Film International nr 3

25 May 2003

The Return of Peter Watkins

As you probably have noticed Film International has something of a Peter Watkins year in 2003. We have featured reviews and essays on his work, and this continues in the issue you have before you with an essay on the banning of The War Game (1965) and a review of his latest film, La Commune (2000). As a director working not only outside the dominating media corporations but also distinctly against what he calls the monoform, the boiling down of serious topics to entertainment formulas, he seems to stand alone, save for a few documentarists. Looking at his work is almost like getting your eyes cleansed; the run-of-the-mill output at the cinema and on television never looks the same afterwards.
Just before completing the work on this issue I saw his Punishment Park (1971) on a French DVD (www.doriane-films.com). I had a vague memory of watching it as a kid once on Swedish or Danish television some thirty years ago, and it made a lasting impression. Hesitating a moment before starting the film, not sure it would stand up to my perhaps glorified memory if it or to the time that had passed since the making of the film, I sat down to experience a film even more powerful than I remembered. Sure, some of the lines in the film were a bit dated due to changes in subcultural language, but compared to such celebrated, contemporary work as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) or Dennis Hoppers Easy Rider (1969) Watkins’ film has passed the test of time far better.
Using the mock-documentary format Watkins films predates pseudo-verité films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and makes superior use of the technique to portray a not-too-distant-future of the American nation under Nixon’s paranoid government. The narrative is effectively fragmented into a series of scenes cutting up the time-line and the perspective of various groups (draft-dodging hippies, militant revolutionaries, peace movement activists, the Board of Justice, the police) as we witness a kangaroo court trial sentencing the accused dissidents to Punishment Park. There they are supposed to be given a chance to cross 53 miles of hot desert in three days to an American flag in order to regain their freedom. Given a head start of two hours they are then chased by the police.
Being canceled after only four days of cinema screening in a small cinema in New York this work has rarely been seen since. Instead the scenario of individuals standing up to a totalitarian state has been imitated in a diluted entertainment form by such Hollywood blockbusters as Rollerball (1975), Logan’s Run (1976) and The Running Man (1984) – all excellent examples of the mindless, reactionary monoform Watkins has continually criticized. Even more depressing are the reviews of his film, echoing the Board of Justice within the narrative in their claim that political opposition equals a hysteric, paranoid state of mind that might, it is implied, even be a sign of mental illness. Ironically, this is exactly the same judgment that the Soviet trials made on their dissidents before sending them off to the psychiatric clinics used as a façade for advanced psychological and physical torture. Fiction is no match for reality.
However, there now seems to be a reassessment of Peter Watkins work. Hopefully other works such as Privilege (1967), The Gladiators (1969), Evening Land (1977), The Journey (1988) will also be released to challenge these ridiculous allegations as well as the totalitarian monoform of the mass medias.

Michael Tapper
Editor-in-chief

In this issue
Film International # 3 (2003:3)

3 Editorial

4 The Landscape of Memories in the Films of the Kaurismäki Bros.
Tytti Soila explores the cultural heritage so prominently featured in the films by these enigmatic directors and festival favorites, Aki and Mika.

16 Futurist Fears of the Machine
A new art form. Without a past. Modern. Employing the dynamics of space, speed and light. Why, then, did not the Italian Futurists made more use of cinema? Daniel Lindvall has some answers.

25 The War Game – The Controversy
Since BBC’s banning of Peter Watkins’ controversial film in 1965 there has been rumours and denials as to why it was supressed. Now Patrick Murphy has discovered documents revealing what actually happened.

29 Interview with Lloyd Kaufman
Responsible for such features as The Toxic Avenger and Tromeo & Juliet Lloyd Kaufman seem to be a self-conscious exploitation artist. But is there more to his films than that ol’ sex and violence? Well, Xavier Mendik thinks so.

32 William Gibson and the “Garage Kubrick”
In the 1980s William Gibson launched cyberpunk as “garage science fiction”. In his latest book he talks about “garage Kubrick” as a new kind of cinema. John Baxter tells us what this means.

Review section

Books

Eyes Wide Shut + Hitchcock and the Making of “Marnie”
Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism
The Cineaste Interviews 2: Filmmakers, the Art and Politics of the Cinema
De Niro: A Biography
Filmoplevelse – en indføring i audiovisuel teori og analyse + Film Style and Story – A Tribute to Torben Grodal
Genre and Contemporary Hollywood
Luchino Visconti
Selling Hollywood to the World:US and Euorpean Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920-1950
This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos

Films

Hero
An Actor’s Revenge
Bob le Flambeur
La Commune
Hearts and Minds
The Killers x 2
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Solaris x 2
Straw Dogs

Filmhäftet

Publicerad: 2003-06-08

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