The Cinema of Peter Watkins by Jared Rapfogel The populace meets in La Commune (2000)
The radical filmmaker par excellence, Peter Watkins has been making defiantly challenging films for more than forty years now. If the early part of his career attests to a period when radical and commercial were not necessarily mutually exclusive propositions—his first films were made for the BBC, and his first theatrical feature, Privilege, was produced and distributed by Universal—the uncompromising nature of his aggressively provocative work made him a cinematic pariah even then, leading almost immediately to a cinematic exile which has lasted to the present day. Unbowed and seemingly incorruptible, Watkins has built a body of work which, whatever reservations one might harbor about particular films, is a truly astonishing and admirable achievement, a testament to his iron-willed determination to make movies on his own terms and in defiance of the obstacles placed in his path. A measure of tribute has arrived at last, in the form of a long-overdue but (even at this late date) still gutsy initiative by New Yorker Films to release a number of the films on DVD. Thus far four discs have appeared, encompassing five out of his first six feature films—The War Game & Culloden (paired together), The Gladiators, Punishment Park, and his masterpiece, Edvard Munch, all in lavish editions with substantial booklets, extras, and critical commentaries—and reportedly The Freethinker will soon join that list as well. With First Run Features having just released a three-disc set devoted to his most recent film, the magisterial La Commune (Paris, 1871), and his fourteen-hour, eighteen-part documentary on the nuclear arms race, The Journey, available from Facets on VHS, Watkins's work may still be less accessible than it should be (the four remaining films from his filmography are virtually impossible to see), but more than you might have thought likely. Watkins is, after all, a provocateur, determined to smash complacency, to reveal injustice, hypocrisy, and ignorance, and to spur his audience into action—not goals which tend to sit easy with producers or distributors, no matter their stripe. Watkins's career has been marked by a constant struggle to get his films made, and even more, by a constant struggle to get them seen, in the face of institutional suppression, censorship, and critical hostility. On the strength of a handful of low-budget, independently produced short films (two of which, Diary of an Unknown Soldier and The Forgotten Faces, are included as extras on the first two New Yorker releases), Watkins was hired by the BBC's documentary division in 1963, where he was able to make his astounding feature debut, Culloden, a reenactment of the brutal and tragic eighteenth-century Scottish battle and its aftermath. The nearly unqualified praise for Culloden (a response which would be short-lived and never repeated) led to the production of his next and possibly most famous film, The War Game, a dramatization of the physical and social effects of a nuclear attack on England. The War Game proved too hot to handle for the BBC, which, partly in response to pressure from representatives of the government and the military, refused to televise it, even going to some lengths to suppress it. The whole affair was reported on widely in the British press and led to Watkins's resignation from the BBC in 1965, thus inaugurating a never-ending search for a hospitable artistic climate which has taken him to the U.S., Scandinavia, and most recently France (as well as Lithuania, where Watkins has lived for many years). Many filmmakers, even admirable ones, have proven vulnerable to pressures less intense and relentless than these. One of Watkins's greatest achievements is simply the perseverance he has demonstrated—from his first short films to La Commune, Watkins has, seemingly without hesitation, sacrificed financial and career security in order to continue making films exactly as he wants to make them. Indeed, taken all together, the paradox of Watkins's body of work is that it is remarkably, even obsessively, unified in style and subject matter, even as he alternates between distinct modes that seem almost incompatible. With Culloden, his first feature-length film and his first BBC-commissioned project, Watkins adopted an approach which he has been developing and refining, with very little variation, ever since. Watkins films are all shot in mimicry of a newsreel documentary esthetic (an apparent nonesthetic), complete with hand-held camera-work, action seemingly caught on the sly, and participants who invariably look directly into the lens, usually accompanied by the off-screen voice of the director (or interviewer). This tactic is ubiquitous now, but Watkins can justifiably be called the pioneer of the style, and one of the few who has not only borrowed the look of newsreel filmmaking but has consistently adopted the conceit that the film is in fact a newscast, with the breaking of the fourth wall that that implies. In other words, Watkins is not simply after the impression of spontaneity or a sense of unvarnished realism. He achieves that; but by breaking the fourth wall, he also, paradoxically, calls attention to the film's artificiality, since, after all, he has no intention of passing his films off as nonfiction. Taking the newsreel style to its logical conclusion allows him to distinguish between reality and the way in which reality is presented in the media, and to investigate the relationship between those who film and those who are filmed. As unwavering as he has been in his loyalty to this approach, there is an obvious distinction (a distinction whose repercussions, however, may not be so obvious) between the Watkins films that apply the faux-newsreel form to past historical epochs and those that apply it to situations and events taking place in the near future (or an alternate present)—the speculative films. The former category includes Culloden, Edvard Munch, The Freethinker, and La Commune, the latter The War Game, Privilege, The Gladiators, Punishment Park, The Trap, and Evening Land (which leaves only The Seventies People, which applies the faux-newsreel approach to the issue of suicide in contemporary Denmark, and The Journey, the only Watkins film to date which directly engages the present without using a fictional framework, taking all of fourteen hours to do so). It's the speculative films that show Watkins, for better or for worse, at his most aggressively provocative—these are films designed to shatter the audience's false sense of security, to shock them with visions of the sickness at the heart of society and of the possible consequences of this corruption. Watkins stands apart from cinematic provocateurs like Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noé in that he almost never indulges in empty cynicism (with the conspicuous exception of Privilege) or a sense