Peter Watkins, the radical British film-maker who won an Oscar for his controversial drama-documentary The War Game, about a nuclear attack on Britain, has died aged 90. In a statement, his family said he had died in hospital on Thursday in Bourganeuf, close to the small town of Felletin in central France, where he had lived for 25 years. They added: “The world of cinema loses one of its most incisive, inventive, and unclassifiable voices. We would like to thank all those who supported him throughout this long and sometimes solitary struggle.”
Watkins was an uncompromising figure who clashed with the BBC after the latter failed to show The War Game on broadcast TV, and subsequently led a peripatetic film-making existence, looking overseas for backing. He was wary of the press. In a rare interview he spoke to the Guardian in 2000, saying he was “someone who has been working for 30 years to help shift the power balance between public and TV”. He added: “Had TV taken an alternative direction during the 1960s and 1970s and worked in a more open way, global society today would be vastly more humane and just.”
Born in 1935 in Norbiton, Surrey, Watkins studied at Rada (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) after doing national service, telling the Guardian: “I did not intend to point my rifle at a human being.” After making a series of short films, including Forgotten Faces, about the Hungarian uprising, Watkins joined the BBC in 1962 and was subsequently asked to make a film about the Battle of Culloden, “Butcher” Cumberland’s victory over Jacobite forces in 1746. Watkins’ resulting film, broadcast in 1964, was pioneering in its immediacy and sense of realism, using contemporary news techniques and non-professional actors.
Watkins then followed it up with The War Game, another pseudo-documentary but this time about a nuclear strike on Canterbury in Kent. Described by Alex Cox, the film director, as a “great, passionate” film that gave a voice to ordinary people, The War Game had its scheduled 1965 broadcast cancelled, according to the BBC’s response to a question in parliament, because it was “too horrifying” and denying that external pressure had been applied to remove it. However, the film went on to win the Oscar for best documentary in 1967, and received outspoken praise from US critics including Roger Ebert, who described some scenes as “certainly the most horrifying ever put on film”. The War Game was eventually shown on TV in 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.
As a result of clashing with the BBC hierarchy, Watkins was forced to look elsewhere. In 1967 he directed the feature film Privilege, another pseudo-documentary with a radical bent, about a pop star (played by the real-life musician Paul Jones) who is manipulated into becoming a cult leader to keep the population distracted from politics. In 1971 his US-set film Punishment Park was another provocation, imagining a Hunger Games-type situation in which radicals and liberals are hunted for sport by the national guard.
Watkins followed this with a biopic of the painter Edvard Munch, originally shown on Norwegian TV in 1974 but which was subsequently released in cinemas, and was described by the Guardian as “a four-hour film of extraordinary beauty”. Watkins would follow this with a series of films made in Scandinavia, culminating in The Freethinker, another lengthy portrait of a Scandinavian artist, the playwright August Strindberg. Alongside these, between 1983 and 1987 Watkins made the 873-minute documentary The Journey about ordinary people’s understanding of nuclear weapons; it is considered the longest non-experimental film ever made. Watkins’ final film was The Commune, a 345-minute recreation of the 1871 workers uprising in Paris using Brechtian-style techniques, first shown at the Musée d’Orsay in March 2000 and then screened on TV.
Watkins was married twice, and is survived by two sons, Patrick and Gérard.
Source link
