A Tribute to Peter Watkins
Introduction
Peter Watkins
Notes on The Media Crisis, by Peter Watkins
Film Programma
Introduction
Peter Watkins,
against this screen
A tribute is born from several motives. This year the Milan Film Festival dedicates a tribute to Peter Watkins, an English director, born in 1935, both for the richness of his films and to reflect on the crisis of the media.
The films of Watkins, an irregular, independent maestro who is marginalised from distribution and largely unknown to the public, are a journey in the forms criticised by the official and standardies Monoform - as the director defined in in his theoretical writings - in which everything is portrayed: from war to detergents, from politics to the environment.
The motto that seems to move his films, is "Tell the story, but find a different way to do so".
An example: 1746, the battle of Culloden, a soldier speaks while looking into the cameria, we hear the hum of machinery in the background. We are in the midst of a live television broadcast, but we are within a historic event: we are in a Peter Watkins film.
In a few moves, in his debut feature film Culloden (1964), with a few displaced elements playing with the expectations of the viewer, Watkins invents a language and a way of telling his story within history. A method which is by no means innocuous, because many witnesses of the battle of Culloden revealed on the screen, and the voiceover tells us how much the vice-ridden leaders and the illiterate, hungry recruits earn. Watkins' fake news report enlarges the perspective on the differences in ideas and on the class divisions of those who are involved in the battle, and ends up telling us a lot more than the news reports of today tell us about current wars.
With his next film, The War Game (1965), Watkins depicts a possible nuclear attack on England and critiques the popular misconceptions about the risks of the atomic bomb. Political pressure prevented the film from being released, but it was shown once: it won an Oscar for best documentary film, but wasn't shown in England until 1985. The War Game is a mockumentary, based on a plausible hypothesis, that combines invention with official documents. Documentary this becomes a hybrid genre where falsehood serves to reveal the truth.
Watkins dabbles in classic fiction, as a one-off, in Privilege (1966), focusing on mainstream culture and on the birth of the pop icon. Produced by Universal, it is the only film to see the light through a major and a direct criticism of the system.
From then on, Watkins began to roam the world producing films.
Gladiators (The Peace Game) (1968) was produced in Sweden. The global powers organised the Peace Game to resolve diplomatic conflicts. A visionary idea, where small troops of soldiers of various nationalities are moved like chess pieces by their superiors, in a war which is broadcast live on television. A cruel, avant la lettre reality show, which is decades ahead of its time in anticipating the questions which we are still asking today about the representation of voilence.
The same is true of Punishment Park (1970), filmed in the USA, where hippies and subversives arrested by the police have been offered an extreme choice between either jail or the punishment park. Abandoned in the desert, chased by the police, they are given just a few days to reach the American flag which they have tarnished and which will save them. The film, filmed like a live news report, becomes an outright criticism of the USA and of its repressive system. The film is equally extreme in its methods of production. Watkins involved amateur actors who subscribed to the ideas that they were to act out: with the police played by conservatives, and the hippies by militants. On set, real violence was on the verge of erupting. The borders between fiction and documentary were easily transgressed, but what matters more is this: the story of two good friends, violence and power.
The seventies marked a moment of decisive theoretical elaboration. The director focuses on the unique story-telling method of MAVM (Mass Audio Visual Media) and the mechanism of the universal clock, or indeed the need for television listings to give precise durations - as well as defined languages.
Watkins followed a continuously radical path, culminating with the work that gathers and engages with all the preceding works: La Commune (Paris 1871) (1999), a riconstruction of the first political loaboratory of every revolution. A film made in three versions (one 9 hours long, one 5 hours 45 minutes, and one 3 and a half hours) to break the mechanism of the universal clock, in which the director involved nearly 200 amateur actors, dividing them according to their opinions regarding the Commune - either for or against. The film, after months of tests, was shot in a relatively short time frame, filmed in 13-minute sequences as is declared to the audience - where the television of Versailles and that of the Commune are the mirror to two different way of speaking of the present and making information. This is another reconstruction based in the past which speaks for the present: the television of Versailles speaks from the top, while that of the Commune speaks from the bottom, driven by media activists.