of superiority towards the audience, traits which can, after all, represent another kind of complacency. At their best, Watkins's provocations are designed to shake his audience's convictions in order to spur them to constructive action or thought—not simply to shock but to challenge the viewer to engage the film, and by extension the world at large. But in the best known of his speculative films (The War Game, Privilege, The Gladiators, and Punishment Park), Watkins's zeal often leads him to use methods that are overbearing and crude, to wield the newsreel aesthetic as a cudgel. It's not a question of bad-faith, of trying to pass off reconstruction as truth—Watkins trusts his audience to be more sophisticated than that (in The War Game, for instance, the narrator is at pains to identify the footage we see as something that might happen). But, to take The War Game as an example again, the film is extremely powerful when it lets the vérité-style images of the attack and its aftermath speak for themselves, less so during the interviews in which certain characters (a soldier, a nurse, a doctor) express their shock, horror, and suffering. Here the newsreel esthetic becomes a distraction, the emotions obviously fabricated—in these moments, Watkins's desire to move and shock us becomes too transparent. The newsreel approach is relatively muted in Privilege and The Gladiators, the only films Watkins has made in the bulkier and less mobile 35mm format, and perhaps partly as a result, these are easily his worst films. But Watkins returned to 16mm, and to his radically collaborative approach to filmmaking, with Punishment Park, the most important of his speculative films. Punishment Park posits a near-future U.S. in which Vietnam War-related unrest has led to a crackdown on subversive elements across the country. Those convicted can choose either to serve jail time or to try their luck in Punishment Park, attempting to cross many miles of desert in an attempt to reach a designated point before being apprehended by the National Guard forces in pursuit, an exercise intended to double as punishment for the prisoners and as military training for the soldiers. The film alternates between one of the emergency tribunals set up to try a group of young radicals and the previous group's experiences in Punishment Park, and it's this structure that makes the film so striking, especially since the footage in the tribunal represents a charged mixture of fiction and fact. From the very beginning of his career, Watkins has made his actors active participants in shaping the films, giving them a great deal of freedom in building their own characters. Punishment Park was, up until this point, his most radical experiment in this direction—the actors were almost all nonprofessionals, and each held views that at least approximated those of their characters. Since the scenes taking place at the tribunal essentially involve heated debates between the young radicals and the mostly older authority figures sitting in judgment over them, there's a palpable tension and hostility at these moments that is clearly more than make-believe. Just as a great deal of The War Game's power stems from the fact that the atrocities it portrays occurring in an England-of-tomorrow all mirror events that had already taken place in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and elsewhere, Punishment Park is as much a snapshot of the divisions and conflict in American society as it is speculation about the near future. Geir Westby and Fru Heiberg in Edvard Munch And yet, Punishment Park is fatally flawed, the mixture of fact and fiction an uneasy one. As in The War Game, Watkins's determination to shock and upset overwhelms the material—Punishment Park culminates in an assault on the part of the national guardsmen so excessive that any rational, reflective instincts the viewer might have are drowned in a wave of indignation and righteous anger (and this would be true even without the presence of Watkins's voice, representing the unseen interviewer, crying out in shock and horror). It's impossible to watch Punishment Park without reflecting on the danger of preaching to the converted. Certainly righteous anger is an important and necessary response to injustice and corruption—but Watkins hits this note so hard throughout Punishment Park that it's difficult not to feel that, for anyone sympathetic to his position, the film functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy that flatters one's convictions; and that anyone unconvinced will be deeply alienated by it. An indication of this problem lies in the discrepancy between the casting of the roles of the radicals and of the authority figures. According to Joseph Gomez , the actors playing the radicals were themselves radicals, who largely shared their characters' convictions, whereas the actors playing the authority figures, though conservative in their politics, were instructed to exaggerate their own beliefs. This imbalance speaks to a crucial limitation at the heart of the film, an inclination to identify the divisions existing in American society without endeavoring to investigate or understand their causes, or to engage the very real issues underlying them (such as the resentment of the working classes towards the mostly young and affluent radicals). This is a problem that recurs constantly throughout the speculative films, and speaks to a curious paradox in Watkins's work—the constant tension in his films between his desire to give the audience a profound degree of interpretive freedom and his tendency to over-determine its responses. Watkins's collaborative approach to making the films and his goal of inspiring his audience to ask questions suggest a nuanced, generous, self-challenging sensibility. But Privilege, The Gladiators, Punishment Park, and The Trap all present conflicts and debates in which the deck is unmistakably stacked, making them bold and provocative but dramatically inert and often only superficially challenging. Privilege and The Gladiators are Watkins's crudest films, simplistically cartoonish and heavy-handed in their characterizations; but Punishment Park and The Trap, a teleplay shot for Swedish TV in 1975, are more complicated. Both films feature, at their center, debates between those defending the status quo and those arguing a radical or at least oppositional viewpoint. But who except a died-in-the-wool right-wing viewer would identify even for a moment with the tribunal judges or the police in Punishment Park, or with John in The Trap, set on the last night of the year 1999, whose unthinking acceptance of his society's preoccupation with security has led him to live in a bunker thirty meters underground? And how many right wingers would ever be caught dead watching a Peter Watkins film? For those sympathetic to Watkins's perspective, these movies primarily offer an opportunity to flame one's indignation. And