Showing of La Commune

To: Retort
From IB

Peter Watkins' six hour film about the Paris Commune - "La Commune" (2000) 
- is showing in its entirety tomorrow, Sunday December 1st, at the New 
College Cultural Center, 766 Valencia, San Francisco. It either starts at 
10 am or 1pm - the publicity has been typically chaotic. Sorry. If anyone 
knows better, please let's hear about it.

Below is a piece from the Guardian at the time of its release in early 2000.
___________________________

In his first British interview in 20 years, Oscar-winning film-maker Peter 
Watkins talks to Peter Lennon about the banning of The War Game, the 
corruption of television, and his new drama set during the Paris Commune



Friday February 25, 2000


At 10am, no more than a few score of us gathered in a modest cinema, 
grandly named Le Méliès in Montreuil, one of those chill eastern suburbs of 
Paris where workers have won the right to live in cheerless concrete 
batteries and socialise in malls where environmental wretchedness is the 
architectural endowment.
Actors, crew and some visitors were going to sit for five hours 45 minutes 
(bring your own sandwiches) to see a film called La Commune, in which 220 
people from this and other workers' areas of Paris re-enact an experience 
of their forebears: the socialist Commune uprising of 1871, a nadir in 
French history.
In the wake of the disastrous Franco-Prussian war, following three months 
of fierce defiance, of heady aspirations for justice and democracy, months 
of solidarity and pitiful bungling, government troops assailed the 
barricades and in one "semaine sanglante" slaughtered, street by street, 
more than 30,000 of their fellow countrymen and women, and children over 
14. It was worse than anything in the Terror of 1793, so persistently 
chronicled by historians. Even today, the French education curriculum 
skates evasively over this event.
The energy, conviction and skill with which the players of La Commune 
perform is startling; few had any previous acting experience. So genuine is 
the force of their passion that at moments you feel they might be about to 
erupt and carry the revolt live into the auditorium.
The director is Peter Watkins, outlawed genius, accomplishing again what he 
achieved decades ago in Culloden and The War Game: giving a demonstration 
of what can be achieved when programme makers are willing to use the public 
as creative participants, rather than passive viewers. The only director 
you can compare with Watkins's working methods is Peter Brook, also exiled 
by negligence and resentment. In both cases, the contribution from actors 
is creatively nurtured, but there is never any doubt that the outcome has 
been forged in an individual furnace. The project was backed by funds from 
a number of sources, notably Sept Arte and the French Centre du Cinema.
La Commune, while pillorying oppression (the Parisian working-class were 
under martial law for the following five years), also contains direct 
criticism of media manipulation. The events are "covered" by national 
television as if it existed at the time: once again a fastidious newscaster 
tells the public what is deemed desirable for it to know and in moments of 
crisis turns to the obligatory pundit for a supposedly civilised analysis. 
(Watkins put ads in the conservative Le Figaro to find people willing to 
give the "royalist" view of La Commune - and came up with, as splendid 
royalist stalwart, historian François Foucart.)
Neither does Watkins overlook left-wing oppression within the Commune; his 
radio reporters behind the barricade get into a dispute in reporting the 
banning of one of the insurgent newspapers which became too critical of the 
movement. Ironically the paper banned was... La Commune.
Media manipulation and the abuse of television power are issues which have 
preoccupied Watkins since the banning of The War Game by the BBC in 1965. 
(It was eventually shown in 1985, to Watkins's indignation, marking the 
40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb.) For 30 years, he has lectured from 
Australia to the US to Scandinavia on this theme. Outlawed is the 
appropriate word to describe the status of one of Britain's most talented 
film-makers, working in exile now for over 40 years.
Watkins's crime was that he not only fell foul of the BBC but, he felt at 
the time, the defence establishment. We now know that, from 1954, 
subsequent Tory and Labour administrations were in agreement that the 
government would "retain control of the manner in which the effect of 
nuclear weapons were made known to the public". The BBC declared its duty 
not to frighten the old or very young - thereby committing itself 
(ironically during its most liberal period under Hugh Carleton Greene), to 
arms race censorship.
Watkins's mistake was to be inflexibly principled; he carried his fight 
against the BBC - for whom he made the film - around the world and became 
regarded as unemployable by any television institution. After being 
deprived of its TV showing, The War Game was released as a feature film 
instead in the 60s. But in those years the image of Watkins as a paranoid 
drifter, hopelessly incapable of mature collaboration, was created and 
perpetuated by the the media. He moved to Scandinavia and now lives in 
Lithuania with his second wife.
But how is it that a supposedly constitutionally disobliging film-maker can 
persuade 220 foreigners to work their guts out for months, rehearsing and 
performing in absurdly cramped conditions? La Commune was shot in the 
cramped Armand Gatti workshop at Montreuil, site of film pioneer Georges 
Méliès's original studio.
And how did this supposedly rebarbative creature manage so successfully in 
the past with a Norwegian cast and crew (as he did for Edvard Munch in the 
mid-1970s). Nowadays, silence (used wonderfully in Munch) is despised; 
contemplativeness outlawed. The result is that museums have become one of 
the rare places where you can see truly responsible or artistic work - the 
Musée d'Orsay in Paris is La Commune's final destination.
Patrick Murphy, a British academic who is co-authoring with John Cook a 
biography of Watkins to be published next year by Manchester University 
Press, frequently watched Watkins at work on La Commune. "They all work in 
complete unity with him," Murphy said. "Cast and crew are for him and he is 
for them.
"He has a remarkable ability to communicate with the cast. He deals on a 
very personal level; he knows every one of them, has respect for them and 
