in the digital era. The film opens on faces bathed in blue light—people staring into screens, entranced yet disconnected—a recurring image that becomes emblematic of a world mediated to the point of paralysis. Curtis charts how the internet, once heralded as a tool of liberation, became a mechanism for containment: a space where individuals mistake participation for power. His montage is saturated with computer interfaces, flickering data visualizations, and archival footage of early cyberspace pioneers.
Against this visual field, Curtis layers ambient and industrial soundscapes that hum with both technological optimism and existential fatigue. The sound design produces what Michel Chion might describe as an “acousmatic world”—a disembodied sonic space where power operates invisibly, everywhere and nowhere.
Curtis situates this collapse of meaning within a broader cultural shift: the hyperindividualism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The digital era, he suggests, did not liberate the self but isolated it, transforming collective politics into personal expression. Social media platforms, designed as participatory systems, have instead become echo chambers where users converse primarily with algorithms that reflect their own desires back to them. In this environment, political life is displaced by performance; dialogue becomes data. Curtis’ recurring images of people alone with their screens evoke a world where the boundaries between communication and self-soothing blur, where individuals mistake emotional engagement for collective action. The result is what he portrays as a feedback loop of the self—a closed circuit in which people are encouraged to express endlessly but rarely to imagine together.
In HyperNormalisation, Curtis’ critique reaches its culmination. The techniques of remediation and recontextualization that once revealed the emotional logic of empire now describe the very condition of the present—a world where mediation has replaced meaning, and affect itself has become infrastructure. The film closes not with resolution but with suspension: a sense that our capacity to feel, to discern the real, has been absorbed by the systems we built to represent it.
Here, the archival effect and the affective register merge: the soundscape becomes a metaphor for living in a mediated world where authenticity is always suspect. The juxtaposition of synthesizers, stock footage, and bureaucratic narration produces what Chion might call a “phonographic realism”—a texture that feels documentary yet is wholly constructed.
Across the Oeuvre
Taken together, these films reveal Curtis’ consistent strategy: to use popular music as a historiographic device. His montage style produces a feedback loop between pleasure and critique—where the viewer’s own affective recognition becomes the ground of political reflection. Through music, Curtis transforms the archive into a living medium, one that allows us to feel the contradictions of power, ideology, and desire.
Key Insights
Reappropriation as Critique: From avant-garde montage to contemporary remix culture, reusing existing materials has always been a way of challenging dominant narratives. Curtis’ work demonstrates how this tradition continues in the digital age.
Music as Archive: Like images, recorded songs carry traces of time, memory, and cultural history. Repurposed soundtracks function as archival documents, evoking both personal identification and broader historical significance.
The politics of pleasure: What feels personal—our enjoyment of music, our nostalgic attachments—can also be deeply political. Curtis’ juxtapositions reveal how cultural pleasures are entangled with ideology.
Multimodality Matters: Meaning is not made by images alone. The interplay of sound, caption, voice-over, and editing creates a layered rhetoric that is as affective as it is analytical.
Archives in Motion: The reuse of footage and music shows that history is not fixed. It is continuously reconstructed, contested, and re-experienced through media.
Emotion as Evidence: Affect is not just decoration. Music’s ability to move us bodily and emotionally is itself a form of knowledge—one that complicates and enriches how we engage with history.
Conclusion & Relevance
For me, this project was not only an academic contribution to documentary and sound studies — it was also a bridge between my creative life in music and my scholarly work in media. It sharpened my skills in analysis, synthesis, and communication, while deepening my appreciation of how learning happens through affect as much as through argument.
Curtis’ work challenges us to see how sound and music shape our relationship to history, politics, and culture. His radical juxtapositions reveal that even our private pleasures are political products of their time.
In today’s post-truth environment, where audiovisual media saturates our lives, these insights feel more urgent than ever. Sound remains a powerful tool for shaping experience, constructing meaning, and imagining different futures.