Peter Watkins Movies
Distinguished filmmaker Peter Watkins is best remembered for his powerful look at the potential horrors of nuclear war in The War Game. Originally made for the BBC television network, one of two he was commissioned to make between 1964-1965, the film was considered too disturbing to air. Later it was released in theaters and in 1966 it was awarded the Oscar for Best Documentary. Before becoming a director, Watkins was educated at Christ College, Cambridge, and at the London Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Before joining the film industry, he worked as an assistant producer in advertising. In the late '50s he began making amateur films. Following the success of The War Game, Watkins made the mainstream feature film Privilege (1967). The film met with a lukewarm reception and Watkins returned to making documentaries in Sweden and the United States. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi- 2001
Veteran Canadian filmmaker Geoff Bowie spins this portrait of Peter Watkins -- one of world cinema's most resolutely utopian and obscure major figures. Bowie follows Watkins as he makes his most recent work La Commune, (Paris 1871), an epic six-hour reimagining of the legendary 19th century uprising against Napoleon III by the Communards. For Watkins, the making of a film is a political act and as such he recruited almost 200 people to work not as mere actors but as creative partners who extensively researched their parts, formed discussion groups, and contemplated modern society in relation to life in the commune. The process led to an increased awareness on the set about the arrogance and intractability of media outlets. Contrasting Watkins' unorthodox ways, Bowie also features footage and a number of interviews from the MIP-TV, a Canadian television trade show where industry high rollers hawk documentaries. This film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
- Starring:
- Peter Watkins, Sara Louis, (more)
Noted filmmaker and media critic Peter Watkins directs this mammoth six-hour-long look at the legendary Paris Commune of 1871. Following the humiliating defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, the reign of Napoleon III collapsed in the resulting public foment. While a new regime headed under the Government of National Defense tried to shore up power, a band of commoners took the reigns of power for themselves and created the Paris Commune, a government defiantly separate from the state operating under a sort of proto-Marxist ethos. Inevitably, the Commune was brutally suppressed by French troops. Watkins' treatment of the event juxtaposes the present with the past -- modern day CNN-style reporting with historical fact. This film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
Acclaimed British filmmaker Peter Watkins collaborates with twenty-four students from the Swedish Folk High School in Biskops-Arno to craft this highly unconventional look at the life of controversial 19th Century dramatist August Stindberg. An iconoclast who flouted the conventions of then-contemporary society to promote political and social change, Stindberg and his freethinking followers were considered outcasts whose revolutionary ideas posed a great danger to the standards of society. By purposefully structuring his film in a carefully layered, spiral manner, director Watkins aims to reflect the filmmaker's admitted concern over the influence of mass media while simultaneously suggesting ways in which that same media might share its unique power with the people in the not-so-distant future. In a curious call back to the subject of the film, The Freethinker was initially boycotted by Swedish television. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
- 1987
In the 1980's, award-winning filmmaker and activist Peter Watkins began making a film about the international arms race, and the people around the globe who were working to avert the growing worldwide march toward mutual destruction. The result was The Journey, a 19 episode, 14-and-a-half hour epic that examined the threat of thermo-nuclear war, and the many faces of the burgeoning peace movement in the United States, Europe, the Netherlands, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Africa, the Pacific Rim, and South America. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- 1986
The German/Swiss The Journey (originally Die Reiss) is an objective look at neo-Fascist terrorism. Markus Boysen plays a member of a terrorist gang who breaks away from the movement. He also "kidnaps" his son from the gang's commune, rather than have the boy raised to be a terrorist himself. In flashback, we see that Boysen was the son of a celebrated Nazi author, whose mansion was confiscated by the occupying American troops. It is to this same mansion, now boarded up and in disrepair, that Boysen escapes to with his son. The Journey ends with the suggestion that the child will be traumatically motivated to follow in the bloody footsteps of his father and grandfather. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Markus Boysen, Corinna Kirchhoff, (more)
- 1977
This strange film is a made-up documentary, detailing the future history of Denmark in four related but discrete storylines. In one, the refusal by a group of shipyard workers to work on ships carrying atomic warheads leads to sympathetic strikes around the country, and a general strike threatens. In another, the future relationship of the Common Market nations to various defense pacts such as NATO is discussed by a group of high-ranking national representatives. The third and fourth stories are closely intertwined: after a leftist group kidnaps the Danish Secretary of State, the police stretch the law as far as it will go in order to respond to the threat. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
The troubled life and career of one of Norway's most celebrated artists is examined with documentary-style realism in this biography from celebrated filmmaker Peter Watkins. Edvard Munch (Geir Westby) was born in 1863 into a well-to-do and privileged family, but he had a unhappy upbringing; his mother and his younger sister died when he was at an impressionable age, and his father was cold, judgmental, emotionally distant, and unsupportive of his ambitions. As a young man, Munch fell in with the Scandinavian bohemian community and developed an appetite for alcohol, which further distanced him from his father. Munch also began an affair with a married woman he called Mrs. Heilberg (Gro Fraas), and his obsessive need for her had a seismic effect on his personality. Munch took up painting, but rather than follow the pattern of realism that was common at the time, Munch used unusual color schemes and distressed textures on his canvases to help convey the darker emotions he longed to express. Between his unusual techniques and pervasive themes of death, illness and eroticism, Munch's work was frequently lambasted by critics and gallery patrons alike, and he briefly exiled himself in Germany, where alongside Swedish playwright August Strindberg he struggled to find an appreciative audience for his challenging visions. Edvard Munch was filmed in the style of a documentary, with characters often addressing the camera as if being "interviewed" and hand-held cameras adding an informal and realistic tone. The film was produced for Norwegian television, but a shortened version was later prepared for international theatrical release. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Geir Westby, Gro Fraas, (more)
