PETER COME HOME
by Alex Cox
I saw Peter Watkins' film CULLODEN when it was first broadcast: on 15 Dec 1964. I watched it with my parents. It was on the new, third TV channel – BBC2 – and it played not long after we'd had our tea.
My folks didn't let on to being impressed by it, but it disturbed me. Thanks to the documentary style, the parallels between what the Americans were doing in Vietnam and what the English had done to the Scots, were very clear. And, after a diet of World War Two newsreels recycled into documentaries, and old war features like REACH FOR THE SKY (Douglas Bader loses both legs yet still pilots a Spitfire!), it was the first thing I'd ever seen on television that could be called anti-war.
The Scotswoman telling the camera how the English troops had killed her child stuck in my head and haunted me. I resolved to be a pacifist. It was my tenth birthday.
CULLODEN was such a brilliant film, such a great and tragic work of art, that it should have got its director fired from the BBC immediately. Somehow, this did not occur. Maybe the BBC didn't know what directors were – Watkins was credited as writer and producer only. More likely he was fortunate, and the Head of Documentaries, Huw Weldon, stuck up for him. We're lucky Weldon did, because in the space of one year the 28-year-old "writer/producer" shot a pair of films which changed the nature of what a documentary film could be, and which profoundly affected filmed drama. The other film, of course, was THE WAR GAME.
What makes these two films particularly great is the director's perfect use of minimal resources. CULLODEN and THE WAR GAME were only possible, are only conceivable, in black and white – where blood and earth and mud are all the same colour, and the viewer isn't always sure what they've just seen. But Watkins' inventive resourcefulness went way beyond film stock. These were the days before CGI and dinosaur-documentary budgets; there was no possibility of a wide shot or a panorama in either film. So Watkins did the reverse of what one expected: he went in, and concentrated on the faces of the people in his story – the clansman, the English soldier, the civil defense official, the relocatee.
Doing this, and filling in the background with a few more extras in costumes, got around the budget issue. But it also did something democratic, even revolutionary: it made the clansmen and the English prison conscripts protagonists. A landless man had as large a closeup as "Bonnie" Prince Charlie, and was on screen for as long, or longer. This was, of course, in contrast to the style of a traditional war film, in which heroic individuals (William Holden, Alec Guinness, Peter O'Toole) received the lion's share of closeups. This, I'm sure, was what Watkins intended. He wanted to draw parallels between Culloden and Vietnam, of course, and to warn of the real consequences of nuclear war. But, going far beyond that, Watkins also wanted to oppose the Western-heroic-drama structure, with its sole, strong protagonist, and its easy moral. In neither film did he try to score points against an obvous antagonist, or to rely on the tedious weight of a conventional villain. As the narrator points out in CULLODEN, there are thousands of Scottish soldiers in the English ranks, and Prince Charlie is an idiot. As order breaks down in THE WAR GAME, the police inevitably end up hoarding the last rations of food: how could they keep order, otherwise?
The nearest thing to a villain in either film is the actor playing an Anglican Bishop in THE WAR GAME, who says (quoting the Bishop's words) "I still believe in the war of the just." Watkins cuts straight from this closeup to blurred images of a vehicle, ablaze. "In this car, a family is burning alive," the narrator says. The juxtaposition isn't about nuclear war, any more. It could be a cut straight out of CULLODEN – or from a bold anti-war documentary about Iraq.
But there won't be any bold anti-war documentary coming from the BBC, for the same reason as THE WAR GAME was banned, and remained unscreenable, for many years. In the last decade, a debate has arisen as to whether this great,passionate, genial film was banned as an act of self-censorship, or on direct orders from Whitehall. Patrick Murphy, Watkins' biographer, writes that the BBC organised "secret screenings… for senior government representatives" in September 1965, prior to the official ban. Though the film was banned under the conditions of the BBC's license to broadcast, Murphy reports that formerly classified documents related to the genesis of the ban have been destroyed, so we may never know whether the BBC was leaned on, or whether they leaned on themselves.
But these debates don't really matter: sometimes the tail wags while the dog's asleep. The miracle was that CULLODEN, with its graphic, anti-war message ("This is grapeshot. This is what it does.") had slipped through the net. And with it, Watkins' original and radical style – which was inevitably emulated, as style only, by other filmmakers. And the second miracle, if evidence of Huw Weldon's secular sainthood is still required, is that Peter Watkins got to make another film, in the same style.
