Peter Watkins. Images at War

"In this film I was interested in breaking the illusion of media-produced ‘reality’. By late 1964 Harold Wilson’s newly elected Labour Government had already broken its election manifesto to unilaterally disarm Britain, and was in fact developing a full-scale nuclear weapons programme. There was a marked reluctance by the British TV at the time to discuss the arms race, and there was especially silence on the effects of nuclear weapons — about which the large majority of the public had absolutely no information. I therefore proposed to the BBC that I make a film showing the possible effects, during an outbreak of war between NATO and the USSR, of a nuclear strike on Britain […]. The filming took place in early 1965 in Kent. Once again the cast was almost entirely made up of amateurs. I repeated the ‘you-are-there’ style of newsreel immediacy […]. Interwoven among scenes of ‘reality’ were stylised interviews with a series of ‘establishment figures’ — an Anglican Bishop, a nuclear strategist, a doctor, a psychiatrist, etc. The outrageous statements by some of these people — in favour of nuclear weapons, even nuclear war — were actually based on genuine quotations. My question was: “Where is ‘reality’? ... in the madness of statements by these artificially-lit establishment figures quoting the official doctrine of the day, or in the madness of the staged and fictional scenes from the rest of my film, which presented the consequences of their utterances?” — Peter Watkins.

“Edvard Munch is the most personal film I have ever made. Its genesis lies in a visit to the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo, in 1968, during the time of a screening of several of my films by the Oslo University. I was awestruck by the strength of Munch’s canvases, especially those depicting the sad life of his family, and was very moved by the artist’s directness […]. I also felt a personal affinity with his linking of past and present […]. It took me three years to persuade Norwegian TV (NRK) to fund this film, and in the end it only happened because Swedish TV convinced them to participate in a co-production. Edvard Munch was filmed during two separate periods in 1973: February-March for the winter scenes, and May-June for the spring and summer scenes. Once again I worked with an entirely amateur cast — this time it was Norwegians from our filming locations in Oslo and the small town of Åsgårdstrand on the Oslo fjord. [It] was one of the very best working groups I have ever had. This was truly one of the ‘magical’ creative experiences of my life […]” — Peter Watkins.

“Culloden was, with The War Games, the first of my two films made for the BBC. The then Head of the Documentary Film Department gave me the opportunity and a small budget to produce a film on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16, 1746. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the son of James Edward, the Catholic Pretender to the British throne, had landed in Scotland, raised a ragged but tough-spirited Jacobite army from amongst the Gaelic-speaking Highland clans, and marched as far south as Derby before having to retreat back to the Highlands. He was pursued into Scotland by a powerful force of 9,000 redcoats under the command of William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, strengthened by Protestant Scot Lowlanders and several Highland clans loyal to King George II. Outside Inverness, on the bleak, rain-swept Culloden Moor, nearly 1,000 of Charlie’s army were slaughtered by the Royal Army. The Highlanders finally broke and fled. Approximately 1,000 more of them were killed in subsequent weeks of hounding by British troops. This was the 1960s, and the US army was ‘pacifying’ the Vietnam highlands. I wanted to draw a parallel between these events and what had happened in our own UK Highlands two centuries earlier” — Peter Watkins.

“Why this film at this time? We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history — where the conjunction of post-modernist cynicism, sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalisation, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualisation of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered ‘old fashioned’. Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm — to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia — which we now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born” — Peter Watkins.

The first two films were made by a young film-maker bitten by the “amateur film-making bug”, where the characteristics of his radical reinvention of documentary language are notable. Both short films deal with two historical events: life in the trenches during the First World War and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In both, shot in a poetic black-and-white, the film-maker stages a strikingly faithful recreation of events and films them mindful of a narrative that disrupts documentary convention. In the first film, the first-person voice of a solider tells of the cruelties of war, bringing us closer to an experience in which lived experience and fact are interwoven. In the second, we have the off-screen voice of the narrator which, combined with the supposedly real images of the Hungarian Revolution, breaks down the traditional distancing between action and description. In these films Watkins works with the amateur theatre company Playcraft, with which he also made Culloden, and unfurls an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema with allusions to the Soviet movement and Neorealism in the framing, landscapes and subjects. The session closes with a moving film portrait of Peter Watkins made by Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius from the film-maker’s time in Vilnius, rendering an account of his lifelong searches and frustrations.

