A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

and protests; at the BBC it catalyzed an opportunity to follow through on a project he had suggested before

Culloden,

a dramatization of the potential horrors of nuclear war. In the years since its controversial release (the BBC initially banned the film from television, and maintained the TV ban for more than twenty years),

The War Game

(1965) has become a widely influential "documentary," and it remains a film of considerable power and insight. The irony is that the film's very effectiveness as a form of horrifying entertainment has obscured its brilliance as a critique of conventional filmmaking and of mass media in general. While the subject of

The War Game

is nuclear warthe film dramatizes events leading up to a nuclear holocaust, the moment when the holocaust begins, and its seemingly unending aftermaththe focus of its critique is the emptiness of the "involvement" promoted by commercial media fiction and of the "detachment" of documentary film and TV news. The passages in

The War Game

that look and feel most like candid documentarythe sequences of people experiencing a nuclear detonation and its gruesome resultsare acted fictions; and the passages that seem most ludicrousa churchman explaining that one can learn to love the Bomb, "provided that it is clean and of a good family"; ordinary citizens revealing their utter ignorance about strontium 90are either candid or based on real statements.

The War Game

emphasizes the fact that both entertainment films and documentaries are fabrications, the function of which is to maintain the system through which more products of both kinds can reach consumers.

In the years immediately following

The War Game,

Watkins completed a series of feature films that, in one way or another, elaborated on the critique of mass media he had developed in

Culloden

and

The War Game: Privilege

(1967),

The Gladiators

(1969), and most notably perhaps,

Punishment Park

(1970), the one Watkins film produced entirely in North America. Like earlier Watkins films,

Punishment Park

takes place in a potential near future: the war in Southeast Asia has expanded and China has become involved, fueling an even more fervent resistance at home and causing President Nixon to use the authority given him by the 1950 Internal Security Act to establish a set of Punishment Parks, where war resisters are punished and law enforcement personnel trained, simultaneously. The film reveals what happens to one group of resisters who have been found guilty of treason, while the next group is being tried and found guilty by a citizens' tribunal. Watkins used nonprofessional actors, most cast according to type: people in sympathy with the war resistance "played" the resisters; people committed to "law and order" "played" law enforcement personnel. Their dialogue was improvised. The finished film is a relentless, candid psychodramatization of the attitudes and language of a large group of Americans in 1971.

Watkins's next project,

Edvard Munch

(1974), critiqued conventional

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Boy's eyes burned by atomic flash in Watkins's

The War Game

 (1965).

film and television biographies.

Edvard Munch

is, simultaneously, an explicit, carefully researched biography of the Norwegian expressionist

and

an implicit autobiography. Like

Culloden, Edvard Munch

recreates a historical period on the basis of careful research, but "modernizes" the period by interviewing citizens of nineteenth-century Norway and Germany as if they are our contemporaries. Again, the result is a negation of the conventional cinematic boundaries between past and present and between different nations.

Edvard Munch

was followed by two films and a video

The 70s People

(filmed in Denmark in 1975),

The Trap

(videotaped in Sweden in 1975), and

Evening Land

(filmed in Denmark in 1977)none of which received widespread attention or distribution. Several other projects collapsed, including film biographies of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, Italian futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg, and a proposed remake of

The War Game

.

By the early eighties, Watkins had become convinced that film and television production organizations were essentially so inflexiblein terms of their means of production and in terms of the media language they usethat there was no longer any point in trying to change them

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from the inside. He began to develop plans for a new kind of project, which was to become his magnum opus: the 14 1/2-hour

The Journey