this comes back through them to him. He is able to raise their awareness of 
the actors to a remarkably intense degree. Watkins's casts do not act in 
the normal sense of the word - they become. It is a remarkable experience 
to see him at work. This explains how he got those performances from the 
people in Culloden and The War Game."
So where is the problem for television? Is it that ordinary people have 
respect for integrity, however uncomfortably inflexible, and that 
institutions - particularly TV, in recent years corrupting itself at 
vertiginous speed - simply cannot afford it?
The BBC washed its hands of The War Game and, in a move which would rid it 
of responsibility but allow it to maintain that there was no real "ban", 
gave the film to the BFI. But when The War Game was nominated for an Oscar 
(winning the best feature length documentary award of 1967, although it 
only looked like a documentary), the BBC did something which would have 
made even Pilate blush.
The director of BBC television, Kenneth Adam, was chosen to go to Hollywood 
to receive the award as he happened to be a governor of the BFI too. It is 
long forgotten that by 1967, Watkins, who made Culloden at the age of 29, 
was regarded as the new Orson Welles of the film world and had showbusiness 
friends throughout the world. He rang his pal Elizabeth Taylor and asked 
her to circumvent the BBC and pick up the award for him.
I can personally attest to the permanence of the BBC's vindictive attitude 
towards Watkins. In 1975, he made Edvard Munch, for Norwegian and Swedish 
television. This four-hour film of extraordinary beauty is a work of 
startling originality in narrative structure, in use of colour, sound and 
hugely confident deployment of non-professionals. Watkins's film is perhaps 
the most persuasive depiction of the artistic process; of an artist's inner 
anguish and of the environment which haunts, torments and nurtures him that 
has ever been screened. In other words it is a work of genius, far beyond 
the modest War Game.
In 1976 the BBC, which at least had the gumption to recognise its worth, 
bought it and gave it a champagne launch. Senior BBC executives fronted the 
press reception with an absurdly proprietorial air (although the 
corporation had put nothing into the production). As television critic of 
The Sunday Times at the time, I expressed my admiration for the work to one 
of the corporation's most senior executives. But even as the champagne 
bubbled for what took on the aspect of some kind of BBC cultural triumph, 
one senior executive at least had a more pressing task: to convince me of 
what a totally untrustworthy and impossible creature Watkins was. Nine 
years after the banning, revenge still dripped from every corporate word.
It is futile to pretend that Peter Watkins handles the media well. It took 
months to establish enough trust for him to agree to any meeting. When we 
met in a Montreuil cafe one Sunday he was wary, rather rigid and given to a 
kind of managerial tetchiness, ready to abandon the interview on the spot 
if I appeared to be straying from what he considered (mostly rightly) to be 
essential issues. But there is a detectable vulnerability in his unsubtle 
attempts to protect himself - and even a hint that if he could only trust 
you, the media, as he does his cast and crew, the relationship could be 
quite different. At one point he made it clear that, even aged 65, exile 
was still painful for him.
The media slaughtered Privilege, his sci-fi parable starring Paul Jones as 
a pop star who becomes a vessel for social control, which he made just a 
year after The War Game. Despite two years of work, the Swedish Film 
Institute pulled the plug on his almost-complete Strindberg. When the BFI 
gave it a single showing some years ago, they refused to introduce him to 
the audience. Contrary to its usual practice, the Halliwell guide makes no 
mention of the Oscar for The War Game in the 70s and 80s editions of either 
the Television or Film Companions. It's enough to make you paranoid.
Watkins admits that he is "a product of the British educational system" - 
educated at Brecon, a small public school in Wales, although his family is 
English. "But, thank God, I had no university education. Instead I went to 
drama school."
There is an extraordinary consistency in his development. While doing 
military service ("I did not intend to point my rifle at a human being") at 
Canterbury, he made his first film, Forgotten Faces, a 20-minute model of 
what was to come. He recreated the Budapest uprising in the back streets of 
Canterbury, with locals and a couple of Hungarians. It won him the top 
Amateur Ciné Camera Award ("A very nice object depicting a hand-cranked 
camera.") This got him a job as PA and then programme-maker at the BBC.
A few years later he was defiantly going around the world showing The War 
Game in schools, colleges, public meetings.
"But you did not have copyright," I said, "How did you get a print?"
"I don't play the game entirely by the rules of the BBC establishment," he 
said. "What could the BBC do - send in the police in Australia or America? 
They were too embarrassed to deal with me physically."
There is a glimpse here of why television companies find him intimidating.
But Watkins insists that the BBC "must not be made an Aunt Sally". CBS, 
NBC, all the big television institutions are equally at fault, as is 
"so-called community television".
"The discussion about my position must be in a broader context," he said. 
"Not just about somebody who produced a film on nuclear weapons which was 
squashed. Basically I am someone who has been working for 30 years to help 
shift the power balance between public and TV. The crisis is so severe in 
television."
"On the basis of what?"
"Everything."
"Financial? Political?..."
"Go on," he said, his smile getting tighter. "Any word you care to use."
"Cultural?"
"Creative?" he suggested. "Moral?"
"I have no doubt," Watkins continued, "that had TV taken an alternative 
direction during the 1960s and 1970s and worked in a more open way, global 
society today would be vastly more humane and just."
His thesis, which few honest citizens can quarrel with, is that there has 
been an "accumulation of global media power with no accountability that is 
not only not being challenged but is not even being debated".
"Dennis Potter is dead," he concludes. "The people who were once able to 
work critically within the media have been marginalised."