Punishment Park is a dystopian psychodrama on the repression of public opinion during the Vietnam War. In a parallel present, suspiciously like Nixon’s America in 1970, a new law allows people to be arrested who pose a risk to supposed national security or, going one step further, any critical formulation opposed to the government. These people go on trial in a civilian tribunal, which sends them either directly to prison or to a perverse game in which they must cross the desert pursued by the police. If they reach a posted American flag they are declared free, yet there are no rules and they are chased by the police with little respect for their lives. At once a fable of totalitarianism in the supposed heart of the free world and anticipating migrant experiences of border crossings, Watkins shoots the film in a cinema-verité style, combining professional actors and amateurs and forming a civilian tribunal out of distinguished citizens in the society of the time, and with those arrested well-known activists protesting against the Vietnam War. Following screenings at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, the film never gained distribution in the USA, prompting the filmmaker to suspect undeclared censorship.

A satire on the control of youth through a rock world that seems subversive but is guided by conservative economic interests. As an acerbic critique of British music in the 1960s and the neutralisation of the disruptive power of youth, Stanley Kubrick cited the film as an influence on A Clockwork Orange (1971). In the words of Peter Watkins: “Privilege was set in the ‘swinging Britain’ of the 1960s, and was prescient of the way that Popular Culture and the media in the US commercialised the anti-war and counter-culture movement in that country as well. Privilege also ominously predicted what was to happen in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s — especially during the period of the Falkland Islands War”.

“The Gladiators (The Peace Game) is a bleak satire set in the near future, in which the major powers of the world, East and West, aligned and non-aligned, recognise the possibility of a major world war within our lifetime, and try to forestall it by channelling man’s aggressive instincts in a more controllable manner. They do this by forming an International Commission along the lines of the United Nations, dedicated to fighting a series of contests between teams of selected soldiers from each country. These competitions, which can be fought to the death, are called ‘Peace Games’, and are broadcast on global television via satellite — complete with sponsors and commercials. The film follows Game 256, which is being ‘played’ in the International Peace Game Centre near Stockholm, under the controlling eye of a highly sophisticated computer, hired out to the International Commission by the (neutral) Swedish Army. The international group of officers watching Game 256 decide to eliminate a man and a woman from opposing teams who reach out to each other, because they decide that such forms of communication would be the gravest threat of all to the stability of the existing world system” — Peter Watkins.

An historic moment in which, over a weekend, one of the most monumental films in cinema history is screened. With a full running time of fourteen hours and thirty minutes, The Journey — its first showing in Spain — traces, as Watkins explains, “the systemic impact of the global nuclear regime across twelve countries, building an intricate series of connections between the state of the arms trade, military expenditure, the environment and gender politics”. As is customary with the film-maker, who attaches great importance to the process of making the film and the learning entailed between the collectives and subjects involved, The Journey was made with activist groups from around the world over three intensive years. The result is a profound debate on world peace, the price of hunger in the world and surviving a past of nuclear disaster, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a disturbing screening in the present, as the Fukushima accident in 2011 shows. Screening The Journey in its entirety and therefore in all its complexity, and respecting its coherence in a world at war, makes it a powerful plea for the capacity of the Museo to house and emit desires for transformation in our society, and further still when the institution it is screened in has Guernica among its Collection, one of the world’s most icon pleas against war.

