Reframing the Past: The Emotional Histories of Raoul Peck and Adam Curtis

Analysing the violent legacy of colonialism through collages of disparate elements, two new documentary series, Raoul Peck's Exterminate All the Brutes and Adam Curtis' Can't Get You out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, issue challenges to traditional constructions of history. Analysing each production in turn, Steven Aoun argues that, despite their respective aesthetic strengths, they ultimately reveal the limitations of their own respective frameworks – and, more broadly, the difficulty in separating fact from historical storytelling.

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