{"id":499,"date":"2011-01-24T13:39:20","date_gmt":"2011-01-24T12:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/premesso.newcontrarian.com\/?p=499"},"modified":"2011-01-24T13:39:20","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T12:39:20","slug":"it-felt-like-a-kiss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/?p=499","title":{"rendered":"It Felt Like a Kiss"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I said last weekend, I&#8217;ve been on a heavy Adam Curtis kick recently. \u00a0<em>Century of the Self<\/em> is quite a worthwhile flick, but his latest, <em>It Felt Like a Kiss<\/em>, really pushes the boundaries. \u00a0An experimental film commissioned initially by the BBC, Curtis collobarated with the Punchdrunk production company on it. \u00a0It certainly has the feel of installation art in terms of disturbing images and disturbing music (special pieces by the Kronos Quartet jumped out at me, as did the frequent use of early Velvet Underground), but it has at bottom messages about politics, power,\u00a0individualism\u00a0and consumption that are sometimes ambiguous, often unsettling and always trenchant. \u00a0Beware of the <a title=\"river deep sequence - adam curtis IFLAK\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ixPGcPxqDkg\" target=\"_blank\">super-quick montages<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>My one gripe is that Curtis can tend towards the paranoid. \u00a0By <a title=\"paranoia short BBC curtis\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=87WqBDgc7wY&amp;feature=related\" target=\"_blank\">his own admission<\/a>, a lot of today&#8217;s politics is driven by paranoia. \u00a0Fair enough, but I&#8217;m not sure about a couple of his assertions, like that the &#8216;computers that controlled the Cold War and guided the rockets to the moon&#8217; were put to use\u00a0analyzing\u00a0the credit data of all Americans, or that the unnamed &#8216;founder&#8217; of the CIA&#8217;s Clandestine Services (formerly\u00a0the Directorate of Operations) went mad and committed suicide, but as film montage with a message about the politics of consumerism and desire, the film stands on its own.<\/p>\n<p>Italy note: thanked alongside the AP, <em>New York Daily News <\/em>and ITN archives is Italy&#8217;s own Mediaset.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I said last weekend, I&#8217;ve been on a heavy Adam Curtis kick recently. \u00a0Century of the Self is quite a worthwhile flick, but his latest, It Felt Like a Kiss, really pushes the boundaries. \u00a0An experimental film commissioned initially by the BBC, Curtis collobarated with the Punchdrunk production company on it. \u00a0It certainly has &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/premesso.com\/?p=499\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;It Felt Like a Kiss&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[413,79,119,284],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/premesso.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}