Inevitably, THE WAR GAME is technically more proficient and more interesting than CULLODEN. In less than a year, the young filmmaker had got better at his craft, and wanted to try new things. In addition to the extraordinary editing, and the brilliantly-choreographed action (both films' action coordinator was Derek Ware), Watkins tries a new technique: the long, hand-held take, in which he follows a motorcycle dispatch rider from his pillion, into a building, up a flight of stairs, or a doctor, in his car, then out of it, without a cut.
In a medium endangered by repetitive editing and storytelling strategies, Watkins was pushing down barriers faster, and more effectively, than any other filmmaker. But, if the jig with the BBC was up, where was he to go from there?
Conventionally, a filmmaker is supposed to make a work-for-hire feature at this point – something in London, ideally with a rock-n-roll theme – and then go off to Hollywood. Insanely enough, this is more or less what Watkins did. But, equally predictably, it didn't turn out.
PRIVILEGE was a rock-n-roll messiah story, originally written by Johnny Speight, which Watkins adapted into his preferred quasi-documentary style. PUNISHMENT PARK was a more personal project, which Watkins developed for himself and shot in the United States in 1970. Like CULLODEN and THE WAR GAME, it posited society breakdown followed by reprisals and police actions, with the war-torn USA in the grip of mass arrests and show trials. Again, Watkins filmed his stressed-out characters addressing the camera directly.
In this way, as in the hand-held, cinema-verite style of his action sequences, the director Watkins most resembles is Stanley Kubrick – whose war-related films FEAR & DESIRE and FULL METAL JACKET also lack a single protagonist, and feature characters speaking directly to the camera. Kubrick and Watkins were alike in other ways, perhaps. Both famously resisted the trappings of Hollywood and film festivals; both have a reputation for reclusivity, and intelligence. But Kubrick's intelligence led him to daily conversations with studio heads and to a ten-picture deal with Warner Bros. Watkins, more radical, more humanistic, far less politic, now lives in Lithuania, and publishes manifestos via the Internet.
Watkins has made fourteen films in all, ranging from a 17 minute amateur short to an anti-nuclear documentary, THE JOURNEY (RESAN), which runs for fourteen and a half hours. Of these, only two are "mainstream" features, in the sense of English-language dramas intended to be shown in the cinema; his recent work has been diverse in the extreme, and has received little distribution.
Watkins has a very erudite and interesting website, where he talks eloquently and intelligently about media matters, and about alternative ways of making, and watching, television and films. He devotes several pages to the unfortunate history of his film THE COMMUNE for the ARTE channel, in France. Contracted to make a film two hours long, Watkins delivered a work five and a half hours in length. He was clearly offended when the network screened his film, uncut, in the middle of the night. But it's not the first time we've heard this story, from any number of filmmakers. Because it's Peter Watkins, it seems strangely insubstantial.
Right now the British film industry is in a right mess. Sold to the Americans for a fraction of its actual value, violated, and tied to the railroad tracks.
I'm sure Watkins has been having a great time, making films about Munch and Strindberg with enthusiastic amateurs, and tweaking his website. But, damn it, there's a war on! We need Watkins here. The peace movement needs him, because it's one of the largest national movements in the world, and one of the most ignored. And the nation needs him. Even reactionaries can agree with this, because Britain needs great, fearless filmmakers, who can see both sides of the question, no matter whom it incenses, who can stand up to the divisive and destructive policies of the Film Council and the broadcasters, who can make radical, revolutionary films for little money. There are still great film technicians here, dying to work on great films – and I suspect that never since making THE WAR GAME has Watkins received the same combination of autonomy and economy that he received during that one momentous year.
Maybe the BBC in 1964 was a bureaucratic nightmare, but it also hired bright young men (and women? not sure about that), set them up as full-time, salaried directors (imagine getting such a gig today!), and gave them some of the best technical staff in the world to work with: cameramen like Dick Bush and Peter Bartlett, editors like Michael Bradsell, stunt coordinators like Derek Ware.
Their successors sit behind computers, now, not just in Soho, but in Bradford, in Liverpool, even in Nottingham (where the worst murderers in CULLODEN all come from!), dutifully assembling promos, and corporates, and stupid reality TV. They hate the stupid, formulaic trash that they are lucky to be paid to deliver. And they would die to work on films like Watkins, Ware, Bradsell and company made.
Peter, come home!
(This article first appeared in the GUARDIAN…)
(To read Peter Watkins on the Media Crisis, click here…)