yet, these problems virtually disappear in the period films, where Watkins's newsreel approach bears fruit brilliantly. It is here that Watkins allows himself a greater measure of reflection and even lyricism, and that he most deeply indulges his experimentation regarding structure, sound design, and achronological storytelling. The miracle of these films is that, despite taking place in the past, they are as relevant, impassioned, and political as any of the speculative films. Culloden is a masterpiece of historical filmmaking, a model of class-conscious, people's-history that, sadly, very few filmmakers have seen fit to adopt. The battle of Culloden, the culmination of the Jacobite Rising, saw the tired, hungry, and ineptly led Highland Scots forces fighting for the cause of Prince Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") decimated by the British army, who followed their victory with brutal and bloody recriminations against not only the surviving soldiers but also the civilian population of the Highlands. Made in 1964, Watkins no doubt intended this campaign of ‘pacification' to suggest the pacification of South Vietnam then underway. But Watkins understood that approaching the battle of Culloden as a thinly veiled reference to contemporary events would fail to do justice to either of them—instead, he chose to portray the battle with a wealth of detail and a class-conscious perspective that would reveal dimensions of the event ignored or deemphasized in conventional accounts, while trusting that the contemporary relevance would be self-evident to any perceptive viewer. The most striking thing about Culloden, of course, is the newsreel format—in all of his period films, Watkins happily embraces anachronism by positing the presence of camera-crews and television interviewers in centuries past. The conceit of an eighteenth-century film crew allows Watkins to avoid the trappings of the conventional period film—its preoccupation with a narrative arc, personal drama, and the spectacle of period dress and props. These are all things which, in most period films, create a comfortable distance—and this is why the immediacy of the newsreel approach is invaluable here, a way of making history come alive again. When Watkins (or his fictional counterpart) interviews the various participants in the battle, whether they are the rank and file of either army or the leadership on either side, any anachronism is easily trumped by the opportunity to engage directly with these characters. Culloden is as angry a film as The War Game or Punishment Park, focusing as it does on what would today be identified as war crimes. Watkins utilizes the newsreel format to convey through his narration and through on-screen texts a constant stream of statistics and facts (from details about the participants' socioeconomic backgrounds and the hierarchical structure of the Highland clan system, to the ratio of dead on each side). But he also editorializes freely, identifying Prince Charles's lack of military experience, damning the injustice of the clan system, commenting soberly but angrily on the atrocities committed by the British army, and finally, in the film's final moments, lamenting the destruction of the Highlanders' culture. In contrast to The Gladiators, Punishment Park or The Trap, however, Watkins is not afraid to complicate the situation, to apply his critical instincts to both sides of the divide. While his sympathies are clearly with the Highlanders, who are after all the victims of the British atrocities, he takes care to identify the exploitative nature of the clan system, and to reveal that many of the British soldiers have been pressed into service. True to its people's-history aspirations, the opposition is not simply between the British and the Highlanders, but between the ruling and working classes, with the Highland peasants doubly victimized: forcibly compelled to fight on behalf of their clan leaders, and then massacred by the British for doing so. This instinct towards complication and moral shading is evident as early as Watkins's short film, The Forgotten Faces, a reconstruction of the doomed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in which Watkins, commenting on a scene in which representatives of the state are captured by the revolutionaries, allows himself the question, "If the freedom fighters had actually won the revolution, would any of them have donned similar uniforms to hold these men in check?" This reflective distance is largely missing in many of the speculative films, and they are the weaker for it. Edvard Munch, Watkins's supreme achievement, takes this reflectiveness even further, achieving a depth of feeling and a tonal range barely hinted at in any of its predecessors. While Culloden radically reconceived the historical film, Munch not only extends those innovations but also represents an even more profound rethinking of the genre of the biographical film. In a genre which would seem almost by definition to focus on an individual and his inner life, Watkins emphasizes the artist's society, the context in which he lived and worked, so much so that Munch recedes almost to the background of his own film. As in Culloden, Watkins presents a wealth of statistics and observations on nineteenth-century Norwegian society and stages interviews with the various characters to reveal the details of their daily lives. But Munch's inner life remains maddeningly elusive. Watkins has never shown much interest in his characters' psychology, and while this approach may seem like a shortcoming in his speculative films, where the characters threaten to slip into abstraction or empty symbolism, here it registers as an honest and admirably materialist acknowledgment that the real Munch can only be an enigma. Munch also makes plain what was easy to overlook in Watkins's earlier films, thanks to their often confrontational nature—his mastery of editing, sound design, and film structure. Both The Gladiators and Punishment Park alternated between parallel narrative threads with great assurance, using overlapping sound editing to create a dynamic relationship between the two halves. But Munch takes a giant leap forward, abandoning chronology, and weaving a number of different periods in Munch's life into a tight web of associations and repeated motifs. Munch is unquestionably Watkins's most beautiful film, even as it retains every bit of the earlier films' critical intelligence and lack of sentimentality. Wargames of the future in The Gladiators (1969) As in Culloden, the newsreel esthetic both creates distance and collapses it. The film's immediacy cuts through the remove we generally feel from the world portrayed in a period film, but the concept of documentary film crew in the nineteenth century encourages us to remain aware that Munch is a fictional reconstruction and to reflect on the process of the film's creation. The culmination of Watkins's experiments