 | by Ron Garmon |  |
| --Arnold Toynbee | ||
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| by Ron Garmon | |
| --Arnold Toynbee | ||
We have gotten permission to post this article from RetroVision about Peter Watkins:
By the time the BBC finally cobbled together an official excuse not to air The War Game, a brilliantly horrifying documentary speculation on the aftermath of a nuclear attack, its creator had already turned in his job. "Every sprocket was analyzed like an Eisenstein spectacle," revealed an exasperated Peter Watkins after months of consultation and argument extending beyond the documentary section of the BBC and into the press and upper reaches of government. The controversy ended with a twenty-year ban on BBC screenings of The War Game and the film narrowly missed being suppressed altogether. When his film finally managed to get exhibited in 1966 (a full year after it went into production), Watkins exclaimed, with a good deal of justifiable disgust, "I wish I’d never heard of the bloody hydrogen bomb."1
In early 1965, Watkins was one of the Brighter Young Men at the BBC. After service in the army and a stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Watkins began making his own amateur 8 and 16mm films in the late 50s. His most successful of these was The Forgotten Faces (1961), a reenactment of the 1956 Hungarian uprising that got him his job at the BBC. Influenced by the early neorealist works of Visconti and Rossellini as well as Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Watkins became fascinated by the possibilities of what might be called the "reconstructed newsreel." The use of nonprofessional actors, a hand-held camera, and available lighting to achieve a documentary feel, became a means of achieving a heightened realism. Armed with this exciting formal innovation, the writer-director turned it toward an evolving personal obsession with the effects of organized violence on the lives of ordinary people.
Watkins acknowledged that "Most of my feelings about... what I would call documentary or reconstruction of reality came from studying photographs." 2 Even a cursory examination of his films reveals an eye for the brute detail within frantic action; the traditional "aim high and shoot bloody" dictum of the news photographer. His interest in the horror of warfare expressed itself in an evolving mastery of the reaction shot. What one remembers most about his films is the welter of frightened, confused, tormented faces that swirls around the atrocities he sets into motion. This coupled with a social conscience, deadpan wit, and willingness to play with the formal traditions of the narrative film led to his discovery by (and eventual departure from) the BBC.
Culloden (1964), his first television project, was a daring reconstruction of the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the resulting near-genocide of the Highland Scots. Done as if cameras and news coverage had existed in 1745, Watkins' camera roved around battlefields and hearthsides and confronted "participants" with spot-interviews. A narrator provided ironic commentary on the proceedings and framed the spectacle for the TV audience. Its telecast on BBC 1 late in 1964 caused a sensation. Though reviled as "sadistic" by some, the film was an overwhelming critical and public success and Watkins was given an award by the British Screen Writers Guild. Watkins now had sufficient clout to get his delayed pet project a respectful hearing by the BBC.
"I am anxious to keep Watkins," argued Huw Wheldon, outgoing head of Documentary Programmes in a company memo, "and to do so I must certainly let him get this film out of his system." 3 Richard Crawston, who moved into Wheldon’s office as Watkins began filming, had to master a few qualms -- "Because it was a delicate, difficult subject and because it was likely to undermine the government of the day and the national defense policy, and NATO and God knows what, he had to use the normal BBC process... the agreement reached was that it could be made on the understanding that first the script, and then the completed film would have to be seen by the director general and, if necessary, by the board of governors." 4
Watkins prepared for The War Game by interviewing scientists, civil defense workers, doctors, artists, and the media for their estimates on the probable effect of nuclear war in Britain and a few thoughts on the dense silence emitted from official quarters on this important matter. He also studied Civil Defence pamphlets, doctrinal statements from the Vatican and the Rand Corporation, and accounts of the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, Dresden, and Darmstadt. Most importantly, he let his mind play on the notion of three single-megaton nuclear devices detonating in postcard-lovely Kent.
The 47-minute film Watkins screened for the BBC brass was very superior work, by any standard. Using the fictionalized and heavily researched documentary technique used in Culloden, set in a Britain of the next-day future, the script extrapolates superbly from primary sources local aspects of a global catastrophe. The immediate causus belli is Chinese intervention in Vietnam (a fair inference from the historical record, given the Korean war). Threatened use of battlefield nukes by US ground forces gives Moscow all the leverage it thinks it needs for a replay of the 1948-49 Berlin Crisis (for those of you who slept through Modern History, this was a Soviet attempt to force the Western allies out of partitioned Berlin). The result is global panic, which provides Watkins with his Kentish context.
