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from the inside. He began to develop plans for a new kind of project, which was to become his magnum opus: the 14 1/2-hour
The Journey
(1987). By the end of 1983, Watkins had organized a grass-roots, voluntary, international system committed to the production of an openly political film. Many of those who agreed to work with Watkins were programmers and exhibitors who had presented his work on the college circuit. Watkins had challenged them to commitat least in this one instanceto the
production
of an openly political media critique. In fourteen countries, local organizations formed to raise money, to assemble local crews, and to find local citizens willing to be the focus of interviews and community dramatizations. During 1983 and 1984 Watkins filmed in three American locations (Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Utica/Ilion, New York); in France, West Germany, Norway, the Soviet Union; in the Hebrides Islands and Glasgow, Scotland; in Mexico, Mozambique, and Tahiti (despite some French government resistance); and in several Australian and Japanese locations. He did not travel protected by a personal or professional entourage; he moved from one nation to the next, from one language system to the next, alone, relying almost entirely on the good will of the people in the locales where he filmed.
When Watkins arrived at the National Film Board of Canada early in 1985 to edit the film, he had shot over a hundred hours of material, and more important, had demonstrated that a filmmaker could interrogate contemporary systems not simply by working within them, but by moving across them, continually exceeding their limits, and finishing a complex, expensive project (the
The Journey
cost the equivalent of more than a million dollars). His individual achievement in seeing the film to completion was a way of suggesting that all of us, whether we're involved in media or not, can and must do a good bit more than we tell ourselves we can do, if we care about delivering a more humane, progressive world to our descendants.
The 14 1/2 hours of
The Journey
are organized into an immense filmic weave that includes candid discussions with "ordinary people," mostly family groups from around the world, about international issues; community dramatizations of the absurdities of contemporary civil defense planning; a variety of forms of deconstructive analysis of conventional media practices; presentations of critical films and photographs by others; portraits of people and places; and a wealth of specific information about the knot of contemporary issues that include the world arms race and military expenditures in general, world hunger, the environment, gender politics, the relationship of the violent past and the present, and, especially, the role of the media and of modern educational systems with regard to international issues.