the sacred to the profane, with the same upbeat formula repeated night after night. “What we are being told by that,” asserts Watkins, “is that nothing is happening and nothing is really going wrong or going to go wrong, with us or without us. We are being told we are useless.” Watkins looks at his audience. He has had his way with us; we are forced to look at the darker side of reality with him. THE DARK SIDE W Watkins has written that it was the banning of The War Game by the B.B.C. (certainly the most powerful media voice in Britain) that threw him into a dialogue with the public about the media — its nature and its paradoxes. In his own work, some three theatrical films and six films made for television, Watkins has nearly always insisted upon critiquing or drawing attention to the structures and rules of the very medium he is working in. The War Game is as much about television and the public's expectations of television as it is about the breaking apart of a society under nuclear attack. In a Willamette class called Visual Thinking, he laments the fact that studies show that television news is the source of 85% of the public’s information and that all such information is squeezed into bites of about four seconds regardless of the subject. He views television, particularly the news, as a kind of “alphastate entrapment, which bypasses the analytical left brain altogether, entering directly into the receptive right brain.” The only positive aspect, Watkins adds, is that some 65% of those watching the news forget everything instantly, according to a lengthy study he and several communications experts recently completed in Australia. “Most people are left in an absolute void,” Watkins painfully concludes. Unlike some speakers who glibly toss off conjectures, Watkins exposes his philosophical anguish when he speaks. When a student .asks what kind of a news system would be preferable to what we now have, Peter is quite willing to say that he knows of none, as yet. He moves carefully, glancing up suddenly with a wide-eyed tension. His manner is a stark contrast to the laid-back security of these Willamette students, most of whom were infants when The War Game was made. False security, shored up by the illusions offered by television, is Watkins’ greatest horror. When he talks, Watkins punctuates his language with sound effects he makes with his mouth — bathtubs draining, cars changing gears, records sticking, windshield wipers thunking. His words take on the textures of real life. No surprise then, to find out he used to be an actor. At sixteen, he left his regular studies to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts when Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole were fellow students. Later, eating dinner at a table crowded with students in a dorm at Willamette, Watkins seems ill at ease, perplexed. He says that he is “positively agog (sound effect) at trying to raise money in the U.S. for a ‘peace’ film.” The basic problem, he is convinced, is that television and the motion-picture industry operate as if the peace movement were separate from the public, just as the anti-Vietnam war movement was perceived as separate from the public until it became so large that it became the public. “No one in the U.S. will finance an anti-war movie when the sentiment is seen only as part of the fringe,” Watkins concludes. A student at the table suggests that an ‘objective’ presentation is needed. Watkins smiles slightly. “I’m not into that. There’s no such thing as objectivity, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Watkins’ impressions of the international television and motion picture industry in 1983 are gloomier than they were in 1966 when the scandal over the banning of The War Game brought him to the attention of Universal Studios. Universal produced a series of low-budget features in Britain in the late 60s, including Charlie Bubbles, Farenheit 451, as well as Watkins’ Privilege. Watkins’ most metaphorical and least verite film, Privilege concerns a famous rock star who is used by the government and the media to manipulate popular taste, to divert the public from serious consideration of society’s problems. It’s an expres- sionistic work in the sense that it speaks to raw emotions of powerlessness and alienation. Privilege was critically perceived as either “hysterical” or “brilliant.” Audiences were generally unwilling to relate to the idea of themselves as mere pawns in someone else’s game. Watkins now feels that in any future work he must suggest the possibility of choice to his audiences. “After all,” he says, “we have to have confidence in order to deal with our destiny.” There were those at Willamette WATKINS NOW FEELS THAT IN ANY FUTURE WORK HE MUST SUGGEST THE POSSIBILITY OF CHOICE TO HIS AUDIENCES. “AFTER ALL, WE HAVE TO HAVE CONFIDENCE IN ORDER TO DEAL WITH OUR DESTINY." who didn’t cope well with Watkins’ downbeat truths about society, one woman wondering aloud about his “negativity” as she left a Watkins presentation. For some, his messages were “depressing.” Sitting in Salem’s Capitol Building coffee shop, Peter too is depressed — by the failure to find money for his new film, by Willamette’s lack of intensity, and by the never-ending rain. A conversation reveals him to be startlingly similar to Edvard Munch as portrayed in Watkins’ own film Edvard Munch. Watkins’ soul lies exposed in his movies. Like Munch, the Norwegian painter who concentrated particular emotions so forcefully in his work that the whole of Expressionism was unleashed, Peter Watkins is an expressionist. Watkins isolates certain emotions in his films — aching loneliness or abject horror for example. In Culloden, you see newsreel-like footage of a Highlander hacking with his sword at a British soldier who suddenly looks at the camera to reveal his slashed eyes. The hacking elicits a kind of horror, particularly because of the verite style of the shot. Then when the man turns to look at the camera, the shot suddenly becomes metaphorical; the unexpected switch in style is in itself highly expressive. The emotion isolated and expressed in Edvard Munch is an incredible passion, both love’s passion and pain’s passion. Watkins has mastered the technique of using a single shot repeatedly as a motif so that it has cumulative emotional impact. In Munch, after the artist has established his relationship with his