CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD

Intriguing assemblage... but what’s it all about?

Does Adam Curtis simply assemble a collection of archive footage and arresting images and then try to graft a unifying thesis on to them? For example, in the first film of this new series of six, he attempts to thread together such disparate elements as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, Mao Tse Tung’s wife, the Illuminati, the former model Sandra Paul (now Sandra Howard) and Boolean logic in service of a waftily vague theory about power structures and individualism. It’s entertaining. Indeed, d, it’s almost mesmerising with Curtis’s narration, but at the end you’re left wondering what it is you’ve just watched. ed. BBC iPlayer, available now