cinema

Watkins Images (Vs. power)
by Stefano Casi

It is one of the leading exponents of "political cinema": He also won an Oscar, but it is no accident that is little known in Italy. Here is your life and his major works. And the text of a lecture.

Peter Watkins

If we talk about political cinema, Peter Watkins is perhaps the most representative polished and consistent, that is, one who has not only addressed issues head-on 'urgent' on the political (war, nuclear power, the role of media in the development of consensus), but it did so by forcing the same codes of filmmaking, before inventing genres which later became successful as the docu-drama and the mockumentary, then criticizing both the movies with his theoretical reflections the 'entire media industry. And 'perhaps odd that an intellectual like this, among other things, an Oscar winner, is kept well away from Italy? Apart from the sporadic distribution of film in just two films, a series monograph on TV in the summer of 1980 (in prime time on Rai 1: really old times!), And a book published two years ago on his class mass-political analysis ( The disappearance of German universal clock A. Duarte), Watkins remains an unknown in our country. But perhaps never before in recent years in which the relationship between media and power in Italy has shown its most ferocious, Watkins's reflections are important, as it would be useful to circulate his last film, the real mosaic not only libertarian or complaints, but powerful enemy and front of each power system.
Born in England in 1935, Peter Watkins has already made its debut in 1964, Culloden, a giant leap: a television drama commissioned by the BBC, which had to recall the last pitched battle fought on British soil in 1746. Watkins Culloden tears by the memory of the musty pages of history, "inventing" the docu-drama: that part of the reconstruction of the historical event in a setting like a television news report. Always with the camera on his shoulder, moving frantically on the battlefield, including interviews 'in drive' to officers, soldiers and poor peasants of 700 (all non-professional actors, constant feature in all his films), and ran to escape the gunfire or cannon, Watkins enters the event viewer as if the atrocities of the battle was going on at that time and not two centuries earlier. Suddenly, Culloden creates a short circuit with amazing images of the war in Vietnam who were in those months in the homes of English through television, suddenly, the deaths of 700 Scots were the frightened face of Vietnamese farmers, suddenly, the undo decades of film reconstructions of battles to present something new: the war in the making at that very moment, in the eyes of a Telereporter who dodges bullets and interview soldiers terrified of a sudden, the absurdity of that war becomes that of all wars, and the "responsibility" falls directly on the viewer who is watching.
The following year, Watkins raises its game, both on content and technique. No longer docu-drama, The War Game, also commissioned by the BBC, opens the way for the mockumentary, a fake documentary. The director envisions a nuclear bomb on England from the Soviets, and always describes his style telegiornalistico with shoulder camera and interviews. The film is shocking and the government blocks them from airing the first episode of a long history of calls and complaints from Watkins suffered everywhere: too dangerous to make the audience reflect on the arms race, too embarrassing to hear statements true and accurate data reported incongruously under the explosions, too extreme descriptions of the collapse of society, with radiation, the destruction of all infrastructure and the police firing on the people to contain the unrest. Despite winning the Academy Award in the category (with even more political move involuntarily) of 'documentaries' and despite the wide distribution (it became a cult in the campus revolt of Americans in that period and ushered in the cult of' hand-held camera), The War Game was banned from British television for over twenty years, and in our country came in 1984 with the Ark, with "War Time.
The straw that broke the camel's back of the relations between Watkins and England, and that the director had to leave forever his country, was the first film conceived directly for the cinema: Privilege (1966), the only other work of Watkins distributed in Italy. Here the theme moves on interaction between power and the increasingly rampant youth pop culture, that England had just re-launched with the Beatles and the rise of subcultures from trendy mods to rockers. The protagonist of the film is a singer 'rebel', cajoled and finally swallowed by the big powers, not only politically, but also the religious and economic. So the pop star (played by a real singer, Paul Jones) is found to be a mere puppet in the hands of those who want to convey to the masses of young people through a sham rebellion towards consensus and approval.