on this front are his most recent fictional films, The Freethinker and La Commune (Paris, 1871), both period films which emphasize their artificiality and foreground their own making. The Freethinker—another biographical film, this time taking August Strindberg as its subject—expands on Munch's innovations: the film is an intricate and wide-ranging mixture of dramatic reconstructions, archival photographs, narration, on-screen texts, and discussions with the cast and crew. La Commune, on the other hand, is a kind of companion piece to Culloden, focusing on the short-lived socialist uprising in Paris in 1871. Both films were made communally, far more so even than Punishment Park. The Freethinker was the culmination of a two-year video production course Watkins led at Nordens Folk High School near Stockholm, and was made with a cast and crew largely consisting of Watkins's students, while La Commune was filmed in a large abandoned factory building, with a cast of more than 220, most of who were without prior acting experience. Both represent Watkins's collaborative approach to filmmaking at its most ambitious, with the actors responsible not only for interpreting their roles, but for researching their characters' lives and backgrounds, for contributing a piece of the historical mosaic. Indeed, both these films are achievements not only in drama but also in historical research. Dry as that may sound, the results are anything but—the wealth of detail adds dimensions that most period films hardly even suggest, the multitude of information heightening the drama rather than bogging it down. Compelling as they are, these films prove that high production values and the illusion of reality can be almost totally superfluous. Though Watkins's collaborative approach was hardly new, in The Freethinker and La Commune he makes this process an integral part of the finished product, interspersing the reconstructions of Strindberg's life and of the uprising not only with the usual screen texts, but also with footage of the actors speaking about their relationship to their roles and discussing the project with each other, as well as debating the state of contemporary politics (an extension of one of the many elements of The Journey, large blocks of which involve group debates about nuclear war and the peace process). This transparency broadens the films' reach—each one is both the result of a process and a document of it. For all their flaws, The War Game and Punishment Park are important models of radical filmmaking, provocations that bravely tackle social and political issues that very few filmmakers would dare to broach. But it's the films Watkins has made beginning with Edvard Munch that are the core of his achievement. The new structural and formal freedom he found with Munch has been apparent in almost all his films since, including The Seventies People and Evening Land (a speculative film with little evidence of the earlier films' shortcomings), finding its most elaborate and sustained expression in The Journey. This film, a kind of sequel to The War Game (or rather a reconceiving of the earlier film in the context of his mature style), marks Watkins's only engagement with documentary per se, combining the angry, impassioned activism of the earlier films with their successors' commitment to a free, open structure, and a patient, sophisticated presentation of information and of multiple viewpoints. Its departure point, as with The War Game, is the threat and the consequences of nuclear war, but The Journey expands to encompass a whole constellation of related themes and issues—the peace movement, media manipulation, the gulf between rich and poor, the process by which a state educates its people to demonize those of the so-called enemy power—as well as participants (it was filmed in the U.S., Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, the Soviet Union, Mexico, and Mozambique, among other countries). Further developing the structure of Munch and The Freethinker, The Journey unveils its multitude of settings and topics relatively quickly, letting each strand develop in tandem with every other over the course of the film's fourteen-hour length. It is a monumental film, yet a carefully constructed and tightly woven one. And yet, Watkins's greatest contribution to film history may not be any one particular film, but rather the development of a cinematic form almost entirely his own: a hybrid of fiction and documentary capable of encompassing an astonishing range of tones, modes, and varieties of information. Edvard Munch, The Freethinker, and La Commune combine drama, text, speculation, debate, and a focus on process into a coherent whole in which each element engages the subject from a different angle, giving each film a breathtaking scope. Watkins expounds at great length, in his critical writings about the media, on the dominance of the Monoform, the linear, literal-minded, narrative approach to image-making which he believes characterizes almost all mainstream television and film production, and which he finds fundamentally manipulative. He makes repeated pleas for the creation of alternative forms, ones that encourage reflection, that posit new ways of representing experience. And his later films show him genuinely putting theory into action. These are not just compelling and fascinating films—they represent a whole new approach, new avenues waiting to be explored, developed, and expanded. If few seem to be following his lead, the precedent has at least been set. Besides, Watkins surely has more films left in him—he has been quiet in the seven years since La Commune, no doubt in part due to the difficulty he has always had in bringing his projects to fruition. But he has always willed them into being eventually, and there is no evidence that his energy and determination are flagging—it seems likely to be only a matter of time before he makes another contribution to the project that has been his life's work. The War Game & Culloden DVD. The War Game: B&W, 49 mins., 1965; Culloden: B&W, 72 mins., 1964. A New Yorker release, www.newyorkerfilms.com. The Gladiators DVD, color, 91 mins., 1969. Also includes The Diary of an Unknown Soldier, B&W, 17 mins., 1959. A New Yorker release, www.newyorkerfilms.com. Punishment Park DVD, color, 88 mins., 1971. Also includes The Forgotten Faces, B&W, 18 mins., 1961. A New Yorker release, www.newyorkerfilms.com. Edvard Munch DVD, color, 174 mins., 1976. A New Yorker release, www.newyorkerfilms.com. The Journey VHS, color, 870 mins., 1987. A Facets Video release, www.facets.org. La Commune (Paris, 1871) DVD, B&W, 345 mins., 2000. Three-disc Collector's Edition also includes The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins, directed by Geoff Bowie. Color, 76 mins., 2001. A First Run Features release, www.firstrunfeatures.com. Purchase Peter Watkins DVDs by clicking here Cineaste, Vol. 32 No.2 (Spring 2007), 20-25.

