HOWZAT

It evokes a kind of American madness, a desire to remake the world in its own image, which, I fear, will be taken by the young and stupid as crude anti-Americanism — hardly justified in the face of what the Soviets were doing at the time. Curtis recoils from the idea. “The film is in love with America — the music, the culture and the emotions — and in the way I cut it. This is an American cut, in love with the idea that you can take reality and heighten its emotional nature with editing and music. If I was a BBC mandarin, I would say it was a balance between a political critique and a love letter to American culture.” Furthermore, Soviet world-remaking does not form part of the picture because it died, whereas the consequences of American ambitions of the period are still with us.

Uneasy with his film just being on the web, Curtis was open to suggestions. At some BBC meeting where everybody was talking “TV bollocks”, he ran into Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk, a company that makes theatre

in which the audience’s decisions form their experience of the show.

“People,” Barrett explains, “can now have everything at the touch of a button, and they are completely passive. That’s why they respond so well to our shows — they have complete ownership of the evening.”

Curtis persuaded the BBC that Punchdrunk was another “platform”, and they agreed to back It Felt Like a Kiss as theatre. Next month, it will be seen in an empty building in Manchester, as part of the international festival, by a total of 5,000 people. You see the whole film in episodes as you wander through the building. Audiences in groups of nine will pass through a house haunted by the past and their own knowledge of its consequences. I won’t give too much away, but it sounds scary, and even comes with a warning for

“people of a nervous disposition”. Yet the horror is seductive. Curtis and Barrett are hitting you and making it feel like a kiss. At the end of the show, they dramatise the central

question that we can’t answer: you are free at last, and alone. What do you want to do?

“We’re taking you into a world we have created,” Curtis says, “but it’s about you. We transport you into something enchanting and dreamlike from long ago, and now to your own world, but in a thrilling way that, we hope, gives you some form of political perspective.”

The ruling idea of the era between 1958 and 1965 was a combination of cosy American security and the radical freedom of the individual. It was the dawn of the cult of self-actualisation — through diet, exercise, fashion, lifestyle, therapy — that still rules our lives. And it was the moment before hippie radicals exposed the contradiction. Radical freedom might mean the destruction of cosy America and her dreams of remaking the world. History is made of ideas and unintended consequences.

The period of the film was also one in which conspiracy theories — spies, aliens, government plots to control the people — became a huge part of public discourse. They were further evidence of the contradiction between the hit and the kiss, the mask and the face beneath.

“I think conspiracy theories rose up because people invented individual myths to explain the non-correspondence between the grand myths and reality,” Curtis says.

And now?

“We’re living through this extraordinary time when there are no big stories that explain reality to us. What we are left with is our own little myths and fears. That’s why fear sweeps so quickly through society. There’s no big story, and you panic.”

Curtis is putting more such films on his website — the next will be about the Congo — but he’s persisting with his documentary series. He makes them single-handed. They are the polar opposite of fly-on-the-wall. Curtis is too smart to hide behind fake realism. He is the author and narrator; these are personal essays.

It’s a miracle he’s allowed out, never mind that he dwells happily amid the ponderous, right-on bureaucracies and the archival bowels of the BBC. His entire career consists of telling people that everything they know and think is wrong, that reality is beyond their reach, that everything they touch dissolves on contact.

“So what,” I ask him, pointing at a curious pink pig, about three inches long, on his lapel, “is that?”

“It’s a pig. Sometimes a pig is just a pig.”

True. But only sometimes.

It Felt Like a Kiss is showing at Quay House, Spinningfields, Manchester, from Thursday until July 19

bryanappleyard.com

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