As the crisis builds, a narrator reads passages from the official Civil Defence procedures and Watkins’ camera pushes through mobs of refugees evacuated from London. Perplexed householders are ordered by the military to billet total strangers ("Are they colored?" asks one housewife) and the ration book returns to British life. A journalist interviews ordinary citizens, most of whom have no idea what Carbon-14 and Strontium-90 are. The majority is smugly convinced (just as in the thirties with Hitler) that there will be no war. The island begins to make half-hearted and unorganized efforts to prepare for nuclear attack. Some do enter into the gruesome spirit of the moment; in one particularly chilling sequence, a merry little homeowner conducts a tour of his "bombproof" house, ending in his garden with its ridiculously small shelter. He proudly hefts a shotgun and announces that he "certainly intends to use it."
The war psychosis is helped along by gouging merchants and idiotic statements from religious leaders (this helps the viewer realize the sort of society the West intends to defend to the last drop of our blood). A "nuclear strategist" (whose accent, plump myopia, and bad haircut peg him as an American academic) appears at intervals, spouting doctrine lifted in part from the writings of Herman Kahn (On Thermonuclear War). One choice example-
"After a nuclear attack on the United States, would Americans live as they are accustomed to, with automobiles, ranch houses, televisions, freezers, and so on? No one can say."
Such asides give the uneasy feeling that excuses are being made for the destruction of civilization before it even happens. Sirens begin to wail.
Public opinion supports retaliation in case of attack and, as if summoned, the missiles strike. Watkins shows his mettle brilliantly in these sequences, suggesting the unimaginable with deft strokes and a low-budget brio that puts such celebrated Hollywood artists as Roger Corman and Sam Fuller in deep shade. Watkins spends the rest of film demolishing several national myths and offending sensibilities wherever found. The celebrated pluck and resolve that saw Britons through the Blitz is simply no good against thermonuclear warheads. Morale, indeed the entire social order, disintegrates rapidly. As radiation sickness begins to carry off the survivors of the initial detonation and the hospitals are engorged with the dying and mad, policemen begin to shoot the terminally ill (American viewers should remember that police are held in much higher public regard in Britain than is traditional here). Food riots create an armed population. A mildly disapproving pundit tells us "When morale falls, ideals fall and may go and behavior becomes more primitive, more a thing of instinct." The narrator indicates that "it is now more than possible that what you have seen happen in this film will have taken place before 1980." The same faces that expressed indifference and blank ignorance before the war now stare vacantly at the camera, voices dim in psychic annihilation. Watkins pricks our ears for every nuance of the Whimper that follows the Bang of history’s end.
Watkins shot The War Game in four weeks during the spring of 1965. The film's atmosphere of improvised spontaneity was carefully written into the massive shooting script, even down to the "uh"s and other verbal hesitancies in the characters' speech. The director's intense personality and RADA training was used to full advantage in coaxing performances out of the non-professional cast. He met individually with each and would often act out their roles for them. The Home Office and the Ministry of Civil Defence were not so cooperative, refusing all requests for information and assistance. Indeed, the only governmental agency that cooperated even informally was the Kent Auxiliary Fire Service, who lent equipment and personnel for the firestorm scenes. Despite such obstacles, Watkins was able to shoot 20,000 feet of film; ten times the amount needed for an hour-long television slot. The War Game was scheduled to air the week of August 6, the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. 5
Wheldon and Crawston had considerable reservations about the film, but supported Watkins to their superiors, both during the shooting and after seeing a rough cut. Wheldon, in particular, was upset over the "unnecessary swipes against the police and the clergy" and Crawston wanted to take the aesthetically dubious but politically prudent step of inserting a disclaimer avowing that the film was "one man's view" of nuclear catastrophe. 6 Watkins refused to budge on either point and the film was sent on its way up the BBC hierarchy.