The Cinema of Peter Watkins

by Jared Rapfogel

The populace meets in La Commune (2000)

The radical filmmaker par excellence, Peter Watkins has been making defiantly challenging films for more than forty years now. If the early part of his career attests to a period when radical and commercial were not necessarily mutually exclusive propositions—his first films were made for the BBC, and his first theatrical feature, Privilege, was produced and distributed by Universal—the uncompromising nature of his aggressively provocative work made him a cinematic pariah even then, leading almost immediately to a cinematic exile which has lasted to the present day. Unbowed and seemingly incorruptible, Watkins has built a body of work which, whatever reservations one might harbor about particular films, is a truly astonishing and admirable achievement, a testament to his iron-willed determination to make movies on his own terms and in defiance of the obstacles placed in his path.

A measure of tribute has arrived at last, in the form of a long-overdue but (even at this late date) still gutsy initiative by New Yorker Films to release a number of the films on DVD. Thus far four discs have appeared, encompassing five out of his first six feature films—The War Game & Culloden (paired together), The Gladiators, Punishment Park, and his masterpiece, Edvard Munch, all in lavish editions with substantial booklets, extras, and critical commentaries—and reportedly The Freethinker will soon join that list as well. With First Run Features having just released a three-disc set devoted to his most recent film, the magisterial La Commune (Paris, 1871), and his fourteen-hour, eighteen-part documentary on the nuclear arms race, The Journey, available from Facets on VHS, Watkins's work may still be less accessible than it should be (the four remaining films from his filmography are virtually impossible to see), but more than you might have thought likely.

Watkins is, after all, a provocateur, determined to smash complacency, to reveal injustice, hypocrisy, and ignorance, and to spur his audience into action—not goals which tend to sit easy with producers or distributors, no matter their stripe. Watkins's career has been marked by a constant struggle to get his films made, and even more, by a constant struggle to get them seen, in the face of institutional suppression, censorship, and critical hostility. On the strength of a handful of low-budget, independently produced short films (two of which, Diary of an Unknown Soldier and The Forgotten Faces, are included as extras on the first two New Yorker releases), Watkins was hired by the BBC's documentary division in 1963, where he was able to make his astounding feature debut, Culloden, a reenactment of the brutal and tragic eighteenth-century Scottish battle and its aftermath. The nearly unqualified praise for Culloden (a response which would be short-lived and never repeated) led to the production of his next and possibly most famous film, The War Game, a dramatization of the physical and social effects of a nuclear attack on England. The War Game proved too hot to handle for the BBC, which, partly in response to pressure from representatives of the government and the military, refused to televise it, even going to some lengths to suppress it. The whole affair was reported on widely in the British press and led to Watkins's resignation from the BBC in 1965, thus inaugurating a never-ending search for a hospitable artistic climate which has taken him to the U.S., Scandinavia, and most recently France (as well as Lithuania, where Watkins has lived for many years).

Many filmmakers, even admirable ones, have proven vulnerable to pressures less intense and relentless than these. One of Watkins's greatest achievements is simply the perseverance he has demonstrated—from his first short films to La Commune, Watkins has, seemingly without hesitation, sacrificed financial and career security in order to continue making films exactly as he wants to make them. Indeed, taken all together, the paradox of Watkins's body of work is that it is remarkably, even obsessively, unified in style and subject matter, even as he alternates between distinct modes that seem almost incompatible. With Culloden, his first feature-length film and his first BBC-commissioned project, Watkins adopted an approach which he has been developing and refining, with very little variation, ever since. Watkins films are all shot in mimicry of a newsreel documentary esthetic (an apparent nonesthetic), complete with hand-held camera-work, action seemingly caught on the sly, and participants who invariably look directly into the lens, usually accompanied by the off-screen voice of the director (or interviewer).

This tactic is ubiquitous now, but Watkins can justifiably be called the pioneer of the style, and one of the few who has not only borrowed the look of newsreel filmmaking but has consistently adopted the conceit that the film is in fact a newscast, with the breaking of the fourth wall that that implies. In other words, Watkins is not simply after the impression of spontaneity or a sense of unvarnished realism. He achieves that; but by breaking the fourth wall, he also, paradoxically, calls attention to the film's artificiality, since, after all, he has no intention of passing his films off as nonfiction. Taking the newsreel style to its logical conclusion allows him to distinguish between reality and the way in which reality is presented in the media, and to investigate the relationship between those who film and those who are filmed.

As unwavering as he has been in his loyalty to this approach, there is an obvious distinction (a distinction whose repercussions, however, may not be so obvious) between the Watkins films that apply the faux-newsreel form to past historical epochs and those that apply it to situations and events taking place in the near future (or an alternate present)—the speculative films. The former category includes Culloden, Edvard Munch, The Freethinker, and La Commune, the latter The War Game, Privilege, The Gladiators, Punishment Park, The Trap, and Evening Land (which leaves only The Seventies People, which applies the faux-newsreel approach to the issue of suicide in contemporary Denmark, and The Journey, the only Watkins film to date which directly engages the present without using a fictional framework, taking all of fourteen hours to do so).

It's the speculative films that show Watkins, for better or for worse, at his most aggressively provocative—these are films designed to shatter the audience's false sense of security, to shock them with visions of the sickness at the heart of society and of the possible consequences of this corruption. Watkins stands apart from cinematic provocateurs like Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noé in that he almost never indulges in empty cynicism (with the conspicuous exception of Privilege) or a sense of superiority towards the audience, traits which can, after all, represent another kind of complacency. At their best, Watkins's provocations are designed to shake his audience's convictions in order to spur them to constructive action or thought—not simply to shock but to challenge the viewer to engage the film, and by extension the world at large. But in the best known of his speculative films (The War Game, Privilege, The Gladiators, and Punishment Park), Watkins's zeal often leads him to use methods that are overbearing and crude, to wield the newsreel aesthetic as a cudgel. It's not a question of bad-faith, of trying to pass off reconstruction as truth—Watkins trusts his audience to be more sophisticated than that (in The War Game, for instance, the narrator is at pains to identify the footage we see as something that might happen). But, to take The War Game as an example again, the film is extremely powerful when it lets the vérité-style images of the attack and its aftermath speak for themselves, less so during the interviews in which certain characters (a soldier, a nurse, a doctor) express their shock, horror, and suffering. Here the newsreel esthetic becomes a distraction, the emotions obviously fabricated—in these moments, Watkins's desire to move and shock us becomes too transparent.

The newsreel approach is relatively muted in Privilege and The Gladiators, the only films Watkins has made in the bulkier and less mobile 35mm format, and perhaps partly as a result, these are easily his worst films. But Watkins returned to 16mm, and to his radically collaborative approach to filmmaking, with Punishment Park, the most important of his speculative films. Punishment Park posits a near-future U.S. in which Vietnam War-related unrest has led to a crackdown on subversive elements across the country. Those convicted can choose either to serve jail time or to try their luck in Punishment Park, attempting to cross many miles of desert in an attempt to reach a designated point before being apprehended by the National Guard forces in pursuit, an exercise intended to double as punishment for the prisoners and as military training for the soldiers. The film alternates between one of the emergency tribunals set up to try a group of young radicals and the previous group's experiences in Punishment Park, and it's this structure that makes the film so striking, especially since the footage in the tribunal represents a charged mixture of fiction and fact.

From the very beginning of his career, Watkins has made his actors active participants in shaping the films, giving them a great deal of freedom in building their own characters. Punishment Park was, up until this point, his most radical experiment in this direction—the actors were almost all nonprofessionals, and each held views that at least approximated those of their characters. Since the scenes taking place at the tribunal essentially involve heated debates between the young radicals and the mostly older authority figures sitting in judgment over them, there's a palpable tension and hostility at these moments that is clearly more than make-believe. Just as a great deal of The War Game's power stems from the fact that the atrocities it portrays occurring in an England-of-tomorrow all mirror events that had already taken place in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and elsewhere, Punishment Park is as much a snapshot of the divisions and conflict in American society as it is speculation about the near future.

Geir Westby and Fru
Heiberg in Edvard Munch

And yet, Punishment Park is fatally flawed, the mixture of fact and fiction an uneasy one. As in The War Game, Watkins's determination to shock and upset overwhelms the material—Punishment Park culminates in an assault on the part of the national guardsmen so excessive that any rational, reflective instincts the viewer might have are drowned in a wave of indignation and righteous anger (and this would be true even without the presence of Watkins's voice, representing the unseen interviewer, crying out in shock and horror). It's impossible to watch Punishment Park without reflecting on the danger of preaching to the converted. Certainly righteous anger is an important and necessary response to injustice and corruption—but Watkins hits this note so hard throughout Punishment Park that it's difficult not to feel that, for anyone sympathetic to his position, the film functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy that flatters one's convictions; and that anyone unconvinced will be deeply alienated by it. An indication of this problem lies in the discrepancy between the casting of the roles of the radicals and of the authority figures. According to Joseph Gomez , the actors playing the radicals were themselves radicals, who largely shared their characters' convictions, whereas the actors playing the authority figures, though conservative in their politics, were instructed to exaggerate their own beliefs. This imbalance speaks to a crucial limitation at the heart of the film, an inclination to identify the divisions existing in American society without endeavoring to investigate or understand their causes, or to engage the very real issues underlying them (such as the resentment of the working classes towards the mostly young and affluent radicals).

This is a problem that recurs constantly throughout the speculative films, and speaks to a curious paradox in Watkins's work—the constant tension in his films between his desire to give the audience a profound degree of interpretive freedom and his tendency to over-determine its responses. Watkins's collaborative approach to making the films and his goal of inspiring his audience to ask questions suggest a nuanced, generous, self-challenging sensibility. But Privilege, The Gladiators, Punishment Park, and The Trap all present conflicts and debates in which the deck is unmistakably stacked, making them bold and provocative but dramatically inert and often only superficially challenging. Privilege and The Gladiators are Watkins's crudest films, simplistically cartoonish and heavy-handed in their characterizations; but Punishment Park and The Trap, a teleplay shot for Swedish TV in 1975, are more complicated. Both films feature, at their center, debates between those defending the status quo and those arguing a radical or at least oppositional viewpoint. But who except a died-in-the-wool right-wing viewer would identify even for a moment with the tribunal judges or the police in Punishment Park, or with John in The Trap, set on the last night of the year 1999, whose unthinking acceptance of his society's preoccupation with security has led him to live in a bunker thirty meters underground? And how many right wingers would ever be caught dead watching a Peter Watkins film? For those sympathetic to Watkins's perspective, these movies primarily offer an opportunity to flame one's indignation.

