Left Center Left

I’ve taken a scholarly interest in the pseudodocumentaries of both the 1940s and 1960s, so I thought I’d take a moment to plug one of the key directors of the genre, Peter Watkins, whose reputation has gone from obscurity and dismissal to renewed interest and overdue DVD release of films that often screen no more than a few days on their release. His films can be frustrating, emotionally intense and even politically problematic, but they’re also smart, nailbitingly suspenseful, and timely to today’s topical issues.

Watkins, one of the British directors whose reputation sprang from the amateur film movement, quickly carved out a niche in docudrama and pseudodocumentaries. They all stage invented, fictional events as if they were real ones being captured by documentary crews. Sometimes the crews are merely hypothetical (what would happen if cameras recorded the French Commune?); othertimes the send up is contemporary and specific. However, unlike the mockumentaries in fashion today, pseudodocumentaries are not done to lampoon but to capture the uncapturable and, sometimes, to show up the conventions of media production to begin with.

His first feature, Culloden, reenacts the pivotal battle between the Scottish highlanders and the Hanover throne. Rather than the vantage of full knowledge that the docudrama usually promises (watching a murder reenactment, we the spectator know the “real story”), Watkins throws the spectator in the subjective position of the troops’ confusion and lack of knowledge, with plenty of medium close-ups and few establishing shots. It’s rough at the edges but is still a strangely gripping watch.

The War Game, his second film and in my view one of his best works, was immediately banned from television. (It sees its DVD releases in North America later this month.) The film imagines what would happen if Britain were facing a nuclear attack. The specific Cold War politics seem dated, and in particular the snarky tone of the voiceover and contrapuntal editing against the naïve “interviews” seems particularly misplaced. But the film has lost none of its punch. Nonactors give a frisson to the interviews – a nurse overwhelmed by the bodies, a housewife taken to crime, - that is only seconded by the “reality effect” of the camerawork and editing, which simulates documentary footage pretty convincingly. The film is an indictment against the Cold War arms race, but more gripping to me were the issues of planning and civilian mobilization. Watkins seems to find the British civil defense plans inadequate, but watch The War Game today, think of Hurricane Katrina, and shudder.

I found both Privilege and the Gladiators disappointing. The first has interesting moments as a cult film figuring pop stardom as mechanism for social control, but it really doesn’t gel narratively. The second, well… the allegory is really weak when it isn’t downright obscure.

With Punishment Park, however, Watkins hit his stride. As critic Joseph Gomez has noted, reality effect and allegory work in tandem. Based on the Cold War-vintage McCarren Act, it imagines a detention camp for dissidents and radicals, who are given a tribunal trial and made to participate in a capture the flag-like exercise for their freedom. Though modeled after the Chicago Eight trail and Kent State, the narrative itself is exaggerated, only the narrative pace builds slowly, inexorably, and the documentary format forces the viewer to take even outlandish events seriously. There’s truth to charges that Watkins’ films and politics are hysterical, yet in age of Guantanamo, military tribunals and accusations flung at the New York Times, I’m willing to give Watkins a lot of credit.

I’ve yet to see any more recent Watkins films. Friends of mine speak highly of Munch, biopic of the painter, and the Commune. They’re next on the list.