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Sprawling dystopias punctuated with grainy retro footage, and washed in throbbing, purgatorial soundscapes.
Such are the unsettling documentaries of Adam Curtis — an icon of 21st century filmmaking. Over 40 years ago, Curtis' debut effort as a director was aired; an episode of the BBC's documentary series Just Another Day. These wonderfully pure-yet-candid portraits (gently narrated by John Pitman) — some of which are available to watch on YouTube — were broadcast between 1983 and 1986, many of them honing in on London, including episodes about the Tower of London, Soho and traffic wardens. Curtis only made one of them, and the subject was the eminent department store Selfridges, which at the time had some 3,000 in-house employees.
Today Curtis is well known for his exposés on the perils of digital commercialism, but watching this 1983 documentary we're swept back to a pre-Amazon age; a world in which department stores are still grand theatres, and their employees, a rich cast of characters. In the ground floor perfume department, overseen by a matronly manager nicknamed the 'Queen Mother', we also find Karen, a bullish salesperson who assaults anyone within her wheelhouse with generous mists of Yves Saint Laurent. She'd easily beat Joey Tribiani in a perfume-toting duel. Elsewhere, we meet a hat salesperson who can't abide wearing hats, a camp hairstylist who nonchalantly bats off the whinings of a particularly bitter old duffer ("Right, are you happy?" "No."), and Stan the lifts goodsman who, when asked to describe his life, responds without missing a beat: "Lots of ups and downs."
Documentaries from the recent past slide a thick highlighter pen over what's changed in the interim: the way people spoke with 'telephone' accents; how tendrils of cigarette smoke curled into shot from anonymous cigarettes; customer service actually being a thing; the fact that this is just the kind of grainy footage Curtis would love to spike his films with now. What strikes you most of all is the candidness with which interviewees open up: managers discuss the importance of customers spending money, while employees reveal spats with past managers, and moan about clients. "Really them two weren't very good at all," Karen smirks to camera after unsuccessfully approaching two gents with more of her dreaded perfume. In the paranoid, reputation-watching world of 2024, there's no way anyone would be so naive as to be as forthright as Karen.
But just as contemporary Adam Curtis documentaries like to encourage us to question reality, Just Another Day has hints of the unreal. Take the store postman Morris, a diminutive figure who looks like something out of Gringott's, scuttles nine miles a day, flirts inappropriately with the customers, and is obsessed with Norman Wisdom to the degree that he only answers to 'Norman'. Most blindsiding of all are two elderly women with perms who look like they're probably talking about knitting circles and Hobnobs, but turn out to be store detectives. One of them pulls up her skirt to reveal a bite mark she received on the leg from a shoplifter. To use a phrase that the Curtis of nowadays would approve of, Selfridges in the mid-1980s was an altogether hypernormal place.
Here's the full video:
