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Boy's eyes burned by atomic flash in Watkins's
The War Game
(1965).
film and television biographies.
Edvard Munch
is, simultaneously, an explicit, carefully researched biography of the Norwegian expressionist
and
an implicit autobiography. Like
Culloden, Edvard Munch
recreates a historical period on the basis of careful research, but "modernizes" the period by interviewing citizens of nineteenth-century Norway and Germany as if they are our contemporaries. Again, the result is a negation of the conventional cinematic boundaries between past and present and between different nations.
Edvard Munch
was followed by two films and a video
The 70s People
(filmed in Denmark in 1975),
The Trap
(videotaped in Sweden in 1975), and
Evening Land
(filmed in Denmark in 1977)none of which received widespread attention or distribution. Several other projects collapsed, including film biographies of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, Italian futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg, and a proposed remake of
The War Game
.
By the early eighties, Watkins had become convinced that film and television production organizations were essentially so inflexiblein terms of their means of production and in terms of the media language they usethat there was no longer any point in trying to change them