peter watkins:resistance cinema
A film they showed on ARTE television a long time ago showed us a couple of things. For one thing, while I was watching it I realised it wasn’t like anything else I’d every seen. For another – and contrary to what many directors, programmers, experts and journalists have told us over the years – stations such as ARTE demonstrate that television can be a wonderful, beautiful medium. Edward Munch is a film unlike any other. It looks at painter Edward Munch’s life and work, but is more than a documentary, and more than a biopic too. I think it’s in a new
category of its own. When the film finished – it was back in the days when we didn’t all carry the Internet around in our pockets – I stayed behind to see who had made such a special film.
Directed by Peter Watkins. Watkins is an itinerant film-maker. He’s always been involved with different, complicated productions. Feature films for television stations in different countries, films which are both documentaries and series. Watkins combined reality, fiction and reactions in his films. They seem artificial at first but, as the minutes go by, his films become credible. And then, all of a sudden, Watkins’ work grabs you. It’s what some people call the magic of cinema. Watkins, however, doesn’t compare his work with magic: What’s behind my work is it’s aim, which is to help the spectators, looking for ways to make them objective, helping them to get away from those myths called reality and truth.
He works with people who aren’t actors in his films and likes to look into each story’s essence and psychological side. In Munch, his most personal work, the artist’s psychic instability is at the centre and his portrait of the Norwegian is marvellous. In The War Game and Punishment Park, for instance, he creates fiction: in the former, he shows the results of a potential nuclear attack on England and, in the latter, the resources which those in power in the USA use to control the citizens (did you really think The Hunger Games was original?).
He made his documentary Culloden for the BBC about the reaction, in 1746, of the highland clans in Scotland to the troops sent to fight them from the capital. Although the BBC’s historical experts recreated the 18th century wonderfully, the whole film is told be a television crew from the battlefield itself. Watkins made that film in 1964. Nowadays – in the age of alternative, punk, post-modern and clever-clever cinema – the critics which Watkins’s different films received are worth looking at:
- Haters can feed from Punishment Park, the most insultant film I´ve ever seen.
New York magazine
- Paranoic Extravaganza. Pretends to show us the inmediate future of the USA. Pure masochism.
New York Times
- It´s not just a bad film. It´s insidious. I ask myself how much violence and sexual frustration is his mind.
The Staff
- Sick realism BBC forbbid it. Well done.
Daily Mirror
- Monstruous fakeness.
Daily Express
category of its own. When the film finished – it was back in the days when we didn’t all carry the Internet around in our pockets – I stayed behind to see who had made such a special film.
Directed by Peter Watkins. Watkins is an itinerant film-maker. He’s always been involved with different, complicated productions. Feature films for television stations in different countries, films which are both documentaries and series. Watkins combined reality, fiction and reactions in his films. They seem artificial at first but, as the minutes go by, his films become credible. And then, all of a sudden, Watkins’ work grabs you. It’s what some people call the magic of cinema. Watkins, however, doesn’t compare his work with magic: What’s behind my work is it’s aim, which is to help the spectators, looking for ways to make them objective, helping them to get away from those myths called reality and truth.
He works with people who aren’t actors in his films and likes to look into each story’s essence and psychological side. In Munch, his most personal work, the artist’s psychic instability is at the centre and his portrait of the Norwegian is marvellous. In The War Game and Punishment Park, for instance, he creates fiction: in the former, he shows the results of a potential nuclear attack on England and, in the latter, the resources which those in power in the USA use to control the citizens (did you really think The Hunger Games was original?).
He made his documentary Culloden for the BBC about the reaction, in 1746, of the highland clans in Scotland to the troops sent to fight them from the capital. Although the BBC’s historical experts recreated the 18th century wonderfully, the whole film is told be a television crew from the battlefield itself. Watkins made that film in 1964. Nowadays – in the age of alternative, punk, post-modern and clever-clever cinema – the critics which Watkins’s different films received are worth looking at:
- Haters can feed from Punishment Park, the most insultant film I´ve ever seen.
New York magazine
- Paranoic Extravaganza. Pretends to show us the inmediate future of the USA. Pure masochism.
New York Times
- It´s not just a bad film. It´s insidious. I ask myself how much violence and sexual frustration is his mind.
The Staff
- Sick realism BBC forbbid it. Well done.
Daily Mirror
- Monstruous fakeness.
Daily Express