While Peter Watkins' films of the 1960s reflected the political turmoil and tumult of that decade, 1971's Punishment Park offered a disturbing look at the backlash against leftist activism which emerged in the wake of such events as the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the shootings at Kent State University. Set at some unspecified point in the near future, Punishment Park was inspired by a provision of the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act, which gives the President of the United States the right to suspend the traditional judicial system in favor of tribunals to deal with people believed to be "a risk to internal security" in the event of what the Chief Executive deems a national emergency. As the McCarran Act also enabled political prisoners to be held in concentration camps rather than conventional penal facilities, Punishment Park follows a group of left-wing dissidents (Black Power activists, antiwar protesters, and a politically oriented folksinger, among others) as they're given a perfunctory hearing by a panel of military officers and ordinary citizens. They are then offered a choice: they can either serve long stays in prison (seven years is the shortest sentence mentioned), or spend 72 hours in Punishment Park, a section of the Southern California desert. The prisoners are to travel 53 miles on foot in three days, with only minimal provisions of water or food under 110-degree heat, while they are followed by National Guard troops who are permitted to shoot if provoked. If they can complete the hike in the allotted time, they'll be allowed to go free, though it soon becomes obvious that despite the fact the odds have been stacked against them, the prisoners are being dealt an unfair hand along the trail. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Paul Alelyanes, Carmen Argenziano, (more)
- 1969
War becomes a sort of global game show in this darkly witty mock-documentary satire from filmmaker Peter Watkins. In the waning days of the 20th Century, the world's major military powers have come to the conclusion it's no longer economically feasible to maintain standing armies and continue the arms race. Instead, the superpowers agree to settle their differences through the Peace Games, a series of regularly scheduled military exercises in which soldiers from different countries are organized into teams who fight it out on global satellite television, with a pasta company sponsoring the show. High ranking officers from the United States, the Soviet Union, China, France, Spain and Mexico gather at a remote location in Sweden and watch as their fighting men (and women) square off against one another, while a handful of computer technicians labor behind the scenes to keep the war games on track. However, the folks at home aren't told the real reason behind the regularly scheduled violence, a handful of pacifist students hatch a scheme to sabotage the games, and the exercises take an unexpected turn when two soldiers decide they don't feel like fighting anymore. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- 1967
After directing several extraordinary documentaries for the BBC, including the award-winning The War Game and Culloden, Peter Watkins made his first dramatic feature with this flawed but striking film about Steven Shorter (Paul Jones), a pop singer in a future society where entertainment is controlled by a totalitarian government. Shorter's music and image are used to channel the impulses of rebellious youth; in one concert sequence, the crowd watches him sing a plaintive plea for love and understanding while locked in a cage surrounded by police officers armed with clubs. While Shorter is remarkably popular, he's also living a life created for him by the government, which Steven knows is a sham. When Shorter's handlers decide to revamp his image into that of an obedient, religious boy, he rebels, to his peril. Model Jean Shrimpton made her film debut here as an artist commissioned to paint a portrait of Shorter. Privilege later became something of a cult film; one of the film's admirers was rock poet Patti Smith, who recorded one of "Steven Shorter"'s songs, "Set Me Free," on her 1978 album Easter. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Paul Jones, Jean Shrimpton, (more)
- 1965
Peter Watkins' The War Game, which was filmed in handheld documentary fashion, speculates on the aftereffects of a nuclear war. Some of the images are almost impossible to look at; they truly illustrate the theory that, in the wake of such a holocaust, the living will envy the dead. The most heartwrenching scene is the simplest. Asked what he wants to be when he grows up, a sullen young boy, physically unhurt but with obviously deep emotional scars, mutters "I don't want to be nothin'." Filmed for BBC television, The War Game was rejected by that august concern as being too graphic. The 47-minute film was released to theaters, making it eligible for the Best Documentary Academy Award, which it won in 1966. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Fledgling filmmaker (and future film historian) Kevin Brownlow worked in collaboration with Andrew Mollo for nearly ten years to create It Happened Here. Shot on 16-millimeter stock in stark quasi-documentary fashion, the film is predicated on the postulation that Germany had invaded--and defeated--England in World War II. Brownlow and Mollo's vision of this nightmarish world is perfect in every detail, right down to the German road signs in rural Britain. The plotline is carried by Pauline Murray, playing a nurse who uncovers Nazi atrocities perpetrated on Polish and Russian hospital patients. Begun in 1957 when Brownlow was an 18-year-old editing apprentice, It Happened Here was finally completed in 1964, and released theatrically two years later. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Pauline Murray, Sebastian Shaw, (more)
- 1964
Peter Watkins directed this mock-documentary examination of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the final act in the attempted Jacobite Rebellion and among the first major steps in Great Britain's near-genocide of the original Highland clans of Scotland. Filmed as if a modern-day television news crew was on hand to cover the battle, and using a team of nonprofessional actors, Culloden includes on-the-spot interviews with the participants, reveals the meager circumstances of the Scot soldiers and the questionable competence of Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie), and reenacts the fearsome brutality of the British troops, who, after defeating the Scots, massacred what was left of their armies. A startling film, which, along with painting a vivid portrait of the horrors of war, explores the economic and class issues behind the conflict, Culloden also draws subtle parallels between the Jacobite Rebellion and Europe's role in the then-ongoing Vietnam conflict. Culloden was Watkins' first project for the BBC; his next would be the highly controversial The War Game. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- 1959
Writer-director Peter Watkins's little-seen fictional short, the 8mm Diary of an Unknown Soldier, follows a World War I trench soldier who is ordered to the front for the first time. In the opening line of his narration, the doughboy informs the audience that this will be "the last day of [his] life." Watkins then uses a combination of expressionist and documentary techniques to relay the experience of battle from the soldier's perspective. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