Watkins' battles with the network inevitably reached the press and soon the Labour government found itself in the awkward position of having to shut off debate over its nuclear policy before any could get started. The War Game was deemed "too horrific for the medium of broadcasting" by the director general of the BBC. "I did it purely for humanitarian, not political, reasons." Sir Hugh recalled twenty years later, "I didn’t feel I could take the responsibility for someone elderly or unbalanced being so upset by it that they would walk under a bus." 7 A laudable sentiment, but the action apparently was taken four days after the controversy hit the newspapers and two days after a pair of Labour MPs visited him over the matter. 8 Two special screenings of the film were arranged early in 1966 for members of Parliament, the military, and people from the press and film establishments. This was done, according to one media analyst, in order for Greene to receive a "political blessing" for the ban. Meanwhile, Watkins began a public battle to get his film before a wider audience.
According to one published AP report (found in the file on The War Game at the Motion Picture Academy Library), the screening was sufficient grounds for a number of British newspapers to support the BBC ban. Watkins began a letter-writing campaign to get the film a cinema release. The BBC balked, but finally relented in March. Even then, two major distributors turned the film down. Critical reception was overwhelmingly favorable; Kenneth Tynan, the dean of British dramatic criticism (who had experienced a few problems of his own recently by uttering the f-word ["fuck"] on the BBC), flatly declared that "it may be the most important film ever made."
The controversy ensured a worldwide release. UN Secretary-General U Thant commended it to the broadest possible audience and Watkins won the 1966 Oscar (TM) for Best Documentary (readers confused as to how a fictionalized narrative could qualify in this category can also puzzle over why the wholly fanciful The Hellstrom Chronicle also won and Michael Moore's accurate and deeply personal Roger & Me wasn't even nominated). More important to Watkins’ immediate future was that The War Game made a major hit on the U.S. college film circuit, approaching Variety’s "magic $1,000,000 rental category" by May, 1967. The venerable old trade seemed honestly flabbergasted by the notion of "such a trenchant message pic" making "it in today's somewhat frivolous film market." 9
What the town's commerce wizards could not quite reduce to prose, Universal was willing to bet money on. Watkins was hired to direct Privilege (1967), a project that originated in a story by Norman Speight (Til Death Do Us Part, the British TV series that formed the basis for All In The Family). A comic exposé of the pop music scene, very much in the mold of Expresso Bongo (see RetroVision 3), Watkins overhauled the script to fit his pseudo-documentary approach, this time with greatly diminished results. Its theme of the pop star as neurotic messiah did, however, establish the template for Wild in the Streets (1968) and Pink Floyd The Wall (1982). His next two films, The Gladiators (1969) and Punishment Park (1971) met with increasing degrees of media hostility due to their overtly anti-establishment nature. The director scored an international critical success in 1974 with the brilliant Edvard Munch, a documentary on the reknowned modernist painter.
The pace of Watkins' output has slackened drastically in recent years, just as his stylistic and social concerns have gained wider acceptance in mainstream media culture. That the BBC finally aired The War Game in 1985 was due in large measure to the huge anti-nuclear movement of mid-decade, which in turn was engendered by the bloody-minded military policies of Thatcher/Reagan. Watkins' innovations in documentary technique were copied and extended in films as disparate as This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), and Bob Roberts (1992). An increasing sophistication on the part of critics and the public on the ways in which ordinary "objective" TV journalism is used to manipulate public opinion and manufacture consent for frankly brutal policies ensures that artistic silence is not so easily purchased as in the 1960s. Indeed, the events of recent months in India and Pakistan indicate that Watkins' vision is far from outdated as prophecy or art.
1. Paul Gardner, "The Horror Show That Shook The British Isles", The New York Times, April 3, 1966.
2. Joseph A. Gomez, Peter Watkins (Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1979), p. 24.
3. Sue Summers "Banning the Bomb Show", The Sunday Times (London), July 28, 1985.
4. Gomez, Watkins, p. 49-50.
5. Ibid. p. 50.
6. Ibid. p. 52.
7. Summers, "Show"
8. Gomez, Watkins, p. 53.
9. "Gruesome War Game My Hit Rentals Of $1,000,000 Via Campus And Art Dates", Weekly Variety, May 24, 1967.
© 1998 by Ronald Dale Garmon