Adam Curtis makes very beautiful, uncompromising and often terrifying documentaries about how we make sense of the world. Through his access to The BBC's vast archive of news and documentary footage, he typically pieces together a collage of fractured narratives that forces the audience to come to their own understandings and conclusions. Shifty, his latest series, is a history of the radical changes in the UK from the late 1970s to the mid 2010's. This is not a conventional historical documentary, and instead uses a range of often confusing archive footage to explore how meaning collapsed and became 'shifty' after the establishment of Margaret Thatcher's government. In doing so, the series explores identity, culture, media, politics and pot-colonialism.
In short, this documentary is as close as it's possible to get to 'media studies the TV show. The conclusion to this documentary is the same as the conclusion to every Adam Curtis documentary: that meaning has collapsed, that we cannot make sense of the world now, and that we cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is not real.
Curtis's style of documentary film making is marmite. You may well hate it. It provides now answers, but asks complex questions instead, forcing the audience to come to their own conclusions. But if this sounds up your street, you may welcome as obsessed with Adam Curtis's documentary films as I am!