And yet, these problems virtually disappear in the period films, where Watkins's newsreel approach bears fruit brilliantly. It is here that Watkins allows himself a greater measure of reflection and even lyricism, and that he most deeply indulges his experimentation regarding structure, sound design, and achronological storytelling. The miracle of these films is that, despite taking place in the past, they are as relevant, impassioned, and political as any of the speculative films.

Culloden is a masterpiece of historical filmmaking, a model of class-conscious, people's-history that, sadly, very few filmmakers have seen fit to adopt. The battle of Culloden, the culmination of the Jacobite Rising, saw the tired, hungry, and ineptly led Highland Scots forces fighting for the cause of Prince Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") decimated by the British army, who followed their victory with brutal and bloody recriminations against not only the surviving soldiers but also the civilian population of the Highlands. Made in 1964, Watkins no doubt intended this campaign of ‘pacification' to suggest the pacification of South Vietnam then underway. But Watkins understood that approaching the battle of Culloden as a thinly veiled reference to contemporary events would fail to do justice to either of them—instead, he chose to portray the battle with a wealth of detail and a class-conscious perspective that would reveal dimensions of the event ignored or deemphasized in conventional accounts, while trusting that the contemporary relevance would be self-evident to any perceptive viewer.

The most striking thing about Culloden, of course, is the newsreel format—in all of his period films, Watkins happily embraces anachronism by positing the presence of camera-crews and television interviewers in centuries past. The conceit of an eighteenth-century film crew allows Watkins to avoid the trappings of the conventional period film—its preoccupation with a narrative arc, personal drama, and the spectacle of period dress and props. These are all things which, in most period films, create a comfortable distance—and this is why the immediacy of the newsreel approach is invaluable here, a way of making history come alive again. When Watkins (or his fictional counterpart) interviews the various participants in the battle, whether they are the rank and file of either army or the leadership on either side, any anachronism is easily trumped by the opportunity to engage directly with these characters.

Culloden is as angry a film as The War Game or Punishment Park, focusing as it does on what would today be identified as war crimes. Watkins utilizes the newsreel format to convey through his narration and through on-screen texts a constant stream of statistics and facts (from details about the participants' socioeconomic backgrounds and the hierarchical structure of the Highland clan system, to the ratio of dead on each side). But he also editorializes freely, identifying Prince Charles's lack of military experience, damning the injustice of the clan system, commenting soberly but angrily on the atrocities committed by the British army, and finally, in the film's final moments, lamenting the destruction of the Highlanders' culture.

In contrast to The Gladiators, Punishment Park or The Trap, however, Watkins is not afraid to complicate the situation, to apply his critical instincts to both sides of the divide. While his sympathies are clearly with the Highlanders, who are after all the victims of the British atrocities, he takes care to identify the exploitative nature of the clan system, and to reveal that many of the British soldiers have been pressed into service. True to its people's-history aspirations, the opposition is not simply between the British and the Highlanders, but between the ruling and working classes, with the Highland peasants doubly victimized: forcibly compelled to fight on behalf of their clan leaders, and then massacred by the British for doing so. This instinct towards complication and moral shading is evident as early as Watkins's short film, The Forgotten Faces, a reconstruction of the doomed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in which Watkins, commenting on a scene in which representatives of the state are captured by the revolutionaries, allows himself the question, "If the freedom fighters had actually won the revolution, would any of them have donned similar uniforms to hold these men in check?" This reflective distance is largely missing in many of the speculative films, and they are the weaker for it.

Edvard Munch, Watkins's supreme achievement, takes this reflectiveness even further, achieving a depth of feeling and a tonal range barely hinted at in any of its predecessors. While Culloden radically reconceived the historical film, Munch not only extends those innovations but also represents an even more profound rethinking of the genre of the biographical film. In a genre which would seem almost by definition to focus on an individual and his inner life, Watkins emphasizes the artist's society, the context in which he lived and worked, so much so that Munch recedes almost to the background of his own film. As in Culloden, Watkins presents a wealth of statistics and observations on nineteenth-century Norwegian society and stages interviews with the various characters to reveal the details of their daily lives. But Munch's inner life remains maddeningly elusive. Watkins has never shown much interest in his characters' psychology, and while this approach may seem like a shortcoming in his speculative films, where the characters threaten to slip into abstraction or empty symbolism, here it registers as an honest and admirably materialist acknowledgment that the real Munch can only be an enigma.

Munch also makes plain what was easy to overlook in Watkins's earlier films, thanks to their often confrontational nature—his mastery of editing, sound design, and film structure. Both The Gladiators and Punishment Park alternated between parallel narrative threads with great assurance, using overlapping sound editing to create a dynamic relationship between the two halves. But Munch takes a giant leap forward, abandoning chronology, and weaving a number of different periods in Munch's life into a tight web of associations and repeated motifs. Munch is unquestionably Watkins's most beautiful film, even as it retains every bit of the earlier films' critical intelligence and lack of sentimentality.

