Radical cheek

The documentary vision of Peter Watkins

by Chris Fujiwara

In the face of media repression and indifference, British filmmaker Peter Watkins has done some of the most original, thoughtful, and provocative film and TV work of the last 40 years. Since this work is rarely shown, the Harvard Film Archive's retrospective, which starts next Thursday, is a major event.

Watkins's most famous film, the once-banned "The War Game" (1965; January 11 at 7 p.m. and January 14 at 7 p.m.), is a hypothesis about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on England. In this tour de force, which has lost none of its power to horrify, Watkins turns documentary style against itself. The blandly BBC-voiced off-screen narration switches without warning between the mock-historical, the informational, and the what-if ("if evacuation plans were carried out, scenes like this would be inevitable"). This free play with narrative strategies gives the film a surging restlessness that's as compelling as the imagery of devastation.

Watkins continues to foreground modes of evidence in the still-astonishing Privilege (1967; January 12 at 7 p.m. and January 14 at 9:15 p.m.). In an England of the near future, pop star Steve Shorter (Paul Jones) is used by the government to distract and tame "the critical elements in this country's youth." At first, Privilege seems to combine a witty, ironic fake documentary about the music industry (including funny portraits of such hangers-on as the "self-confessed anarchist" musical director) with a conventional individual-versus-corruption drama in which Steve, encouraged by a beautiful painter (Jean Shrimpton), comes to rebel against his handlers. But Watkins brilliantly subverts both documentary and narrative. No film has dealt with the analogy between pop-star worship and fascism so directly, but the magic of Privilege lies in how Watkins transcends this painless metaphor and examines the relationship between star and audience in terms of need and denial. If Watkins and Jones fail to convince us that the withdrawn, sorrowing Steve is "the most important personality in the history of show business," the film still works so well at conveying the ritual quality of rock-star performance that you can even understand why Patti Smith covered one of Steve's songs ("Set Me Free").

The all-but-unknown Punishment Park (1971; January 12 at 9 p.m. and January 13 at 7 p.m.) is a cult hit waiting to happen. President Nixon declares that the anti-war protests have created "an internal security emergency" and that this authorizes the government to set up detention camps for protesters. The condemned are given the choice between long prison sentences and a three-day stint in Punishment Park, a National Guard training ground in the California desert. There, prisoners must submit to a grueling "game" in which they try to elude armed Guardsmen and reach an American flag 53 miles from their starting point. Watkins intercuts shots of this ordeal with scenes of radicals confronting a tribunal in a series of two-way ideological harangues that degenerate into shouting and abuse. Scenes slap against each other with as much force as in a Don Siegel cop film and with an exact sense of lunacy. (A tribune asks a conscientious objector, "If I were to tell you that I was going to wad up this piece of paper and throw it at you, what would you do?"; the answer, heard just before the cut: "I would duck.") Watkins's vision of a polarized America is intense, outrageous, and still relevant.

Edvard Munch (1976; January 17 at 7 p.m. and Friday, January 19 at 7 p.m.) and The Freethinker (1994; January 24 at 7 p.m. and January 29 at 7 p.m.) are multi-layered, long-but-never-ponderous explorations of artists and their societies. In Munch, Watkins's gestural zoom-outs insist on shape and silhouette; shots become washes of faces and force fields; the soundtrack lingers over the sounds different implements make against canvas. The cutting switches moods from the reflective to the furious; the world looks lived-in; there's a low-budget, not-seen-before way of representing period. The Freethinker, a meditation on Strindberg, reveals an original kind of non-Brechtian distancing: absorbed in their characters, the amateur actors give traditional (and very good) performances, but the illusion of reality is merely one aspect of a complex presentation that shuffles times and modes of discourse. Each scene exists for its own sake while it's on screen, but the editing invites us to consider it in terms of contradictory information and clashing points of view.

The series also includes the American premiere of Watkins's latest work, La Commune (Paris, 1871) (1999; January 26 at 6 p.m. and January 27 at 6 p.m.), a six-hour reconstruction of the Paris Commune. This ideal meeting of subject and filmmaker promises to be the first must-see premiere of 2001.