A largely unsung titan at the business end of a renegade career that began almost five decades ago, Watkins may be the most honest, independent, intellectually rigorous and politically prescient filmmaker at work today. Certainly, no one beyond Godard is as protean an interrogator of both social power structures and the sign-&-meaning experience of film itself. Watkins pioneered the use of the "mock doc" approach, so popular now as a vehicle for satire, but his program couldn't be more serious. Watkins's first feature for the BBC, Culloden (1964), had appalled network cameramen witness the Jacobite combat of 1745; his next, The War Game (1966), graphically faked a documentary about the effects of a nuclear attack on Britain, and was banned by the BBC for 20 years. (It did reap one of the strangest Oscars® ever awarded: Best Documentary, for a fully scripted, wholly acted, fake-non-fiction featurette.)
Watkins's has been on the move globally ever since, and has remained at war with producers, distributors and governments, often becoming the victim of censorship, blackouts and active suppression. His faux-non-fiction scheme has also persisted the visionary biopic Edvard Munch (1976), his most popular film, has as much to do with Industrial Revolution injustice, expressed by utterly convincing talking-head interviews with 19th century laborers, as with the Norwegian painter. La Commune might be the big-brain outcome of this evolution. Using a large cast of non-professionals, and the mock-up interior of a single warehouse shot in black-&-white video, Watkins plunges into the titular people's uprising, a two-month period in which, at the tail-end of the Franco-Prussian War, the worker citizens of Paris, led by the armed National Guard and other disaffected military personnel, took over the city. With the formal government having fled to Versailles, a socialist program was enacted, and for a brief period a kind of empowering, egalitarian utopia was founded people voted on everything, everyone helped each other, and the tension of capitalist dog-eat-dog ethos were scrapped in favor of a truly communal society.
Of course it couldn't, and didn't, last, soon crushed by Republican forces. Nor has it been much of a topical presence in history books since. (The only other feature to depict this troublesome moment in history is the rather crazy Soviet propaganda film The New Babylon, directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg in 1929.) With a threadbare budget, Watkins takes a textual leap, imagining the presence of TV broadcast technology in 1871, and so the airwaves, avidly observed and participated in by everyone, are a battleground between the right-wing Versailles news programming (full of sardonic pundits), and the spontaneous, elated, mic-in-hand reports from the commune's front lines. The mob of over 200 Parisians is in a constant state of feverish, activist excitement, as the powerful elite we see entirely on TV are stuffy, regal, and perniciously dishonest, twisting facts, making absurd summary judgments, and characterizing the communards as crazed outlaws. (Watkins's method involved allowing the cast members to write their own dialogue and cooperatively create their own scenes, and so for the Versailles media figures he cast actual conservatives, and told them to just express their own points of view.) The breaking-news immediacy is infectious, making vitally resonant history feel brand new and electric to the touch.
But of course Watkins's ideas of history belong not merely to the past, but to the present: whether his films have trucked with historical fact or sci-fi speculation, they're always about the here and now, a modern, commercialized social web fraught with alienated masses, out-of-control corporations, self-serving federal powers, and mass media that cheapens and degrades everything it touches. (The irony cannot be lost on Watkins that he, the world's preeminent player in the fields of is-it-real-or-is-it-Memorex slippage, has become the last man standing in defiance against a culture thick with reality shows.) La Commune's dramatic force is titanic, but it is, due to its extraordinary length, profoundly inspiring as well. (Neo-cons, beware.) And not just for us as the commune and the film wind down and face their sad conclusions, Watkins allows his amateur cast to break out of character and speak about France in the new millennium, and it's a measure of the project's fidelity to human truth that there's hardly a difference between the "acted" past and the confessional present.
Is La Commune the most passionate and eloquent progressive-values film ever made? It's difficult to imagine what would happen to the voting patterns in this country if adults actually took in Watkins's history lesson with open minds. After being shunned by the French networks, the movie has been roaming the globe, finding only occasional showings on European television and brief appearances in the most courageous of art-house theaters. Now, on DVD, it's as available to everyone as a boxed set of Family Guy but will it get seen? The three-disc box comes with a revealing, Canadian-made feature portrait of Watkins and La Commune's production, Geoff Bowie's The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins (2001).
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by Michael Atkinson
