"The Diary of an Unknown Soldier" / CULLODEN

ABOUT THE FILMS:

“The Diary of an Unknown Soldier,” 1959, Dir. Peter Watkins, 20 Mins, UK

“The failure of ‘The Web’ (which did, quite undeservedly, win Four Stars in the 1956 ‘Ten Best’ competition), and of a subsequent film, ‘The Field of Red,’ set during the American Civil War – which was not only bad, but somehow (fortunately) disappeared – did not deter me. By 1959, I was working as an assistant film editor at ‘World Wide Pictures’, a documentary film company; and fortunate to have as colleagues many of the finest surviving filmmakers and editors from the days of the GPO and Crown Film Units – including the editor John Trumper, who had worked with John Grierson (and who later edited ‘Privilege’). Also with me at World Wide was Kevin Brownlow, a young filmmaker who was already making a great impact with his invaluable restoration work on Abel Gance’s masterpiece, ‘Napoleon’. Kevin was also steadily working on his own master-work, ‘It Happened Here’, a film depicting what would have happened if Germany had won World War II and occupied Britain. At the same time – with assistance from what had become the Playcraft Film Unit, Roger Higham from my army days in Canterbury, and a friend from London, Brian Robertson, who was to play the leading role – I was preparing ‘The Diary of an Unknown Soldier.’” – Peter Watkins

FORMAT: DCP

CULLODEN, 1964, Dir. Peter Watkins, 69 Mins, UK

In English and Scottish Gaelic with English subtitles.

“This was the 1960s, and the US army was ‘pacifying’ the Vietnam highlands. I wanted to draw a parallel between these events and what had happened in our own UK Highlands two centuries earlier, including because our knowledge of what took place after ‘Culloden’ was basically limited to an exotic image of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ on the label of a Drambuie whiskey bottle. Secondly, I wanted to break through the conventional use of professional actors in historical melodramas, with the comfortable avoidance of reality that these provide, and to use amateurs – ordinary people – in a reconstruction of their own history. Many of the people portraying the Highland army in our film were direct descendants of those who had been killed on the Culloden Moor.” – Peter Watkins

FORMAT: DCP