Adam Curtis on South Park: “the best documentary”
Sage for our time Adam Curtis reckons fiction films are where you'll find the best documentaries
Jean Luc-Godard once said, “If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.” Documentarian and thinker Adam Curtis is clearly in step with the À bout de souffle director.
Writing in the Guardian, he states that the best documentary reporting these days comes, counter-intuitively, from fiction films, citing examples like The Big Short, American Honey and the This Is England series.
Curtis argues that the documentary genre is in a rut since documentaries began to be made for the big screen of arthouse cinemas, rather than the small screens of our TV sets. “As a result they tend to play to what their audience already know – reinforcing their beliefs,” he argues. “Like the fact that bankers are bad. Or climate change threatens the world.”
It’s an interesting theory, but we can’t go along with it.
Documentaries have never been in better health, as far as we’re concerned. While we agree that there are too many of these stating-the-bleeding-obvious-type docs that Curtis laments, we can point to dozens of other examples of documentaries made for cinema that do much more than preach to the converted. We’d point to the likes of Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), Kim Longinotto (Dreamcatcher) and Frederick Wiseman (In Jackson Heights) as documentarians at the height of their game, whose films constantly challenge the audience's beliefs.
Where we can get on board with Curtis is his ardour for the “true genius” of “the best documentary” as per his example from the world of fiction: South Park. “Every week they report on the world in a really original way," he writes. "Their recent shows have been all about social media and internet trolling – and it is just wonderful. They make you realise how strange and absurd that world is.”
He’s absolutely right. You won’t find any more pointed coverage of the recent US election than in Matt Stone and Trey Parker's animated show, which has sharply been calling out the follies of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign and the whole swirling mess of the critical debate that has surrounded the election.
“At its heart, South Park has a touching faith in human beings,” Curtis adds. “That despite their absurdities and flaws, people have the capacity to create a better world. In our conservative times that is the most radical message of all.”
We couldn't agree more.
Adam Curtis’s latest film, HyperNormalisation, is currently available on iPlayer
South Park can be found on Comedy Central