Tate Modern season of Peter Watkins (The War Game) films in September

[Gramsci]

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/eventseries/peter-watkins-films-1965-99

Peter Watkins (born 1935) is an award-winning pioneer of the docudrama, typified by his combined use of fictional and documentary elements to dissect historical events. His work has been crucial to a critical understanding of mass media.Edvard Munch (1974), a highly regarded biopic considered by Watkins the most personal film he has ever made, dramatises three decades of the life of Munch and provides a raw and haunting portrait of the creative process as embedded within the spirit and the social relations of the time. In honour of this landmark film, Tate Modern presents a survey of Watkins’s acclaimed work on the occasion of the exhibition, Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye.
A new article about Peter Watkins by Jonty Claypole, Head of Arts Television Production at the BBC, is available in the September 2012 issue of Friezemagazine.

He is famous for the banned "The War Game". I have seen "Punishment Park" and his film on Munch. Both very good. I have heard his film of the Paris Commune is worth seeing as well.

His work is little known apart from The War Game. He found it difficult to get work in this country so went abroad. Our loss.

Tate Modern is showing them from 14th to end of September. They have full size cinema in Tate and its cheap.

He has his own website:

http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/

 

[dylans]

The war game was the single reason I became involved in politics. I was 15 years old at the height of the cold war and it was being shown at the local Friends meeting house. I watched it, walked out halfway through, spent a terrified sleepless night and joined CND the next day.

It was a time of fear, a time when nuclear war and global annihilation seemed a very real possibility. The cold war was cold and getting colder. Reagan was in Power in the US and Thatcher here, the Soviets had announced a new wave of nukes.Cruise missiles were being rolled out across Europe and the language of deterrence was being replaced with talk of flexible response, first use, winnable nuclear war and limited nuclear strikes . Protect and survive booklets were being pushed through letter boxes giving advice on "surviving nuclear attack" and the 3 minute warning was part of our vocabulary. The air raid siren still brings a chill down my spine to this day. This was the atmosphere of my youth and it was a cloud that hung over us all.

Into this, the war game was a terrifying wake up call. The fact that it had been banned made it even more chilling. I have since watched it a number of times and it still has the same power to frighten with its black and white hand held shaky camera feel and chillingly simple message. I would say without hesitation that it is the most powerful documentary ever made and one that literally changed the course of my life.