On October 30th, Peter Watkins died a day after his 90th birthday. It was the second time this year that I cried at the death of a filmmaker, but unlike David Lynch there was no will-he-won’t-he about continued projects in cinema—Watkins’ work ended 25 years before when his final masterpiece La Commune (Paris, 1871) premiered at Cannes. In an artform rife with self-importance, to a director as politically serious and stalwart as Watkins there was nowhere else to go after his experiment of recreation of that ill-fated radical moment devolving with the reality of the real world outside the confines of the warehouse it was shot in. Watkins’ cinematic project, like the utopian moment it examined, was rejected by the world before it ever had a chance to prove its success.
Watkins was a generation ahead of his time. His choice to recreate the Battle of Culloden with a contemporary TV news crew back in 1964 feels closer to the bleeding temporality of the digital age than it does with a still-burgeoning post-modern one, not to mention how his deconstruction of what he called Mass Audiovisual Media is more relevant than ever 60 years later. He followed Culloden up with The War Game, his most famous and therefore also his most controversial work. The BBC might’ve expected something merely cautionary for the British public, and Watkins went well beyond a simple PSA and delivered what looked like a documentary of the future when the world decided to blow itself up and what it would look like after. It got banned by the network, and then won an Oscar.
After making a brief stylistic detour with Privilege (which, notably, he didn’t write or produce), Watkins returned to his technically science fiction documentaries with The Gladiators and Punishment Park. The films suppose confined clashes of militants from opposing political positions, in The Gladiators with a UN-sanctioned “International Peace Games” where countries engage in small-scale combat for TV audiences, while Punishment Park envisions an America where President Nixon enables the McCarran Internal Security Act to round up various elements of the American Left and places them in front of kangaroo courts. The latter film now has a cult reputation, no doubt in its terrifying resonance with the increasing fascistic crackdowns by the American government—never has it been easier to see a near future United States where opposition to the state’s party line will cause you not only to be stripped of your rights and dignity, but subject to the cruelty of the people in power.
From America, Watkins would go on to Scandinavia for the rest of the 1970s, where he’d make his most seminal work. There’s Edvard Munch, the masterful revelation about the painter, explicating his suffering, frustration, and surprising political milieu all in Watkins’ signature pseudo-documentary style. Then there are the less-scene TV films like The Trap (set in an authoritarian 1999) and The Seventies People (about the high suicide-rates in Denmark), or the more-notable feature Evening Land, which pictures a state-of-emergency in Denmark during a NATO summit and leads to an authoritarian crackdown on the domestic left. These works, while expanding Watkins’ scope and mastery, are still directly in-line with what he’d been making since Culloden. It would take another decade to get his next film finished, not only be his longest work by far (clocking in at over 14-and-a-half hours), but one of the greatest in all of cinema.
The Journey is Watkins’ most literal documentary, in that it’s not just creations or recreations filmed as if TV crews were there, but is Watkins and his team filming people and getting their reactions to the information he’s sharing with them. The first few hours is predominately taken up with Watkins showing families all over the world images of the human destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while also showing the network of activists the Peace Movement was building to combat the Global Arms Race and how Mass Audiovisual Media was attempting to suppress information and keep people anesthetized. It’s a film whose length justifies itself not merely because of the information it’s trying to pack in, but how it’s presented—the form of The Journey is anathema to how television has been built to work. Despite its sections cut up into digestible TV-hours, it’s never meant as distraction but a starting place: every section ends with a question mark, prompting the audience to keep inquiring beyond the confines of the film.
Watkins followed up The Journey with The Media Project, a much shorter and more direct version of that previously prolix inquiry and its methods, although in this case focusing specifically on TV coverage of the Gulf War. Watkins then returned to his historical roots with his four-and-a-half hour film on August Strindberg. These works remain two of his most obscure, sandwiched within the Big Masterpieces of The Journey and La Commune, and perhaps not groundbreaking enough in their own rights to elicit much interest outside of the diehard followers. It’s possible, though, with a broad renewal in interest towards Watkins’ work—in the last five years especially—that these, too, could be elevated amongst the essentials.
There’s something strange, though, in eulogizing a filmmaker like Watkins, given that doing so implicitly comes with a recommendation to watch work in the very medium he abandoned. I think there’s great value in doing so, and The Journey in particular I’d say without exaggeration has changed my life. But what’s most striking about Watkins’ cinema is it reveals the limitations of the medium as a whole in its ability to properly be a political tool. The Journey is so effective because it doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, but instead is built as a jumping-off point. And yet, its political project failed. I could critique some specificities of it as misguided, like how it falls into the same trappings that doomed the Peace Movement into an ouroboros of protest by shifting its critique of nuclear weapons towards nuclear power, but that’s not the center of the problem.
Watkins sought to make a rhizome of education with The Journey by informing people in disparate pockets of the world and putting them in contact with each other. After I saw the film in Chicago at the start of the year, I emailed Watkins’ son out of curiosity if there had been any follow-ups with the subjects of the film, which he responded by saying that he didn’t think his father had heard from any of them in a very long time. It was a tough thing to hear about a film that gives me such genuine hope for humanity, that those connections people form and the projects that they build to try to push against the tides can wind up being so temporary, so fickle despite everyone’s best efforts.
Perhaps I cried when Watkins died because he did everything he could to help people save the world that’s senselessly destroying itself every day, and it didn’t work. It’s hard to reckon with. Still, perhaps foolishly—naively—I believe that if more people engage with Watkins' work, it could somehow make the world a better place, even if the films themselves reveal how that probably won’t be the case.