PETER WATKINS1 ICY FIRE BY PENNY ALLEN INTENSE CHILD OF SIX OR SEVEN DURING THE GERMAN BOMBARDMENTS OF ENGLAND, PETER WATKINS SPENT MANY LONG NIGHTS HUDDLED WITH HIS MOTHER AND BROTHER IN THE ONLY SAFE PLACE IN THE HOUSE — UNDERNEATH A STEEL- TOPPED TABLE WRAPPED ROUND WITH PROTECTIVE STEEL WIRE MESH. HIS FATHER OFF TO WAR, THE CHILD, LIKE MANY ANOTHER SUBURBAN LONDON CHILD AT THE TIME, WATCHED HIS MOTHER AND BROTHER AND LISTENED AS THE V-l "DOODLEBUGS" OVERHEAD CUT THEIR ENGINES, SIGNALING THEIR IMPENDING EXPLOSION SOMEWHERE NEARBY. THE LOSS OF EVERYTHING . . . HIS FAMILY, HIS HOUSE, HIS FUTURE, HIS LIFE . . . OFTEN SEEMED POSSIBLE, OR MAYBE EVEN CERTAIN. TIME AFTER TIME DEATH HOVERED CLOSE, WHILE PETER AND HIS FAMILY SAT IN THEIR CAGE LIKE LABORATORY MICE. WATKINS- ALTER-EGO AND MRS. HEIBERG IN EDVARD MUNCH. BELOW, A SCENE FROM THE WAR GAME, BANNED BV ITS SPONSOR, THE B.B.C. Penny Allen is a Portland writer and filmmaker Twenty years later, Peter Watkins made the 1966 Oscar-winning documentary The War Game about the events during and just after an imagined nuclear attack on the south of England. The movie was shot mostly in a newsreel style — verite camera jolts and refocusing included in order to underline immediacy and authenticity. The B.B.C., which had financed the film, refused to air it, saying that “its effect is too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.” In the U.S. to raise funds for an updated “war game” movie, Peter Watkins came to Willamette University in Salem this March as part of a series of speakers analyzing the modern media. Watkins was at Willamette for two days, talking, in classrooms, as well as giving a public lecture where he showed The War Game. Willamette University is Oregon’s oldest, an ivy-covered collection of handsome brick buildings across from the State Capitol. Senator Mark Hatfield was President of Willamette, and one might think there would be a connection between Hatfield’s policies of peace and his alma mater’s interest in Peter Watkins, but there really isn’t. In fact, most of the audience gathered for The War Game — Willamette students and a few Salem townspeople out for a cultural event — had never heard of Watkins and nearly everyone was seeing the film for the first time. The War Game is a sort of dramatized document of an imagined future, so one is hard put to call it a documentary. It is precisely this ' totally original aspect of the film that galled the B.B.C. back in 1966; the film looks like cinema verite (true cinema), but it was completely staged and performed. The B.B.C. documentaries of the era were, by contrast, rigidly standardized according to the famous B.B.C. doctrine of ‘objectivity.’ Nothing untoward or outside-of-formula ever turned up on the British telly in those days. The B.B.C., in banning Watkins’ film, said that The War Game “conveys the sense that what it is showing could happen to people who might be watching it.” Other B.B.C. sentiment held that the film wasn’t very English, since it didn’t show the legendary resilience of the English under attack. The odd thing is that Watkins’ first film for the B.B.C., Culloden (1964), had reconstructed realistically, with news-like footage, the brutal 18th century battle of Culloden in which Britain's Scottish Highland clans were systematically slaughtered by the British army. Culloden's style and technique parallel The War Game’s, but the B.B.C. proudly broadcast Culloden to resounding critical praise for a “brilliant and unforgettable breakthough.” The only difference was that with The War Game, Watkins had ventured into the present or the possible future, and, furthermore, he had presented a scenario totally in contrast to the officially-accepted British national defense policy. Now, some seventeen years after the film was made, The War Game shocks the Salem audience, as the well-intentioned sensible English people on the screen are rendered helpless by a nuclear blast’s effects on their houses, their eyes, their oxygen supply, and their social fabric. The startling images linger long in the memory. Once the screening’s over, his film having introduced him, Watkins smiles and says, “Nothing I will say tonight is the truth. Only an opinion.” Everyone laughs. “The media, including this film, deal with subjective realities. What they say is not the truth. Only an opinion.” Nowadays, Watkins approaches the subject of possible nuclear disaster as a way of looking at the very means by which we learn about the nuclear ‘question’ — the media. “Why,” he asks with feeling, his voice rising, the tides obviously churning beneath his controlled exterior, “why is our emotional response to the threat of annihilation so compressed?” There is a long pained silence, long enough to think about the fear of death held at the back of a dry throat. “Why is it,” Watkins answers himself finally, “that we have given over all responsibility for how we receive information?” He strains towards the audience, holding the tension. The audience begins to focus intently on this powerful man who virtually insists upon unleashing that long- denied emotional response. He becomes the director before our eyes, shaping our behavior. Television news, Watkins goes on to say, compresses our emotional response to the threat of nuclear death by trivializing, by reducing every subject, no matter how profound or foolish, to the same length story, with the same series of shots, with the same unfeeling voice linking Clinton St. Quarterly 31
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