In an interview with Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius, British director Peter Watkins explains his special status within the history of documentary film by the fact that he has always moved between various different poles with his half-documentary films: between reality and fiction, but also between a radical left-wing position and the BBC, which produced some of the director’s films in the 1960s. These included »Culloden« (1964), a fictitious in-depth report on a decisive battle between the English colonial power and the insurgent »Highland clans« in Scotland, as well as his most famous film »The War Game« (1965), in which he addresses the repercussions of a nuclear attack on England.¹ The roughly fifty-minute-long film is based on facts drawn from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also assimilates information about secret nuclear tests carried out by the US army in the 1950s, which gradually became public. Watkins explored the repercussions of nuclear war at the height of the global arms race through interviews with experts, who give sober and factual descriptions of the consequences of such incidents, which were not common knowledge at the time, and through dramatic staged images of »English victims«, which were intended to generate direct audience identification. Whilst the BBC did not wish to inflict this kind of »realistic« educational film on audiences, banning broadcasts of the film for the next 20 years, in 1967 »The War Game« won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Contrast this with the US response to »Punishment Park« (1970) – a film addressing the arbitrary manner in which the Nixon administration treated political opponents, with a documentary format not dissimilar to »The War Game«.
The real-world point of departure was a decree adopted in 1950, which granted the President and the federal authorities special powers to act against opponents of the government during a state of emergency. In order to reflect »reality« as accurately as possible, Watkins made his film, which has now become horrifyingly topical again, with non-professional actors, who represented their actual political convictions in the staged discussions before the special tribunal. Parallel to the hearings, which thanks to this approach were both heated and convincingly »authentic«, in the film Watkins also shows a group of dissidents that have already been convicted. When the interrogators confront them with a choice between a life sentence or three days in »Punishment Park«, they have already decided to opt for the alternative out in the desert, where they will have to cover 53 miles in three days to reach a US flag set up there. The presence of armed US army forces pursuing the prisoners brings events to a head; at the end, shortly before the last three survivors of this torture reach their goal, the soldiers shoot them, even though a foreign camera team is on the scene.
This explosive amalgamation of a hot pursuit reminiscent of Hollywood films blended with real political facts also brought this film a twenty-year screening ban. In addition, the film, in which Watkins turned the American film industry’s propaganda potential against the US government, was unable to find a commercial American distributor. As a result mainstream audiences have to this very day not had an opportunity to see »Punishment Park«.
In his »Invisible Film« (2005), shown in the group exhibition »On Peter Watkins« in Galerie Martin Janda, artist Melik Ohanian addresses the decade-long banishment of »Punishment Park« by once again depriving viewers of the images from the original film. His video projection in a Black Box shows only a film projector screening Watkins’ film in the broad expanses of California’s desert at sunset. The original sound is audible, whilst a flat screen in the gallery space reproduces selected passages of dialogue. Although he does still offer scope to experience the film’s drama, by adopting this approach Ohanian steers the audience’s attention towards the film’s real strength, which lies not so much in the emotionally charged pursuit but more in how convincingly the dissidents present their political arguments.
The exhibition, which was shown at the same time as a retrospective of the British director’s work in the Austrian Film Museum, also included photographs on the set taken by Corinna Paltrinieri, a non-professional actor who appeared in Watkins’ film »La Commune« (1999). In her photographs, just like in the film, the focus is never on a single actor or on the crowd, but instead always on the »multitude«, which also represents nuanced political concerns in the film.
It is not just this one filmic means of scrapping hierarchies but instead an overall highly impressive form of production that makes the 1871 Paris Commune as depicted by Peter Watkins reminiscent of Hardt and Negri’s multitude theory. Through the history of the Paris Commune Watkins moved closer to a chapter of French historiography that even today is to a large extent repressed, working with professional and non-professional actors from the Parisian suburbs, migrants from North Africa, as well as with actors recruited though adverts in the conservative »Le Figaro«. Watkins, who was in no small part seeking to respond to the blinkers blotting out this historical era, encouraged his actors to carry out their own research so that the various figures and political concerns, which were also intended to express personal social experiences, could be developed together with the cast. In contrast to »Punishment Park«, where the non-professional actors never break through the filmic reality, in the roughly six-hour-long »Commune« film the actors repeatedly step out of their roles to point up analogies with specific contemporary social problems. In addition here Watkins also introduces two bodies that comment on events from their respective viewpoints, namely the conservative »Versailles TV« and »Radio La Commune«, set up by the Communards. The media therefore no longer appear as objective reporters (as was still the case in »Punishment Park«), but are instead intimately entangled in ideological power struggles.
However the rejection of a linear conception of history associated with the anachronistic deployment of the modern medium is more intriguing than this somewhat naïve criticism of the media. In addition to the actors, who constantly establish a link between the past and the present, between reality and fiction, the medium itself opens up a space in which history presents itself as something reconstructed, which can constantly be narrated anew.
Deimantas Narkevicius, who for his film »A Role of a Lifetime« (2003) interviewed the director in his self-imposed exile in Lithuania, picks up on Watkins’ semi-fictional approach even in his choice of title. Unlike Watkins however he is no longer interested in grand political narratives. Four films in which Narkevicius attempts to move closer to Eastern European history through individual biographies were screened in Vienna’s Secession gallery in his exhibition »Among the Things We Touched«. The sound track of »A Role of Lifetime« reproduces the interview with Peter Watkins, whilst the visual tier of the film combines found footage material from an amateur filmmaker in Brighton with drawings by a Lithuanian artist. These portray a romantic snow-covered park where a nouveau-riche business man has decided to erect old sculptures and statues from the Soviet era. Deimantas Narkevicius does justice to these absurd political and symbolic dislocations in his atmospheric juxtaposition of the disparate film materials.
In contrast to Watkins’ generally rather dogmatic approach, which correspondingly limits scope to interpret his intentions, Narkevicius opens up a wide-ranging associative field and approximates a »documentation« of a society in transition by subtly exploring the representational validity of his images.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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