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Peter Watkins (born 29 October 1935) is an English people filmmaker, documentarian, writer, and Film theory. He is known as a pioneer of the docudrama and the mockumentary genres, typically with heavy political content. His films present pacifist and radical ideas in a nontraditional style. He mainly concentrates his works and ideas around the mass media and our relation/participation to a movie or television documentary.
Nearly all of Watkins' films have used a combination of dramatic and documentary elements to dissect historical occurrences or possible near future events. The first of these, Culloden, portrayed the Jacobite uprising of 1745 in a documentary style, as if television reporters were interviewing the participants and accompanying them into battle; a similar device was used in his biographical film Edvard Munch. La Commune reenacts the Paris Commune days using a large cast of French non-actors. The War Game (1966) depicts the aftermath of a hypothetical nuclear attack on Great Britain. His other notable works include Edvard Munch, a biographical film of the Edvard Munch, and Resan, a 14-hour essay film about nuclear disarmament.
The British Film Institute writes "in an age when the media stranglehold on both our lives and the means by which we communicate is ever tightening, Watkins films remain a vital tool for considering new forms of image-making and a vibrant and engaging force in their own right."
The scope and formal innovation of Culloden drew immediate critical acclaim for the previously unknown director, and the BBC commissioned him for another ambitious production, the nuclear-war docudrama The War Game, for The Wednesday Play series. The production was subsequently released to cinemas and won the 1966 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, eventually being screened by the BBC on 31 July 1985 after a 20-year ban.
His reputation as a political provocateur was amplified by Punishment Park, a story of violent political conflict in the United States that coincided with the Kent State Massacre. Opposition to war is a common theme of his work, but the films' political messages are often ambiguous, usually allowing the main characters to present violently opposing viewpoints which in many cases are improvised by the cast: in Punishment Park, the soldiers and dissidents were played by nonprofessional actors whose political opinions matched those of their characters so well that the director said he feared actual violence would break out on set. He took a similar approach in his Paris Commune re-enactment La Commune, using newspaper advertisements to recruit conservative actors who would have a genuine antipathy to the Commune rebels. Watkins is also known for political statements about the film and television media, writing extensively about flaws in television news and the dominance of the Hollywood-derived narrative style that he refers to as "the monoform".
After the banning of The War Game and the poor reception of his first non-television feature, Privilege, Watkins left England and has made all of his subsequent films abroad: The Gladiators in Sweden, Punishment Park in the United States, Edvard Munch in Norway, Evening Land in Denmark, Resan (a 14-hour film cycle about the threat of nuclear war) in ten different countries, and La Commune in France. Freethinker: The Life and Work of Peter Watkins, is a forthcoming biography by Patrick Murphy, a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at York St John University, and John Cook. It is being compiled with Watkins' active help and participation.
Following Privilege, Watkins planned a Western film following a fictional American Indian tribe, to which Universal Studios showed interest and Marlon Brando agreed to star as an cavalry scout. However, Watkins conceived a new script in the style of Culloden, titled Proper in the Circumstances, which covered the Washita Massacre and battles in the Great Sioux War. The new script was rejected by Universal on the grounds that American audiences would not be interested in another film about George Custer.
In 2004, he wrote the book Media Crisis, which discusses his ideas of media hegemony which he calls, the monoform, and the lack of debate around the construction of new forms of audiovisual media.
| 1956 | The Web | |||||
| 1958 | The Field of Red | Considered lost. | ||||
| 1959 | The Diary of an Unknown Soldier | |||||
| 1961 | Forgotten Faces | |||||
| 1963 | The Controllers |
| 1964 | Culloden | |||||
| 1966 | The War Game | Originally produced for BBC in 1965 | ||||
| 1967 | Privilege | |||||
| 1969 | The Gladiators | |||||
| 1971 | Punishment Park | |||||
| 1974 | Edvard Munch | |||||
| 1975 | The Trap | |||||
| The Seventies People | ||||||
| 1977 | Evening Land | |||||
| 1987 | Resan | |||||
| 1991 | The Media Project | |||||
| 1994 | The Freethinker | |||||
| 2000 | La Commune |
| Academy Award | 1967 | Best Documentary Feature Film | The War Game | |
| Asolo Art Film Festival | 1977 | Best Film | Edvard Munch | |
| Atlanta International Film Festival | 1971 | Best Director | Punishment Park | |
| BAFTA Awards | 1967 | United Nations Award | The War Game | |
| Best Short Film | ||||
| BAFTA TV Awards | 1977 | Best International Programme | Edvard Munch | |
| Moscow International Film Festival | 1977 | Golden Prize | Evening Land | |
| Valladolid International Film Festival | 1967 | Golden Spike | Privilege | |
| Zinebi | 1967 | Golden Mikeldi | The War Game |
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