Peter Watkins | |
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Born | Norbiton, Surrey, England | 29 October 1935
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Years active | 1956–present |
Peter Watkins (born 29 October 1935) is an English film and television director. He was born in Norbiton, Surrey, lived in Sweden, Canada and Lithuania for many years, and now lives in France. He is one of the pioneers of docudrama. 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.
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.
After doing his National Service with the East Surrey Regiment, followed by studying acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Watkins began his television and film career as an assistant producer of short TV films and commercials; and in the early 1960s was an assistant editor and director of documentaries at the BBC. [1] All of his films have either been documentary or drama presented with documentary techniques, sometimes portraying historical occurrences and sometimes possible near future events as if contemporary reporters and filmmakers were there to interview the participants. Watkins pioneered this technique in his first full-length television film, Culloden , which portrayed the Jacobite uprising of 1746 in a style similar to the Vietnam War reporting of the time. In 1965, he won a Jacob's Award for Culloden at the annual presentation ceremony in Dublin. [2]
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. [3] 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. [4]
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.
Citing their 1969 Bed-in efforts and Peace Concert, an interviewer asked John Lennon and Yoko Ono, "Is there any one particular incident that got you started in this peace campaign?". John answered, "...the thing that really struck it off was a letter we got from a guy called Peter Watkins who made a film called The War Game. It was a very long letter stating just what's happening – how the media is really controlled, how it's all run, and everything else that people really know deep down. He said 'People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace'. And we sat on the letter for about three weeks thinking 'Well, we're doing our best. All you need is love, man.' That letter just sort of sparked it all off. It was like getting your induction papers for peace!" [5]
The War Game is a 1966 British pseudo-documentary film that depicts a nuclear war and its aftermath. Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC, it caused dismay within the BBC and within government, and was withdrawn before the provisional screening date of 6 October 1965. The corporation said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences..."
The Great Northern War (1700–1721) was a conflict in which a coalition led by the Tsardom of Russia successfully contested the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. The initial leaders of the anti-Swedish alliance were Peter I of Russia, Frederick IV of Denmark–Norway and Augustus II the Strong of Saxony–Poland–Lithuania. Frederick IV and Augustus II were defeated by Sweden, under Charles XII, and forced out of the alliance in 1700 and 1706 respectively, but rejoined it in 1709 after the defeat of Charles XII at the Battle of Poltava. George I of Great Britain and the Electorate of Hanover joined the coalition in 1714 for Hanover and in 1717 for Britain, and Frederick William I of Brandenburg-Prussia joined it in 1715.
The year 1965 in film involved several significant events, with The Sound of Music topping the U.S. box office and winning five Academy Awards.
Docudrama is a genre of television and film, which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events. It is described as a hybrid of documentary and drama and "a fact-based representation of real event".
Film colorization is any process that adds color to black-and-white, sepia, or other monochrome moving-picture images. It may be done as a special effect, to "modernize" black-and-white films, or to restore color segregation. The first examples date from the early 20th century, but colorization has become common with the advent of digital image processing.
Edvard Munch is a 1974 biographical film about the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch, written and directed by English filmmaker Peter Watkins. It was originally created as a three-part miniseries co-produced by the Norwegian and Swedish state television networks NRK and SVT, but subsequently gained an American theatrical release in a three-hour version in 1976. The film covers about thirty years of Munch's life, focusing on the influences that shaped his art, particularly the prevalence of disease and death in his family and his youthful affair with a married woman. The film was screened at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, but wasn't entered into the main competition.
Culloden is a 1964 docudrama written and directed by Peter Watkins for BBC TV. It depicts the 1746 Battle of Culloden, the final engagement of the Jacobite rising of 1745 which saw the Jacobite Army be decisively defeated by government troops and in the words of the narrator "tore apart forever the clan system of the Scottish Highlands." Described in its opening credits as "an account of one of the most mishandled and brutal battles ever fought in Britain," Culloden was hailed as a breakthrough for its presentation of a historical event in the style of modern TV war reporting, as well as its use of non-professional actors. The film was based on John Prebble's study of the battle.
Denmark has been producing films since 1897 and since the 1980s has maintained a steady stream of product due largely to funding by the state-supported Danish Film Institute. Historically, Danish films have been noted for their realism, religious and moral themes, sexual frankness and technical innovation.
The Anderson Platoon is a documentary feature by Pierre Schoendoerffer about the Vietnam War, named after the leader of the platoon - Lieutenant Joseph B. Anderson - with which Schoendeorffer was embedded. Two decades later, a sequel was released as Reminiscence.
A pseudo-documentary or fake documentary is a film or video production that takes the form or style of a documentary film but does not portray real events. Rather, scripted and fictional elements are used to tell the story. The pseudo-documentary, unlike the related mockumentary, is not always intended as satire or humor. It may use documentary camera techniques but with fabricated sets, actors, or situations, and it may use digital effects to alter the filmed scene or even create a wholly synthetic scene.
Punishment Park is a 1971 American pseudo-documentary drama film written and directed by Peter Watkins. The setting is of a British and West German film crew following National Guard soldiers and police as they pursue members of a counterculture group across a desert.
John Edward Curtis Prebble, FRSL, OBE, was an English journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He is known for his books on Scottish history.
La Commune is a 2000 historical drama film directed by Peter Watkins about the Paris Commune. A historical re-enactment in the style of a documentary, the film received much acclaim from critics for its political themes and Watkins' direction.
Karl Ove Knausgård is a Norwegian author. He became known worldwide for a series of six autobiographical novels titled My Struggle. The Wall Street Journal has described him as "one of the 21st century's greatest literary sensations".
Yellow Bird is a Swedish film and television production company. In 2003 Danish producer Ole Søndberg and Swedish author Henning Mankell started a collaboration on a series of television films based on Mankell’s famous fictional detective Kurt Wallander and Yellow Bird was born. The success of the initial Wallander films was followed by Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters, Liza Marklund’s Annika Bengtzon series as well as the British version of Wallander starring Kenneth Branagh.
Chasing the Deer is a 1994 British war film directed by Graham Holloway and starring Brian Blessed, Lewis Rae, Iain Cuthbertson, Fish and Mathew Zajac. It depicts the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, in which Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland, trying to claim the British throne.
Joachim Trier is a Danish-born Norwegian filmmaker. His films have been described as "melancholy meditations concerned with existential questions of love, ambition, memory, and identity." He has received numerous nominations including for a Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Cesar Awards, and three Cannes Film Festival Awards.
Paul Temple is a British-German television series which originally aired on BBC1 between 1969 and 1971. 52 episodes were made over four series, each episode having a running time of around 50 minutes.
Deimantas Narkevičius is one of the most consistent and widely recognised Lithuanian artists on the international art scene. Originally trained as a sculptor, Narkevičius has mainly worked with film and video. Employing documentary footage, voice-overs, interviews, re-enactments and found photographs, his films submit historical events to the narrative structures of storytelling and cinema. In his artistic practice Narkevičius examines the relationship of personal memories to political histories, particularly those of his native Lithuania. For the artist, history itself has become both material and methodology.
Rosie Violet Nina Millicent Newman (1896–1988) was a British amateur director of documentary films. She is best known for Britain at War of 1946, colour reportage of World War II. From a wealthy background, she belonged to London society circles, and her connections facilitated her film work.
Gomez, Joseph A. (November 1979). Peter Watkins. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-9267-8.
Welsh, James Michael (September 1986). Peter Watkins: a guide to references and resources. G.K. Hall. ISBN 978-0-8161-8179-7 . Retrieved 14 October 2010.