La Commune

The grotesque face of power

In 1969, Watkins made in Sweden Gladiators, one of the most bitter allegories film about the war. In this sci-fi utopia, the world is pacified and conveys the aggression war in Olympics: General and heads of state gather in a control room, arranging the troops (in true real battlefields) to mo 'driving distance of Risk and . They, the powerful, warm and get compliments on the 'move' others, 'gladiators' in the trenches, to die. The war, in close relationship with the actuality of Vietnam, is a target on which Watkins obsessive landing right back in the U.S., where in 1970 he realizes the awesome Punishment park. In the film, the American peace activists are confined in a camp in the desert and subjected to a mock trial at the end of which they are invited to a game: run into the desert to freedom, but being chased by the soldiers who will kill them. Hunting deadly to the Pacific, in short, that is the face of the grotesque state of emergency instituted by Nixon to counter the domestic context. Imagine the reactions of the establishment in front of this film in which the mechanisms of cinema-verite documentary of the fake and plunge into an allegory that delivers a harsh indictment of the repression of freedom.
He returned to Sweden, signing Watkins Edvard Munch (1973), a biographical film about the painter. Apparently far from his usual themes, allows the director to not only weave an extensive correspondence with the contemporary, but also to experiment with new creative: lots of dialogue, in fact, are improvised by the actors (also non-professional). The experiment will be repeated later with a biography of Strindberg, even more radical in creative ways, called The Freethinker (1994) and the now almost usual outcome of films banned on television.
After a film directed analysis of contemporary society (The Seventies People of 1974 on suicide among young Danish), the new target is nuclear power, with a country at sunset (1976), one of the more extreme and ruthless of Watkins. The film imagines that the workers of the shipyard strike in Copenhagen fall blocking the construction of a submarine designed to carry nuclear missiles. The strike, police repression, the ambiguities of power, the terrorist groups who kidnap political leaders: a truly impressive crescendo of stimuli and offending, well summed up by what one critic wrote: "When you learn to stop scaring Watkins the public? ". The film picked up an almost unanimous chorus of attacks from the conservative press as from the left accusing the director of siding with the terrorists rather than the workers. Needless to mention the fact that a project is activated immediately after the RAI in 1977 for a film about Marinetti was immediately aborted.

The gladiators

For an overview "Participated"

The next project, The Journey (1986), is sensational, not only for the duration of the film (14 hours). This is the first film "global", filmed in many parts of the world including Europe, America and Australia, and the denunciation of war and nuclear weapons, in particular the role of media in the falsification and manipulation of information: film strictly independent, since that every request for production was denied at every latitude, and substantially in the anarchist conception of the construction in which dozens of people actively working together in a common mode of collective creation. The purpose of the film is to show how people in each country is held totally unaware of the dangers that threaten peace. E 'therefore become the system of communication, the real target of attack by Watkins: lens that will focus more and more in subsequent years and will have a new important success in his most recent film, shot in 1999. It's La Commune (Paris 1871), or almost 6 hours (but shot in two weeks where there were old studies Méliès) to tell a key event in European history, Watkins seen as essential to starting the reading of the Western world contemporary. Hence the need to involve non-professional actors in the preparation of the film, through studies and research that each of them had been called to do on his own, also improvised during filming. From this experience comes Rebond the association since 2000, given the substantial yet another boycott of this film on traditional channels of distribution, projections and works to promote new and experimental modes of vision "shared" the film itself.

La Commune

The greater commitment of Watkins in recent decades is mainly theoretical and pedagogical. Focal point of his reflection is critical to the media identified as manipulation of information in favor of a political system aimed at the consolidation of economic power and its most important means of supporting the war. In particular, much of its effort is aimed at revealing the mechanisms of what he called the "single size" real approval code of the media system, which led to the crisis of contemporary communication. A key point of this concept is the development and establishment of a single dominant mode of 'story', a form-repetitive language, a real format, born and raised in Hollywood with the double-instrument global American film and television. The single size crushed the opportunity for reflection by the viewer through the use of predetermined plot lines now and 'intentions' in the reception, which allows the producer of communication to predetermine the type of reaction from the viewer. Alternatively, if no real antidote to the spread of these forms of control consent, the search for modalities (film and television) capable of disrupting the mechanisms of a single size, on the other hand, has nothing to do with political goodwill of the producer of audiovisual aids. Not surprisingly, the English director considers single size attributable to his own films until 1976, ie including its own way politically perhaps more shocking, a village at sunset. The experiment of breaking the single size, in an attempt to create different and creative dynamics of political involvement "real" of all, even trying to reset the internal mechanisms of power to the team making the film, is accomplished only by Watkins from The Journey that is, since he conceived the film is created by a basic input from many people, with an equally widespread awareness and sharing. Up to the Commune, for which even includes an innovative method for receiving (and thus awareness) by the viewer.
The complexity of this work, the difficulty of distribution and the same difficulty trying to focus a viewer in the vision of his latest works from the time the river and constantly surprising narrative, shows just how our addiction to single size of viewers complained to Watkins has come almost to the point of no return. The challenge is high and although the search for Watkins will always be marginal (as seems to be the place where he went to live for years, Lithuania) and the mainstream media, remains in all of us the strength to know that a Another type of political cinema and media policy is possible.