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and protests; at the BBC it catalyzed an opportunity to follow through on a project he had suggested before
Culloden,
a dramatization of the potential horrors of nuclear war. In the years since its controversial release (the BBC initially banned the film from television, and maintained the TV ban for more than twenty years),
The War Game
(1965) has become a widely influential "documentary," and it remains a film of considerable power and insight. The irony is that the film's very effectiveness as a form of horrifying entertainment has obscured its brilliance as a critique of conventional filmmaking and of mass media in general. While the subject of
The War Game
is nuclear warthe film dramatizes events leading up to a nuclear holocaust, the moment when the holocaust begins, and its seemingly unending aftermaththe focus of its critique is the emptiness of the "involvement" promoted by commercial media fiction and of the "detachment" of documentary film and TV news. The passages in
The War Game
that look and feel most like candid documentarythe sequences of people experiencing a nuclear detonation and its gruesome resultsare acted fictions; and the passages that seem most ludicrousa churchman explaining that one can learn to love the Bomb, "provided that it is clean and of a good family"; ordinary citizens revealing their utter ignorance about strontium 90are either candid or based on real statements.
The War Game
emphasizes the fact that both entertainment films and documentaries are fabrications, the function of which is to maintain the system through which more products of both kinds can reach consumers.
In the years immediately following
The War Game,
Watkins completed a series of feature films that, in one way or another, elaborated on the critique of mass media he had developed in
Culloden
and
The War Game: Privilege
(1967),
The Gladiators
(1969), and most notably perhaps,
Punishment Park
(1970), the one Watkins film produced entirely in North America. Like earlier Watkins films,
Punishment Park
takes place in a potential near future: the war in Southeast Asia has expanded and China has become involved, fueling an even more fervent resistance at home and causing President Nixon to use the authority given him by the 1950 Internal Security Act to establish a set of Punishment Parks, where war resisters are punished and law enforcement personnel trained, simultaneously. The film reveals what happens to one group of resisters who have been found guilty of treason, while the next group is being tried and found guilty by a citizens' tribunal. Watkins used nonprofessional actors, most cast according to type: people in sympathy with the war resistance "played" the resisters; people committed to "law and order" "played" law enforcement personnel. Their dialogue was improvised. The finished film is a relentless, candid psychodramatization of the attitudes and language of a large group of Americans in 1971.
Watkins's next project,
Edvard Munch
(1974), critiqued conventional