Wargames of the future in The Gladiators (1969)

As in Culloden, the newsreel esthetic both creates distance and collapses it. The film's immediacy cuts through the remove we generally feel from the world portrayed in a period film, but the concept of documentary film crew in the nineteenth century encourages us to remain aware that Munch is a fictional reconstruction and to reflect on the process of the film's creation. The culmination of Watkins's experiments on this front are his most recent fictional films, The Freethinker and La Commune (Paris, 1871), both period films which emphasize their artificiality and foreground their own making. The Freethinker—another biographical film, this time taking August Strindberg as its subject—expands on Munch's innovations: the film is an intricate and wide-ranging mixture of dramatic reconstructions, archival photographs, narration, on-screen texts, and discussions with the cast and crew. La Commune, on the other hand, is a kind of companion piece to Culloden, focusing on the short-lived socialist uprising in Paris in 1871. Both films were made communally, far more so even than Punishment Park. The Freethinker was the culmination of a two-year video production course Watkins led at Nordens Folk High School near Stockholm, and was made with a cast and crew largely consisting of Watkins's students, while La Commune was filmed in a large abandoned factory building, with a cast of more than 220, most of who were without prior acting experience. Both represent Watkins's collaborative approach to filmmaking at its most ambitious, with the actors responsible not only for interpreting their roles, but for researching their characters' lives and backgrounds, for contributing a piece of the historical mosaic. Indeed, both these films are achievements not only in drama but also in historical research. Dry as that may sound, the results are anything but—the wealth of detail adds dimensions that most period films hardly even suggest, the multitude of information heightening the drama rather than bogging it down. Compelling as they are, these films prove that high production values and the illusion of reality can be almost totally superfluous.

Though Watkins's collaborative approach was hardly new, in The Freethinker and La Commune he makes this process an integral part of the finished product, interspersing the reconstructions of Strindberg's life and of the uprising not only with the usual screen texts, but also with footage of the actors speaking about their relationship to their roles and discussing the project with each other, as well as debating the state of contemporary politics (an extension of one of the many elements of The Journey, large blocks of which involve group debates about nuclear war and the peace process). This transparency broadens the films' reach—each one is both the result of a process and a document of it.

For all their flaws, The War Game and Punishment Park are important models of radical filmmaking, provocations that bravely tackle social and political issues that very few filmmakers would dare to broach. But it's the films Watkins has made beginning with Edvard Munch that are the core of his achievement. The new structural and formal freedom he found with Munch has been apparent in almost all his films since, including The Seventies People and Evening Land (a speculative film with little evidence of the earlier films' shortcomings), finding its most elaborate and sustained expression in The Journey. This film, a kind of sequel to The War Game (or rather a reconceiving of the earlier film in the context of his mature style), marks Watkins's only engagement with documentary per se, combining the angry, impassioned activism of the earlier films with their successors' commitment to a free, open structure, and a patient, sophisticated presentation of information and of multiple viewpoints. Its departure point, as with The War Game, is the threat and the consequences of nuclear war, but The Journey expands to encompass a whole constellation of related themes and issues—the peace movement, media manipulation, the gulf between rich and poor, the process by which a state educates its people to demonize those of the so-called enemy power—as well as participants (it was filmed in the U.S., Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, the Soviet Union, Mexico, and Mozambique, among other countries). Further developing the structure of Munch and The Freethinker, The Journey unveils its multitude of settings and topics relatively quickly, letting each strand develop in tandem with every other over the course of the film's fourteen-hour length. It is a monumental film, yet a carefully constructed and tightly woven one.

And yet, Watkins's greatest contribution to film history may not be any one particular film, but rather the development of a cinematic form almost entirely his own: a hybrid of fiction and documentary capable of encompassing an astonishing range of tones, modes, and varieties of information. Edvard Munch, The Freethinker, and La Commune combine drama, text, speculation, debate, and a focus on process into a coherent whole in which each element engages the subject from a different angle, giving each film a breathtaking scope. Watkins expounds at great length, in his critical writings about the media, on the dominance of the Monoform, the linear, literal-minded, narrative approach to image-making which he believes characterizes almost all mainstream television and film production, and which he finds fundamentally manipulative. He makes repeated pleas for the creation of alternative forms, ones that encourage reflection, that posit new ways of representing experience. And his later films show him genuinely putting theory into action. These are not just compelling and fascinating films—they represent a whole new approach, new avenues waiting to be explored, developed, and expanded. If few seem to be following his lead, the precedent has at least been set.

Besides, Watkins surely has more films left in him—he has been quiet in the seven years since La Commune, no doubt in part due to the difficulty he has always had in bringing his projects to fruition. But he has always willed them into being eventually, and there is no evidence that his energy and determination are flagging—it seems likely to be only a matter of time before he makes another contribution to the project that has been his life's work.

The War Game & Culloden
DVD. The War Game: B&W, 49 mins., 1965; Culloden: B&W, 72 mins., 1964. A New Yorker release, www.newyorkerfilms.com.

The Gladiators
DVD, color, 91 mins., 1969. Also includes The Diary of an Unknown Soldier, B&W, 17 mins., 1959. A New Yorker release, www.newyorkerfilms.com.

Punishment Park
DVD, color, 88 mins., 1971. Also includes The Forgotten Faces, B&W, 18 mins., 1961. A New Yorker release, www.newyorkerfilms.com.

Edvard Munch
DVD, color, 174 mins., 1976. A New Yorker release, www.newyorkerfilms.com.

The Journey
VHS, color, 870 mins., 1987. A Facets Video release, www.facets.org.

La Commune (Paris, 1871)
DVD, B&W, 345 mins., 2000. Three-disc Collector's Edition also includes The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins, directed by Geoff Bowie. Color, 76 mins., 2001. A First Run Features release, www.firstrunfeatures.com.

Purchase Peter Watkins DVDs by clicking here

Cineaste, Vol. 32 No.2 (Spring 2007), 20-25.