#peter watkins

[gogandmagog]

Edvard Munch (1974), except if I’m being honest, I spent at least fifty percent of the time watching this film thinking of Teddy Kent, because to me this would have been a perfect cast circa the EQ era… but more than that, I was also thinking about how far a tinnnny bit of Edvard’s depth would have gone for Teddy as a character. This film itself is an expressionistic masterpiece, criminally under-seen. An immediate favourite.

[davidhudson]

Happy 89th, Peter Watkins.

[obsessioncollector]

La Commune (Paris, 1871), dir. Peter Watkins (2000)

[sesiondemadrugada]

Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967).

[gatutor]

Mark London-Jean Shrimpton-Paul Jones "Privilegio" (Privilege) 1967, de Peter Watkins.

[vcasih]

"WHAT ARE YOUR FEELINGS TOWARDS THE POLICE IN THIS COUNTRY? - PIGS ARE PIGS. I MEAN PIGS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN PIGS. THEY'RE THE STREET CLEANERS OF THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE. THEY'RE LIKE, HIRED KILLERS."

punishment park, dir. peter watkins (1971)

[spectralthrum]

The War Game, 1966.

[filmsntv]

Edvard Munch (1974)

[swampflix]

Privilege (1967)

I’m sure the millions of dollars help ease the tension a little, but being a popstar really does sound miserable.  Between recent reports of Ice Spice twerking with joyless dead-eyed monotony, Taylor Swift cancelling tours dates under credible terrorist threats, and Chappell Roan tearfully begging her own fans to back the fuck off and let her breathe a little, it appears that the all the Pop…

[dynamofilms]

The War Game (1966)

7/10

[salva7orearato]

[mad-prophet-of-the-airwaves]

Edvard Munch (1974, Peter Watkins, Sweden/Norway)

[denimbex1986]

'Two new documentaries available to stream this week are riding the wave of anticipation for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, out in cinemas next Friday. Lest Nolan’s Cillian Murphy-starring biopic of atomic bomb creator J Robert Oppenheimer not serve the facts diligently enough, then Oppenheimer: The Real Story (from 17 July) and To End All War: Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (Now TV) are on hand to fill in any gaps. They join a long line of documentaries on the subject and its adjacent concerns; the surprise is that it’s taken this long for Oppenheimer himself to be the protagonist of a major Hollywood drama.

But the legacy of the atom bomb, from its development to its impact to its all-round political aura, is a rich one, spanning everything from esoteric arthouse films to genre B-movies. For decades after the horrifying outcome of the Manhattan Project, through the long-lingering chill of the cold war, anxiety over nuclear warfare was the driving force behind any number of thrillers and war films. Comedies, sci-fi and even the odd film noir – see Robert Aldrich’s blistering Kiss Me Deadly (1955; Internet Archive), which culminates in a literally explosive allegory – got in on the paranoia.

First, however, the film industry attempted to tackle the subject more directly. Mixing earnest informational film-making with melodramatic fiction, the 1947 Hollywood film The Beginning or the End (Internet Archive) is a fascinating relic of its still-raw era. Dramatising the creation of the bomb and the circumstances building to Hiroshima, it has a dour sternness of tone that allows it to smuggle in some wild fabrication. Scenes of President Truman morally wrestling over whether or not to drop the bomb have the ring of patriotic face-saving. Indeed, there’s more history to be gleaned from the film’s blind spots than its inclusions.

Japan had its turn in 1953 with Hiroshima, another blend of fiction and documentary centred on child survivors in the aftermath of the blast. It’s undeniably wrenching, using a vast number of extras to effectively recreate their own harrowing experience, and while it was unsurprisingly branded “anti-American” in certain quarters, it doesn’t go easy on the Japanese military either.

In 1989, leading Japanese auteur Shōhei Imamura covered similar subject matter with a more distanced perspective in his soberly beautiful Black Rain (Arrow). A portrait of a family rebuilding in the wake of Hiroshima, it intersperses a quietly unfurling study of trauma with blunt first-hand accounts from victims. That same year, Hollywood inadvertently responded with Roland Joffé’s peculiarly misguided Manhattan Project drama Fat Man and Little Boy, previously Oppenheimer’s biggest screen showcase. Still, the scientist plays a supporting role to overseeing army officer Leslie Groves (played by Paul Newman), whose clipped, macho sense of duty spars with Oppenheimer’s cerebral detachment in a way that rather diminishes the bigger picture. There’s a reason you never hear of it today.

You certainly get a sharper, more telling view of the masculine egos sparking and aggravating nuclear warfare in Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly deranged 1964 cold war farce Dr Strangelove, a film that managed to be both piquantly of its time and wildly ahead of it. It came amid a rush of more serious-minded Hollywood dramas on the same subject, including two released the same year. Sidney Lumet’s cold-sweat political thriller Fail Safe, in which an honourable US president and his advisers fret over an error that has sent a nuclear strike Russia’s way, is better remembered than John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, in which a different imaginary Potus faces military mutiny in response to nuclear disarmament. Both are excellent.

European film-makers, meanwhile, may seem to be left out of the matter, but have contributed in surprising ways. Alain Resnais’s exquisite Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959; Amazon), a pointedly even-handed co-production with Japan, addresses Japanese PTSD and western guilt in the form of a desolate, mutually wounded romance. And the UK entered the conversation in the 1960s with The War Game, Peter Watkins’s stark, unnerving pseudo-documentary vision of nuclear war on home turf: a fiction evocative enough to fool the Oscars into giving it a best documentary prize, though a spooked BBC wouldn’t air it for 20 years. We’ll see next week if the atom bomb on screen can still cause that kind of stir...'

[schlock-luster-video]

On June 18, 1971, Punishment Park premiered at the Melbourne Film Festival.

Here's some new art inspired by the indie classic!

[nextwavefutures]

The ‘most significant’ political films

New Review’s summer list of the ‘most significant’ political films is both quite familiar and a bit different. New post on Around the Edges

The New Republic decided that the summer was a good time to run a list of the Top 100 most significant political films, and invited the veteran film critic J. Hoberman to curate it. Hoberman suggested that it should be a list of “the most significant” rather than the best—which certainly makes it potentially more interesting. 79 critics, academics and film programmers each sent in their top 10…

[highonfilms]

10 Distressing Films on the Potential Aftermaths of a Nuclear Holocaust