“The Freethinker was originally conceived under the title August Strindberg as a full-length feature film which I was commissioned to make by the Swedish Film Institute and the Swedish TV in the late 1970s. As well as looking at certain aspects of Strindberg's work as a dramatist and polymath, I planned to portray the author's troubled childhood and his relationship with his first wife, the Finnish-Swedish actress Siri von Essen. After two and half years of research and script work, the project collapsed […]. Some 15 years later, the old script was given a new lease of life. With the invaluable support of Birgitta Östlund, Rector of the Nordens Folk High School (at Biskops Arnö outside Stockholm), August Strindberg became a unique two-year video production course which involved twenty-four students. The result, a four-and-a-half-hour film entitled The Freethinker, is based on the original manuscript, with many new scenes and important facets developed by the students themselves, who researched, directed, filmed, recorded, edited […]. It attempts to challenge media problems and to open up space for the audience” — Peter Watkins.

“In 1974, Sveriges Radio in Stockholm invited members of the Swedish public to submit teleplay scripts dealing with the ‘future’. One of the scripts selected was by Bo Melander, a noted journalist working for The Gothenburg Times. I accepted to direct the play when it was chosen for production, and in January 1975 Bo and I worked on developing the script, deciding to concentrate on the nuclear reactor issue which was becoming a major political concern in Sweden in 1974. The Trap is set in the underground living quarters of a scientist working at an international nuclear waste station near the west coast of Sweden. It is the end of 1999, and the TV in the oppressive living room inhabited by John (the scientist), his wife Margereta, and their son Peter is proclaiming optimistic statements about the promise of the New Millennium. John’s brother, Bertil, arrives to celebrate the new century. Bertil holds a political position completely opposed to that of his brother, denounces the consumerist society which has led to the need for all the nuclear waste embedded in the nearby rocks, and argues bitterly with John, telling him that he and his colleagues are like caged rats, trapped within the confines of a system they defend blindly. Meanwhile, on the Swedish television channel, a Minister of State expresses his belief that, ‘The century to come will be a century for humanity, filled with humanity” — Peter Watkins.

“Evening Land depicts ‘fictional’ events in Europe [in the 1970s] — beginning with a strike at a shipyard in Copenhagen over the building of four submarines for the French navy: not only because the financially troubled management has proposed a wage freeze to secure the contract, but because it is discovered that the vessels can be fitted with nuclear missiles. At the same time, a summit meeting of European Common Market ministers takes place in Copenhagen, and a group of radical demonstrators kidnap the Danish EEC Minister in protest against the production of nuclear submarines in Denmark, and in support of the strikers’ demands. The Danish police not only brutally attack a demonstration by the strikers, they also locate and rescue the kidnapped minister, and capture or kill the ‘terrorists’” — Peter Watkins.

The auteur documentary is now constrained by the imperatives of television markets. In an age of platforms, conspiracy theories, fake news and anxiety over disinformation, “infotainment” has become one of the dominant genres, with documentary its prime format. Nevertheless, the “Universal Clock”, an appalling machine that imposes runtimes and themes on the audiovisual work broadcast on television, makes any documentary repeat conventions, copy resources and be, ultimately, a standardised product of consumption. Geoff Bowie goes in search of the last insurgent opposing this “monoform”, Peter Watkins, whom he encounters filming La Commune, a six-hour film on the French revolt of 1871, in which the seams of the monoform burst and challenge the norms of the Universal Clock. As much in La Commune as in his entire body of work, Watkins has sought to reflect on integrity, globalisation and artistic resistance.

“Broadly speaking, our ‘process’ manifests in the extended way in which we involved the cast in the preparation for, and then during the filming, and in the way that some of the people continued the process after the filming was completed. Our ‘form’ is visible in the long sequences and in the extended length of the film which emerged during the editing. What is significant, and I believe very important in La Commune, is that the boundaries between ‘form’ and ‘process’ blur together, i.e. the form enables the process to take place, but without the process the form in itself is meaningless. Before the filming we asked the cast to do their own research on this event in French history. The Paris Commune has always been severely marginalised by the French education system, despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that it is a key event in the history of the European working class, and when we first met, most of the cast admitted that they knew little or nothing about the subject” — Peter Watkins.