It Felt Like a Kiss looks at America’s global influence

It Felt Like a Kiss

www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis

THIS is a documentary that used to be a theatre project. You can catch it online, but it’ll never be shown on TV. It’s edited like an MTV clip show, but it’s about the rise of military power and the influence of pop culture.

It’s made by Adam Curtis, a BAFTA winner, who’s sometimes described as a visionary genius and sometimes a ­paranoid nut. It’s brilliant, strange, funny and unlike anything else you’ve seen.

You may remember Curtis from 2004’s extraordinary The Power of Nightmares, where the rise of Islamic extremism was intrinsically linked to the rise of the Neo-Conservatives.

His films – Curtis also made The Century of The Self and The Trap – manage to stand apart from the news cycle, finding sweeping undercurrents in world events, often via a witty rollercoaster of archive footage.

It Felt Like a Kiss, which looks at CIA bungling and social ­hypocrisy in America, began as an experimental film to “try to find a more emotional way of doing ­political journalism”.

It then became the centrepiece of a recent show from Punchdrunk, the innovative theatre troupe. Now Curtis has put the entire hour-long film online – part of his move towards online-only films in connection with the Beeb.

So, yes, it’s a slight spoiler for the theatre show when it comes to London from ­Manchester, but it’s worth it.

Bookended by Doris Day and Rock Hudson in the arch 60s romcom Pillow Talk, it’s a furiously edited multicolour trip through 20-odd years of American history. It makes Baz Luhrmann’s super-speedy Romeo + Juliet seem a bit on the slow side.

In a blitzkrieg of clips and subtitles we see how America came to dominate the world through a mix of pop ­culture and power, balanced by a puritanical streak that’s neatly underlined by edited clips of Day and Hudson ­looking angry or fraught.

Watching this, you’re living US history: pop stars, chimps in space, the dawn of HIV in 60s Congo. Curtis’s clips are occasionally familiar, always intriguing and ­peppered with wry bits of trivia. The CIA’s laughable attempts to ­assassinate Castro are grimly funny. That Saddam Hussein apparently was a CIA agent is weird enough, but the fact he hired Dr No and From Russia With Love director ­Terence Young to make a propaganda biopic about him is unnerving.

The freaky juxtaposition of dangerous and quirkily cute runs throughout – and it’s classic Curtis. While the title track He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss) by The Crystals plays, we see that it was written by Carole King after discovering her child’s babysitter was blaming her boyfriend’s abuse on the fact he loved her. The babysitter? Soon-to-be pop star Little Eva. Cue Curtis weaving us into a load of wholesome teens dancing to her smash hit The Locomotion. So much for the American Dream.

It’s online for “a few weeks” only, so snap it up. It’s a spellbinding hour.