Peter Watkins: An American Cinematheque Retrospective

ABOUT THE SERIES:

Building on our ‘This Is Not a Fiction 2026’ screening of PUNISHMENT PARK, the American Cinematheque joins the global film community in honoring the work of Peter Watkins, whose avant-garde films and television programs demolished the boundaries of fiction and documentary, past and future. An incisive critic of the Cold War and a great theorist of the screen, blending drama, pseudodocumentary and elements of stage production, few artists have done more to upend the conventions of their forms. Join us as we pay tribute to the bloody histories and dark hereafters of Peter Watkins.

The Cinematheque has the privilege of offering screenings of Watkins’ less-seen films, like EDVARD MUNCH, EVENING LAND, LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871) and several of his shorts. In addition, Watkins’ rarely-screened fourteen-and-a-half-hour opus THE JOURNEY will be shown in sections throughout April and May. A massive global production, THE JOURNEY examines the public’s understanding of nuclear warfare in more than a dozen countries through interviews with civilians. This retrospective also revisits the films that made Watkins a giant of both the large and small screen—and an enemy of the British government.

Watkins’ fascination with mass media forms—particularly television and the implications of a screen in every home—informed both the shape of his works and their subjects. CULLODEN, Watkins’ first feature, restages the disastrous battle and its brutal aftermath for a newsreel-style camera crew, with the doomed Jacobites turning to the cameras to offer soundbites as they prepare to die on the windswept moor. Centuries later, in PUNISHMENT PARK, a group of young activists judged “a risk to internal security” are hunted across the Californian desert by officers of Nixon’s government. Screening as part of ‘This Is Not a Fiction 2026,’ the film’s exacting realism–from the SoCal landscape to the amateur cast of angelenos to the cinema verité camerawork–makes PUNISHMENT PARK an extraordinarily affecting anti-war tale.

PRIVILEGE may initially appear to be an outlier in Watkins’ filmography, featuring Manfred Mann frontman Paul Jones as a disillusioned pop star. But as his stock continues to rise, his handlers mold him into a figurehead for the country’s government, military and church, becoming a messianic idol to the youth before finally snapping.

Perhaps Watkins’ most infamous film, THE WAR GAME was initially banned from broadcast by the BBC, as its depiction of Britain before, during and after total nuclear destruction had been, according to the corporation, “judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.” Examining the British government’s inadequate preparation of the populace, the country’s unique vulnerability to Soviet weapons and the almost incomprehensible suffering such a conflict would entail, the film asks: “Would the survivors envy the dead?” Though the BBC refused to air the program and took steps to marginalize Watkins, the reputation of both the film and its filmmaker would grow, with THE WAR GAME becoming the only non-documentary film to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Leaving the United Kingdom, Watkins made THE GLADIATORS, also known as THE PEACE GAME, for Swedish television. Presaging decades of dystopian fiction, the film takes place in a future where both sides of the Cold War have agreed to replace conventional warfare with organized–though potentially deadly–contests.