British experimental filmmaker Peter Watkins, 90, died on Oct. 29. Watkins’s films might be described as “mockumentaries” or “docudramas,” except I hate those words. While at the BBC, he was tasked with producing and directing a documentary on the Jacobite uprising of 1746; the result, Culloden (1965), was a You Are There-style film with modern reporters interviewing 18th-century combatants. He went on to create similar time-bending films: The War Game (this nuclear war warning won an Oscar), Punishment Park (the Vietnam War), La Commune (Paris’s 1871 revolt), Privilege (a pop music story, starring supermodel Jean Shrimpton), The Gladiators (a futuristic war story), Edvard Munch, 70'ernes Folk (suicide in Denmark), Evening Land (also Danish, about political protesters), and The Journey (a 14-hour about “nuclear weapons, military spending and poverty—maybe it just seemed like 14 hours). Watkins’s BFI obits notes that “Troubled by the passive, hierarchical, spectacle-based relationship he felt cinema or television establishes with the viewer, Watkins sought through his own work to deconstruct this dynamic and explore possible alternatives.” Promise me if I ever write a sentence like that, you will have me put down?
