A Soviet version of Martin Parr: Adam Curtis’s Russia 1985-1999 –TraumaZone reviewed

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the one where he frightens off his fans by abandoning the trademark flourishes that made him so entertaining and instead goes all pared-down and raw and grim.

If you don’t know or remember what those trademark flourishes were, let me refer you to a cruelly funny pastiche which you can easily find on YouTube called The Loving Trap. This sends up poor Adam as a pioneer of the collage-umentary, a genre resembling ‘a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretence to narrative coherence’ which ‘vomits grainy library footage onto the screen to a soundtrack of Brian Eno and Nine Inch Nails.’

If the BBC had an inkling of what Curtis is actually saying it would drop him like a hot brick

True enough – but those expertly curated ambient tracks were very easy on the ear, as too was Curtis’s soothing voiceover which yoked heterogeneous concepts together and led you in all manner of beguiling and unexpected directions. I think his stuff is great and the fact that it is still being promoted by the BBC confirms how devilishly clever he is, because if the BBC had an inkling of what he’s actually saying it would drop him like a hot brick.

Anyway, TraumaZone dispenses with the frills. There’s no voiceover and no soundtrack. It’s just loads of film footage taken from across the collapsing Soviet empire in the dog days of communism. Some of it’s quirky: two men fantasising over a bottle or two about what animals they might keep in their imaginary future zoo; some of it’s sad and personal: a mother bidding farewell to her son just before he heads off for two years’ military service during which he’ll quite possibly end up being killed in Afghanistan; mainly, it’s just bleak.