Page 402
Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins has been directing films that critique the commercial cinema in general, and television news in particular, since the late fifties. Even in his early "amateur films"as they were called in Englandhe dealt with the issues of war and revolution in unconventional ways. By the time he went to work for the BBC in 1963, Watkins was a recognized talent (
The Diary of an Unknown Soldier,
1959, and
The Forgotten
Faces, 1961, had won "Oscars" in the then-annual Ten Best Amateur Films Competition) with a desire to use film as a means of changing conventional ways of seeing and understanding history and current developments. Watkins's first two directorial projects at the BBC caused considerable controversy. The first of these to be completed was
Culloden
(1964), a dramatization of the final major battle between the Scottish and the British and the subsequent destruction of the Highland Clans as a political force. The film was based on John Prebble's history of the events,
Culloden
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), but while
Culloden
is rigorously true to the facts, it in no way conforms to the cinematic forms standard at the timeeven at the BBCfor "recreating" history. For
Culloden
Watkins extended the methods he had explored in the amateur films, especially the use of the camera as part of the action, rather than detached observer, and the reliance on close-ups of characters who look directly at the camera/audience. As the Highlanders look out at the viewers, they defy the conventional limits of history and geography, confronting our tendency to fantasize about the "heroic" past and ignore the problematic connections between past and present.
Watkins's break with convention in
Culloden
resulted in both awards