A clash of plurality in a decisive moment, while, addicted, we risk living in a single-screen world.
Watkins, films, his tendency to continuously make us think about the ,single screen, of the present, help us to see and to imagine others
Alessandro Beretta
Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins was born in Norbiton in England on 29th October 1935. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and from his first short films, The Diary of An Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1961), he reconstructed history "live". Noticed by the BBC, the British channel produced his first films: Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965). The latter film, despite controversy and censorship, won the Oscar for the best documentary, but he left England. Privilege (1966) was produced by Universal, whilst with Gladiators (1968) he started to work with Scandinavian countries (Sweden and Denmark), except for Punishment Park (1970) which was made in the USA. Alongside the critical reconstruction of historical events and some episodes of visionary fiction, Watkins also made two unusual biopics, Edvard Munch (1973) and Freethinker (1992-1994) on the life of August Strindberg. Evening Land (1976) marked the beginning of an even more critical use of the cinema in films like The Journey (1983-1985), over 14 hours and a half on the awareness of the problems of atomic energy and in his last film, La Commune (1999). After having lived in Sweden, Canada and Lithuania, today he lives in France. His works are closely related to his critical thought on the media, collected in Media Crisis (Homnisphres, 2004) and available on the directors website pwatkins.mnsi.net.
Note sulla crisi dei media, di Peter Watkins
Since the time of the 1966 banning by the BBC of my film The War Game (which dealt with the consequences of using nuclear weapons) I have been concerned with the increasing 'dumbing down' of the MAVM (mass audiovisual media) and the development of what I now refer to as "the media crisis". Key elements in this crisis include the heavily circumscribed agendas of the MAVM, the forced development of the media popular culture, the standardisation of the audiovisual form resulting in the creation of an increasingly hierarchical and manipulative relationship with the audience (the public), and education systems which are largely compliant with this system.
As the professional repression against my work became more extensive, I travelled to schools and universities in North America, Europe, Scandinavia and Australasia, speaking about the media crisis and trying to organise critical media education. In the mid-1970s I ran two summer courses under Dr. James Shenton at Columbia University in New York City, in which we analysed a series of American news programmes. From this emerged my awareness of what I call the Monoform - I have written about it extensively over the past 30 years.
Our research at Columbia revealed the development of a formatted and repetitive TV language-form of rapidly edited and fragmented images accompanied by a dense bombardment of sound, all held together by the classical narrative structure. Although this language-form had originally been conceived by Hollywood, it was disturbing to discover its common use throughout virtually all contemporary TV programming, from soap operas to news broadcasting. This standardisation - and the imperatives behind it - has become worse in the last decades, and now embraces virtually all forms of 'professional' film and TV usage, including reality TV, sports broadcasting, most documentary films, etc.
Because of its extreme rapidity (especially the version developed over the past 20 years), the Monoform gives no time for interaction, reflection or questioning. Its dense layering of sound, its lack of silence (except for manipulative purposes), is again hostile to reflection. The rapidly edited images are like small railway cars, and the rails they run on the monolinear narrative structure as originally developed by Hollywood and designed to move the story (the message) in a pre-determined line (pre-determined by the producers, not the public), rising and falling between impact points to a final climax and termination.
This Monoform is designed to entrap - to catch and hold the attention of the public over prolonged periods of time. It is organised to create pre-determined responses, which means that before the audience sees any Monoform film or television programme, its producers already know how they (the audience) will react - or at least such is the intention. No allowance is made for any reaction from the audience which might be different to the anticipated and created one.
