Peter Watkins: a revolutionary in English filmmaking from a tradition of uncompromising radicalism | film

DDystopia, post-apocalypse, mockumentary: these genres are common, even hackneyed, in films and television today. But when director Peter Watkins used them in the 1960s, they were revolutionaries, and Watkins himself was a revolutionary too — an English revolutionary, in fact, alive to the cruelty and injustice of kings, but also to the cruelty and injustice of people bent on cutting off heads. His cinema has consistently asked questions about who is in power, and what happens when their power goes disastrously wrong. An artist committed to challenging and disturbing, Watkins comes from the maverick tradition of hard-line extremism on screen and stage – the same tradition as Edward Bond, Ken Loach, and Dennis Potter.

His brilliant, angry anti-nuclear drama War Game was banned by the BBC in 1965. (It was shown in cinemas, then finally shown on television two decades later.) It only lasts 47 minutes, but viewers felt like they lived a life full of fear. When I first saw it as a teenager at a Disarmament Committee meeting 15 years after it was made, it was as if I had entered a new era of frustrated adulthood.

Cinema audiences were aware of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, released in 1964, and were probably aware of Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe that same year, but The War Game was very different. Strangelove and Fail Safe were, in their different ways, top-down dramas, dramatizing the people in charge. The War Game is about the ordinary people on the ground: the rambunctious, restless ordinary British people who sullenly submit to the instructions of increasingly distraught low-level official types, just minutes before, after, and during the explosion of a nuclear bomb. We have seen that those GPs, police, soldiers and civil servants, whose authority and expertise were developed to meet the needs of the Second World War, were woefully inadequate.

The almost diabolical genius of The War Game is that it is directed at the viewer with the clipped tone of a “protect and survive” informational film, the voice of Rethy, men of the Ministry who in other circumstances could be deployed to deceive or deceive the public. Watkins uses it to uncover the shocking truth. This is the voice that lingers quietly as police execute irreparably irradiated victims in the street with specially issued pistols, in an attempt to prevent the health service from being overwhelmed.

The whole film is in a pseudo-documentary style, with the faces of shocked, ghost-like people looming in front of the camera as they obediently answer the narrator’s stubborn questions. The mockumentary form – often used for satire, comedy, and satire, and to undermine the standing of the media and television – is here considered extremely dangerous. Watkins used it to emphasize that this is true. What happens on screen in The War Game happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even in non-nuclear theaters of war including Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo. Perhaps we in the West have been encouraged not to think about these things; To think that it applied only to defeated Axis powers – and since the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended, the problem was in any case at an end. “No, it can and does happen,” Watkins told us vehemently. And the unstable geopolitical negotiations were always wobbly. Barry Hines Threads, from 1984, was the heir apparent to the war game on British television.

Watkins’s style of mockumentary was perhaps more radical in his previous film: the 1964 BBC classic Culloden, in which a contemporary camera crew arrived, like American photojournalists in Vietnam, to cover the 1746 Battle of Culloden, where the Jacobite rebel forces of Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” were decisively defeated by the government army of the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II. There are no timid or arching shots of cameras or unhistorical audio recorders; All we hear is the quiet, off-camera voice of the journalist “interviewing” the various foot soldiers, commanding officers, and blue-blooded commanders, their faces huddled openly in front of Watkins’ camera in the same way.

The rebel forces – exhausted, underfed and undermanned, surrounded by Scottish clan divisions and poorly led by their arrogant, arrogant leader – have been horribly defeated. But Watkins doesn’t leave it there. His camera shows us what happened next, what would now be called war crimes. Cumberland’s men, deeply motivated by their victory, follow the retreating troops on the road to Inverness, slaughtering combatants and civilians alike in the service of “pacifying” the Highlanders. When the Cumberland troops bayonet a wounded Jacobite on the battlefield, it is disturbingly similar to policemen shooting victims in a war game. Watkins always emphasizes how much leaders and men have in common: they are brothers, cousins, and relatives. Their differences are a function of war.

In the early 1970s, Watkins gave us a film less well-known than Culloden and The War Game, but perhaps his masterpiece. Punishment Park, from 1971, is more of the deadpan dystopian satire that soon became popular in Hollywood, but it’s very much Watkins. Although set in the United States, the clear, articulate English voice-over introduces what appears to be a BBC documentary-style film. The US government is cracking down on hippies, troublemakers and extremists, forcing them to choose between 20 years in prison or a few days in a mysterious new “Punishment Garden.” Of course most of them choose the park, not knowing what is in store for them, and for the first time Watkins’ divine narrator loses his temper over what is happening, and at the end screams in horror and disgust, as if Ludovic Kennedy or David Attenborough had had a nervous breakdown. It’s an unforgettable moment.

Watkins’ career continued in its own way, and included a classic satire of popular culture in Franchise (1967); Bergman-esque and much-loved novel about Edvard Munch from 1974; The epic 14-hour anti-nuclear documentary project The Journey (1987); and another historical docudrama in 2000, La Commune (Paris, 1871), about the Paris Commune. The cold, clear flame of passion burns to the last.