Peter Watkins: an English film-making revolutionary from a tradition of uncompromising radicalism

In films such as The War Game, Culloden and Punishment Park, Watkins pioneered the mock-documentary form and used it to make his historical dramas and up-to-the-minute dystopias all equally immediate and real• Peter Watkins, Oscar-winning director of The War Game, dies aged 90• Peter Watkins obituaryDystopian, post-apocalyptic, mockumentary: these are common, even hackneyed genres in today’s movies and television. But when film-maker Peter Watkins deployed them in the 1960s, they were revolutionary, and Watkins himself was revolutionary as well – an English revolutionary, in fact, alive to the cruelty and iniquity of kings but also to that of people bent on decapitation. His cinema persistently asked questions about those in power, and what will happen when their power goes catastrophically wrong. An artist dedicated to challenging and upsetting, Watkins came from the dissenter tradition of uncompromising radicalism on screen and stage – the same tradition as Edward Bond, Ken Loach and Dennis Potter.His enduringly brilliant and angry anti-nuclear drama The War Game was commissioned but then banned by the BBC in 1965. (It screened in cinemas, and was finally shown on television a couple of decades later.) It lasts just 47 minutes but viewers felt they had lived through a lifetime of fear. When I first saw it as a teenager at a CND meeting 15 years after it was made, it seemed as if I had entered a new era of disillusioned adulthood. Continue reading...

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