The media, and probably many media scholars, would claim that the use of the Monoform in this way is a widely accepted practice. But accepted by whom? Who has discussed it? And what do we know about its impact? Given the sheer breadth and universality of the media crisis (its effect on the creative and pluralistic development of cinema and television on the one hand, its detrimental social, political and human consequences on the civic process on the other), the silence that reigns over the subject publicly, within the mass audiovisual media (MAVM) themselves, and throughout the education sphere, is shocking. The multiple holistic issues of the media crisis remain undebated by the public nearly 100 years after the emergence of Hollywood!
Here I would like to speak frankly about the contribution of my own films, both as challenging, and contributing to, the media crisis. I hope that other filmmakers and media teachers will also become involved in this debate as it applies to their own work.
My films can be divided into two periods: before and after the making of Evening Land (1976). The production of this film in Denmark occurred in the time that I was teaching summer courses at Columbia University - where I first understood the structure of the Monoform. Up to and including the Danish production, my films all apply the Monoform, while The Journey (1986), The Freethinker (a co-production with students, 1994), and La Commune de Paris (1999) all consciously strive to break away from the Monoform in one way or another. But even my earliest professional films - Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) - convey a conscious challenge to certain aspects of the traditional narrative structure and the concept of a pure documentary form that depicts 'reality'. Culloden was a direct development from my amateur film The Forgotten Faces (1960), a reenactment of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, filmed in a backstreet in Canterbury, England, in a newsreel manner - as if actually happening in Budapest.
I extended this idea of the 'fake' documentary into my professional films essentially to de-code and challenge some of the 'objective' practices of the MAVM. We know that there were no cameras in 1746 at the time of the Battle of Culloden, and we know that England has not (yet) been attacked with nuclear weapons - yet I was filming these events with all the appearance of the verisimilitude of a traditional documentary film or the TV evening news. My hope at the time was to initiate a dialogue within my profession, and with the public, on the manipulative dangers of the so-called realist film or objective documentary.
I was hoping for a bi-polar reaction, a mix of immersion and critical distance, to my work. But the unexpected hostile reaction by my profession soon blunted and nullified those aims.
My work has also always tried to give expression to the voices of the public. With some exceptions, where I mix professional and non-professional actors, I have tried for the most part to work with 'ordinary people', i.e. the public. Despite the parlance of the popular culturists, I feel that the public have been shunted into an entirely passive role by the MAVM. I believe that the public are an immense resource of feelings, ideas, points of view, creativity, and political innovation - a resource that could have contributed in an evolutionary (and revolutionary?) way to the development of the MAVM, had this been allowed by the media professionals, and encouraged by education systems. I believe that my work is important because it reflects this potential.
On the negative side, my films also reveal (or perhaps conceal - thereby meriting even greater criticism) the role of the hierarchical director (myself). I leave the reader to discuss the various manifestations of this tendency, which I guess has been prompted by my own inner reluctance to totally relinquish control to others (e.g. to the people who appear in my films) - a very common problem in our profession.
Nevertheless, I am referred to as a "radical" (often "too radical") filmmaker - a reference I have difficulty with. According to current usage, radical suggests something out of the ordinary (even 'difficult') in my work. I personally see La Commune and my other films as occupying a 'middle-ground' between the present MAVM, with all their control and restrictive popular culture, and the more genuinely 'alternative' films of the avant-garde. I like to think that in a less repressive and reactionary media climate, my work would be seen as an acceptable and 'normal' part of the function of the mass audiovisual media. And likewise regarding 'avant-garde' films ...
Peter Watkins, Felletin, France, August 2010
curated by Vida Urbonavicius and Alessandro Beretta,
translation by Alice Arecco and Alessandro Beretta
Film programme
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Culloden
UK, 1964, 69'
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La Commune (de Paris, 1871)
France, 1999, 5h 45'
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Privilege
UK, 1966, 90'
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Punishment Park
USA, 1970, 90'
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The Gladiators
Sweden, 1968, 105'
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The war game
UK, 1965, 47'
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