Peter Watkins – filmmaker theory:
- British director
- Highly regarded for his work in. the 1960’s
- His early work ‘Diary of an unknown soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1960) started his experimental film
- Used mock newsreels to show a media constructed version of reality
- He used amateur actors to add naturalism to his films
- Watkins worked in America and Sweden where he used colour in his films for the first time
Style:
- Docudrama style (actors restage factual events)
- Bold collage of newsreel type footage
- Voice over narrator
- Handheld camera work
- Breaks the fourth wall
- Use of amateur actors
- Blurred lines between fact and fiction
- Uses pseudo- documentary films to cast a critical eye over past, present and near future political issues
Influence: Watkins’ style influenced…
- Television docudramas
- The documentary form itself
- Mockumentaries
- The Dogme 95 directors
- Peter Greenaway films
- Michael Winterbottom films
Watkins’s Work:
- Questions history
- Socio-political thinking
- Role of the media controlling messages
- Tackled nuclear destruction
- Political oppression
- Police brutality
- Teenage suicide
- Workers’ rights
- Subjection of the masses
- Watkins anticipates and condemns mindless mass entertainment, class prejudice, abuses of power and politics of fear in openly confrontational fashion
Watkins’s films:
- Punishment Park (1971)
- Edvard Munch (1974)
- The Journey (1987)- 14 and a half hour long documentary about the nuclear age
- Culloden (1964)
- The War Game (1965)- a vision of a nuclear attack on Britain by the soviet union. The British government saw the damaging politics and terrifying imagery so the film was withdrawn from being broadcast. In 1966 it won the Academy award for best documentary.
Both his films broken new ground in terms of the on-screen representation of fact and fiction by the use of film making techniques not readily associated with the subject matter at hand
Watkins’s Film Form:
- Interviews
- Graphics
- Titles
- The collision of dry data
- Tele-photo
- Sudden zoom
- Strong intimacy
- Handheld camera
- Direct address to camera
- Near- surreal reportage of historical events
- Pre-constructed events
- Mock newsreels
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02xbpx9:
What documentary/stylistic features related to Watkins are evident in these clips?
- History reconceived
- Addresses the audience
- Addresses socio-political issues
- Show extreme, horrific and violent scenes of how history could’ve been
- Created a vision of the past and future
- Used amateur actors
- Voice over narration to appear as if a news report
- Fake achieve footage and news footage/interviews
- Nuclear destruction and political oppression
How can Watkins’ filmmaking theory be applied to Amy?
- Challenged us to what we saw in the media
- Uses a handheld camera
- Uses camera zoom to draw the audience’s attention to significant details or to emphasise something- in Amy there is deliberate zoom on some images
- Journalistic style
- Archive footage (in Watkins’ case it is fake)
- Breaks the fourth wall- Amy sings and talks to the camera when she films herself/ the amateur actors are interviewed on camera
- Spectator challenged with a range of representations
- Leaves it to the spectator to work out their own response and issues raised
- The film form is used to guide the spectator rather than the director leading the documentary
Emma Coe Film Studies 