PETER WATKINS. Born in Norbiton, Surry, England, 29 October 1935. Attended Christ College, Grecknockshire; studied acting at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. Served with East Surrey Regiment. Began career as assistant producer of television short subjects and commercials, 1950s; assistant editor and director of documentaries, BBC, 1961; director, The War Game, banned by the BBC, 1966; director, feature film, Privilege, 1967; moved to Sweden, 1968; worked in United States, 1969-71; resides in Sweden.

TELEVISION

1964 Culloden

FILMS

The Web, 1956; The Field of Red, 1958; Diary of an Unknown Soldier, 1959; The Forgotten Faces, 1961; Dust Fever, 1962; The War Game, 1966; Privilege, 1967; The Gladiators, 1969; Punishment Park, 1971; Edvard Munch, 1974; The Seventies People, 1975; The Trap, 1975; Evening Land, 1977; The Journey, 1987.

PUBLICATIONS

Blue, James, and Michael Gill. "Peter Watkins Discusses His Suppressed Nuclear Film The War Game." Film Comment (New York), Fall 1965.

The War Game: An Adaptation of the BBC Documentary. New York: Avon, 1967.

"Left, Right, Wrong." Films and Filming (London), March 1970.

"Peter Watkins Talks about the Suppression of His Work within Britain." Films and Filming (London), February 1971.

"Punishment Park and Dissent in the West." Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), 1976.

"Edvard Munch. A Director's Statement." Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Winter 1977.

"Interview with S. MacDonald." Journal of the University Film Association (Carbondale, Illinois), Summer 1982.

George Bernard Shaw of fin-de-siecle novelist Samuel Butler, "England does not deserve great men". Much the same might be said at the end of another century of one of the most singular, committed and powerful directors of the last 40 years. Peter Watkins' prizewinning experimental documentaries Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1960), reconstructing respectively World War I and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, earned screenings and a job at the BBC which he used to make the remarkable Culloden, a Brechtian deconstruction of documentary technique in an account of the bloody defeat of the 1742 Jacobin rebellion in Scotland. Culloden already exhibits hallmark techniques: hand-held camera, direct-to-camera address from historical and fictional characters, and interviews with them, though the near surrealism of placing a modern on-camera reporter on the battlefield is a humourous touch rarely paralleled in his later work. Using, as he has throughout his oeuvre, the heightened naturalism of amateur actors, the programme contrasts the effete figure of Bonnie Prince Charlie, actually a European adventurer, with the impoverished and still feudally bound Gaelic speaking peasantry of the Highlands, a cruel indictment of both Scottish patriotism and the brutal British reprisals on the Highlanders. His next work, The War Game, "preconstructs" the effects of a nuclear attack on southern England. Perhaps it was not just Watkins' deadpan voice-over, nor the matter-of-fact delivery of official prognostications of casualties and security measures, but his comparison of nuclear firestorms with the ever-sensitive British bombing of Dresden in 1945 (subject of two later banned programmes in the United Kingdom) that saw the film banned. Reduced to fund-raising shows for nuclear disarmament groups, the programme has rarely been discussed in terms other than those of its subject and its political fate. But its pathbreaking and still-powerful juxtaposition of interview, reconstruction, graphics, titles and the collision of dry data with images of horror still shock, the grainy black-and-white imagery and use of telephoto, sudden zooms and wavering focus creating an atmosphere of immediacy unique in British television. Fifty minutes that shook the world, it was banned for 25 years by the BBC amid storms of controversy which were reopened when it finally made British TV screens in a Channel 4 season of banned titles.

The War Game look the 1966 best documentary Oscar, opening the door to Hollywood. Universal bankrolled the feature film Privilege about a pop messiah in a near-future police state, but pulled the plug on an ambitious reconstruction of the Battle of The Little Big Horn and the subjugation of the Native American Indians. From the late 1960s, Watkins' career is marked by projects cut, abandoned or suppressed: Watkins himself listed 14 in a document seeking support for his 1980s film The Journey. The Gladiators, made for Swedish TV, about popular acquiescence in militarism, used the device of a fictional television programme, "The Peace Game", in which generals play games of strategy, and the savage 16mm allegory of Nixon's America Punishment Park, in which "deviants" are given their chance to survive in a nightmarish outlaw zone, both saw broadcast and theatrical release, though limited. These two titles extend Watkins repertoire of effects by their focus on individual characters caught up in evil times, though the use of montage cutting and extreme naturalism in performances combine to minimise identification, and increase the intellectual engagement of the viewer with the narrative. Closer in technique to Brecht's practice than his theory, Watkins' failed to benefit either from the vanguardism of contemporary film theory or the political clout of less challenging auteurs like Ken Loach and Denis Potter.

Other completed projects like 70s People (on suicide and the failures of social democracy) and Evening Land (a terrorist kidnap contrasted with the quelling of a strike in a military shipyard), both for Danish TV, were suppressed. Only the biopic of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch has had major distribution, though mainly as theatrical film, rather than the 3-part series it was originated as. Munch's passion derives not only from the subject and Watkins handling, but from the identification between director and derided artist. The series is distinguished again by direct-cinema techniques, but also by complex editing around motifs, especially faces and floras, and by multi-tracked sound design layering the characters' past, present and future into a rich montage. Like his earlier documentaries, Munch adds voice-over to the sound mix, sometimes even over blank screens, to connect the narrative with worldwide events and political analysis. Carrying the use of natural light pioneered in his BBC projects into colour, the film achieves a profoundly affecting image of a consumptive society unable to credit those who warn of its demise until it is too late. It is its political analysis and, stylistically, its use of sophisticated montage editing, that distinguishes Munch and its predecessors from the hand-held stylistics of some recent U.S. cop shows.

In 1982, an attempt to remake The War Game with Central TV fell through, and Watkins devoted the following three years to accruing donations and help to make The Journey, perhaps his greatest achievement. Running at over 14 hours, the film was a rarely screened account, shot in over a dozen nations, of nuclear war and its effects. It has yet to be broadcast. Watkins' peripatetic life, spent developing and trying to complete projects in cinema and TV, and his occasional embittered polemics in print, are all that is certain. Rumours circulate of an international shoestring production on ecological disaster, and about further failed projects with production houses. Watkins' intelligence, passion and skill have been consistently masked by controversy: he is the most neglected and perhaps the most significant major British director of his generation.

-Sean Cubit