Some filmmakers say this is my work and I want it to stay that way. That is their right, and we respect that right. Those are the films we don’t buy, and those are the films we don’t transmit. —TV executive in The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins
His latest magnum opus, La Commune (Paris, 1871) (1999), runs only five hours and 45 minutes, but I missed it at Toronto and Rotterdam, and saw only part of it in Buenos Aires last month (I saw the rest on video here; it’s playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center in various two-part installments this week). I was surprised that the auditorium in Buenos Aires was as packed for the later portions as for early ones and that the audience was absorbed in all the details. I also managed to see a feature-length documentary about La Commune made by Geoff Bowie for the National Film Board of Canada, The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins (unfortunately not being screened in Chicago)—a film that enlightened and confused me by at times sparking my interest even more than Watkins’s pseudodocumentary about the Paris Commune of 1871.
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Watkins’s The War Game (1965), probably his best-known film—a terrifying 47-minute pseudodocumentary that imagines the immediate effects of a nuclear strike on Britain—won a well-deserved Oscar for best documentary, yet it was banned from worldwide TV broadcasting for 20 years by the BBC, which rationalized its suppression by calling it an artistic failure. That only encouraged supporters to be hyperbolic. Kenneth Tynan, probably the greatest theater critic of the second half of the 20th century, saw it at a private screening and wrote in the London Observer, “I suspect that it may be the most important film ever made. We are always being told that works of art cannot change the course of history. Given wide enough dissemination, I believe that this one might….The War Game is more than a diagnosis; it is a work of art. It precisely communicates one man’s vision of disaster, and I cannot think that it is diminished as art because the vision happens to correspond with the facts. Like Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment,’ it proposes itself as an authentic documentary image of the wrath to come—though Michelangelo, of course, was working from data less capable of verification.” Watkins’s gargantuan Web site (www.peterwatkins.lt; he’s now based in Lithuania, where his Lithuanian wife works as a freelance translator and editor) quotes portions of this review and several others, positive and negative, though it fails to cite Tynan by name—just as it fails to cite the names of most of the actors in his films.
In the latter part of his career Orson Welles seemed on occasion to prefer making films to having them released—especially Don Quixote, which was financed out of his own pocket (he may have felt the same way about some of his protracted work on The Other Side of the Wind, much of which also took the form of a pseudodocumentary). He’s been widely criticized for this tendency, but it’s easy to understand his motivations given the joy he and his collaborators often felt while making his films and the often hostile critical reception the films met when they were released. Like Welles, Watkins made a controversial splash at the beginning of his career, then suffered a comparable marginalization, and it’s easy to see how the nearly insuperable problems he’s faced in getting his works shown may have reduced the importance of their reception. Why not stretch a two-hour movie to six if this gives more pleasure, edification, and inspiration to its participants, especially if one concludes, consciously or unconsciously, that it won’t be widely distributed anyway? (A large part of The Universal Clock is devoted to the tragicomic futility of trying to interest television outlets across the planet in works such as La Commune, whose availability is often in inverse proportion to their seriousness. In contrast are the Ken Burns types, who seem ready to compromise anything and everything—their subjects, their intellectual, political, and aesthetic integrity—for the sake of their formats and audiences.
Directed by Peter Watkins
Written by Watkins with Agathe Bluysen and contributions from the cast members.
