When the news came last week that Peter Watkins passed away at age ninety, I was attending a film festival in the Czech Republic. It had been a few years since we last spoke. For several years beforehand, I had gotten accustomed to seeing his name in my inbox; to reading his long missives, updates, kind greetings, and rants, and listening to his occasional meandering voice recorded messages. In 2015, writer and film scholar Leo Goldsmith and I began working on a comprehensive book about his filmmaking as a political practice. We set out to emphasize formal tactics of representation and ethics embroidered in his work, and the politics these modeled, from their first treatment to the films’ afterlife as teaching and gathering object. We embarked on research that would take us to various state, cultural, and personal archives, and met collaborators across several countries. In the summer of 2016, we spent a week in the attic of Watkins’s and partner Vida Urbonavičius’s home—really, a place of semi-exile—in the central-French town of Felletin.
His death came as a surprise; It brought that familiar regret in grief of not having simply checked in once in a while. And it was unexpected because of how I remembered him: having scanned in those archives dozens of imploring and confrontational letters to producers, broadcasters, state funders, and industry execs involved in his productions and seen their inevitably arrogant, dismissive responses; read statements of principle and urgency he attached to films headed to festivals, insisting they be read to audiences as part of the screening; and collected decades of open letters to the press and film and media professionals that outline piece by piece the lies they were living with. I thought that clear conviction and unbridled rage would sustain him, if nothing else would. Sitting with this loss I awkwardly tried to continue prize deliberation as a member of the festival jury. But it felt incumbent to at least briefly summarize to those around me how much he left for us—all the potential encoded in his work’s form and ethics, its ideas, and his unflagging analysis and conviction.
I failed in this at the point of beginning, in part due to festival-social distraction, but mainly because, as I realized, the reference, or meaningful shorthand, around Watkins’s work had already started to fade from collective discourse before his passing. In the twenty-four years since his final feature production, an epic reenactment of the Paris Commune anachronistically mediated by mainstream news broadcasters called La Commune: Paris 1871 (2001), the filmmaker largely withdrew from public engagement and stopped seriously pursuing new productions. In a public note published upon release of his previous work, The Freethinker (1994) Watkins announced that he was leaving filmmaking for good. He continued to communicate news of screenings and retrospective, educational, and organizing projects brought about by former collaborators, such as Rebond por la Commune, and shared essays analyzing the state of audiovisual media almost exclusively through his website, a channel that would pre-emptively fill the absence of recognition for his work and his erasure from film history. In one email to us, Peter included a list of the British and US film encyclopedias and reference books that omitted his work. In some cases, they had been taken out in the latest editions; in others, they were never there in the first place. There’s a bit of comical arrogance in this act of compiling absences of course, but he was right.
Watkins was right that the fix was in. Perhaps not as a directed offence against him, but in the obvious constraining of audiovisual media to an entirely nondemocratic process of one-way communication. One of the entries of the list, an annual compilation of best British films from Time Out London, was not an omission per se. Its entry for Watkins’s 1964 made-for-BBC film Culloden does not refer to the1746 battle and subsequent end to the Jacobite revolution it depicts, nor to the unique form of docudrama it employs. The entry is a weird slam, calling his films “a progression from polemical hysteria to formal paranoia.” The accusation of paranoia is a regular feature in his correspondences with the executives and funders. When The War Game (1965), a chilling pre-enactment of the days following a nuclear bomb hitting Britain also commissioned by the BBC, was suddenly pulled from broadcast before its first screening, the filmmaker’s suspicions were also dismissed as such. We now know that the BBC, in violation of their own charter, screened the film for the Home Office, Ministry of Defense, and Post Office (!); following edicts coming down from Churchill himself on PR regarding the threat of nuclear war. Following this, the network deemed it “too horrifying” to be broadcast. Years later, when the ban was lifted, the film retroactively won the Academy Award for best foreign film.
The letters are incontrovertible evidence that the filmmaker would throw himself into every single battle his work encountered from the wimpy politics of the film and TV industry, whether or not there was any expectation of winning. They testify to the protocolar ignorance and capitulation of even the most liberal-seeming institutions of the industry. But the vast majority of Watkins’s correspondences reveal the degree of care and passion for people he maintained throughout his embattled career. His films included large casts of amateur or nonactors, who worked on small budgets and in compacted shoot times. The letters often account for the intimate individual approach the director took. They attest to the life-altering experience of taking part in his productions.
In an essay on La Commune, film scholar Gabriel Levine proposes that Watkins’s collaborative methods do “what Brecht and Benjamin hoped art could accomplish: de-naturalize the present and portray the world as historical and as changeable.” One critical difference between Watkins and these political-cultural imaginaries is in the intimacy of the collaborations—often performers would be given script notes and encouraged to improvise on the spot or revise actions and narrative elements. This kind of engagement was also possible because of his use of deliberate anachronisms as key formal attributes. In the 1974 biography-fabulation Edvard Munch, Norwegian cast members were required to extensively research the real-life characters they played but asked to act as their correlates might in the present. After the film, the actor playing Munch, a student and printmaking apprentice, changed his name and became a painter, a profession he maintains to this day. In La Commune, those playing the politicians of Versailles were recruited from Parisian right-wing newspapers, while the communards were mainly portrayed by community activists supporting immigrant rights. The present tenseness of their roles is induced with the frequent appearance of an on-site TV crew dressed in period clothing but using the tropes of mass media today. Watkins’s vision was not to educate performers, crew, or viewers toward a particular revolutionary decree. His politics were to make use of his privilege to create scenarios in which people could take part, and that would demonstrate collective power over past, present, and future history.
Watkins initiated this epistolary practice with handwritten letters of gratitude, acknowledging each unique contribution in detail, whether taking up a time and character merging role or learning how to edit a film in the moment of doing. Exchanges might then continue for a round or two, or extend over years, sharing personal news, remarking on political changes and new kinds of bad news, suggesting small controversies or gossip from production, arguing or nit-picking, or coming back with retroactive appreciation. In one, from a cast member playing a draconian judge in Punishment Park (1971) admits trying to hide from the camera while crying uncontrollably in one scene. One of the activists he’s just sentenced to de facto death responds with a spontaneous monologue on acceptable violence and radical commitment. Watkins wrote back for as long as the replies would come in.
Details like this are probably why, in the end, Watkins could live with the galling treatment he and his films have received. And why he never altered his standards for what discourse around a film can be. He never gave up on his hope for ordinary people to change the world. In a YouTube video about Punishment Park commissioned for an online film school, he quotes the suicide note of sixties radical activist Abbie Hoffman: “It’s too late. We can’t win. They’ve gotten too powerful.” Watkins didn’t agree; he’d never let them win, or certainly never admit it.
With love and gratitude to Gerard Watkins, Patrick Watkins & Vida Urbonavičius.1
Check http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/ for updates.
