Why Adam Curtis is my favorite filmmaker.
Published 2026-07-05 · unknown · 5,926 views
About This Video
Van Neistat names Adam Curtis his favorite filmmaker. The reasons are specific. Curtis scores his documentaries with pop music laid over archival footage, a combination that should not work but rewrites how you process the image. He writes and edits everything himself. And the reason Van lingers on longest: Curtis's recurring thesis, visible across films like HyperNormalisation and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, is that counterculture got absorbed into the system it claimed to resist. The rebellion became part of the trick.
That thesis connects directly to the argument in The machine dream was never real, the parent episode this clip comes from. Curtis documented how Silicon Valley projected machine logic onto nature and called it organic. Van builds his own analog-living framework on that foundation.
The clip works as a filmmaking confession. Van's own method mirrors Curtis's: write and edit your own work, keep the whole thing in your own hands. The admiration is not abstract. It is recognition of a shared practice. More on Van's filmmaking influences in My Favorite Filmmaker Explains Why.
Related: As This Fake Word Grew, Making My Stuff Mine.
FAQ
Who is Adam Curtis?
Adam Curtis is a British documentary filmmaker whose work includes HyperNormalisation (2016) and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011). He writes and edits his own films, using archival footage scored with pop music. Van Neistat calls him his favorite filmmaker in this clip.
Why does Van Neistat admire Adam Curtis?
Van cites Curtis's visual style of scoring music over archival images and his practice of writing and editing everything himself. But the reason he returns to is Curtis's recurring argument that counterculture movements get absorbed by the systems they oppose.
Transcript
Transcript not available from automated pipeline. Surface command for manual fetch: ``` python3 ~/Documents/Obsidian\ Vault/yt-transcript.py 'https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zwaDF01O8BE' -o ~/Documents/Obsidian\ Vault/raw/TSM/videos/zwaDF01O8BE.md ```
People Referenced
Adam Curtis
Films & Media Referenced
- Referenced broadly: style (music + image), technique (writes and edits his own films), subject matter (showing how counterculture became part of the system)