lover/muse/torturer Mrs. Heiberg, a particular shot of Mrs. Heiberg leaning slowly forward to kiss Edvard’s neck is often repeated. Love’s passion becomes pain’s passion with excruciating poignancy. And a pervasive grey-blue, which both Munch and Watkins use expressively to evoke a painful repressed agony, fills Edvard Munch with life’s darker side. Like Munch, Peter Watkins is a break-through kind of artist, and, like Munch, Watkins has been painfully shaped by suppression and non- acceptance in his own country. Like Munch, Watkins has moved from country to country, going where the work would be supported ... to Sweden, Norway, the U.S., Denmark, Australia, and now again the U.S. As he sits in the Capitol coffee shop, Watkins is unsure if he'll ever make another film. “Actually, I have no qualms about leaving film behind,” he says. “The whole pleasure of film has been traumatized out of me. I refuse to conform to the ritual of a script as separate from the human beings who are playing the characters. I refuse to conform to the commercial film world’s ritual of emotions: three griefs and two angers. No, that’s probably already too complicated for them.” Watkins works only with nonprofessional actors and has an intuitive trust in the people he selects to play in his films. He believes in the kind of emotions conveyed through his non-actors and prefers their naturalness to the actorish behavior in most commercial films. Watkins often casts for intuitive reasons, such as inventing a Judge Hoffman kind of role in his 1971 Punishment Park when a man who looked like the Chicago Seven’s Judge Hoffman turned up to audition. Watkins says that those who have financed his films and some who have written about them have worried about his use of non-actors. “I think it’s because they fear the loss of any control mechanism,” he says. His sense of despair at his profession seems complete. Yet film has not always meant despair to Watkins. He has been able to make films that looked and were shot differently from those being done before he happened along, wherever he has gone. According to the book Peter Watkins by Joe Gomez, when Watkins was shooting Culloden, the B.B.C.’s best cameraman was assigned to work with him. The cameraman initially had misgivings about taking his camera off the tripod, about running around with it, about not knowing in advance what the focus would be, all of which lead to a cinema verite look. He ended up convinced that Watkins’ conceptions were brilliant. The same thing happened between Watkins and the cinematographer assigned to Edvard Munch by Sveriges Radio/ Norsk Rikskringkasting, its producers. At first frustrated at being asked to abandon his tried and true ‘professional’ ways as a cameraman, the cinematographer was eventually liberated by the release from constraints and became a full creative partner to Watkins on the film. As a matter of fact, cathartic release is what Watkins seems always to strive for, both on the screen and with his collaborators — the non-actors, townspeople, and unchained technicians who come to life via Watkins’ passion. A RAY OF SUN w WATKINS' TRIP TO Oregon has inspired the showing of Edvard Munch at the Clinton Street Theatre. Great surprise: The Oregonian’s Ted Mahar has called Edvard Munch one of the ten best films he’s ever seen. The Clinton Street is sold out. Peter Watkins smiles when he hears that. The dreary Oregon rain has stopped. After the screening at the Clinton, his film a great success, Watkins At press time Peter Watkins indicates that a portion of his new anti-nuclear film will be shot in Portland. All those who wish to be on the mailing list for public meetings concerning the project, or wishing to support or work on the film, please write to Watkins Project, 3627 SW Kelly, Portland, OR 97201. talks vigorously to an audience of genuine fans. They ask question after question. For an instant here and there Peter seems perilously close to happy, albeit exhausted. Since his thoughts these days focus on breaking down the illusions and manipulations perpetrated by television, Peter Watkins no longer thinks the same way about the manipulations (of editing, of sound, of mood, of style) he perfected in Edvard Munch. After initially saying it’s hard for him to answer questions today about a film made in 1974, he launches, with increasing pleasure, into a performance as intense as his films. As Watkins talks, he looks poised on the edge of something. He holds his hands out flat in front of him, palms up, fingers pointed towards each other. He tells how the woman who played Mrs. Heiberg was feeling extreme grief over a love affair at the time she was chosen to play the part. “Mrs. Heiberg in the film is a kind of ‘living history,’ because she is that woman expressing her own self as much as she is any kind of ‘truth’ about the character of the real Mrs. Heiberg,” explains Watkins. “That way there is a certain fusion between then and now which breaks down the rigidity of Time.” Watkins talks about how he came to cast the quiet, nervous young man who plays Edvard Munch and who actually looks so much like Munch. The man answered an ad in the paper, was an art student himself, had had asthma as a child just like Munch. “He and I talked a lot, read a lot, read diaries,” remembers Watkins. “He spent a couple of months talking to the woman who was to play Mrs. Heiberg. They developed a very real bond which you can see reflected on the screen.” When Edvard Munch was first televised in Norway in 1974, it had an extraordinary impact on Norwegian press and audiences who truly took the film to heart and loved it, according to Joe Gomez in his book on Watkins. But producers NRK and Sveriges Radio generally tried to ignore the film on all levels, refusing to make it available for sale to other national television systems until Watkins angrily protested. Next, just as Watkins was involved in talks with Sveriges Radio about a cinema version of Edvard Munch, NRK destroyed all the original soundtracks of the film. The situation deteriorated even further, including the refusal by NRK to submit the problematically-finished 35mm. blowup of Munch to the Cannes Festival on the grounds that it didn’t wish to compete with the Norwegian film industry, even though no film from Norway was entered that year. Watkins struggled for over a year on the complications following the release of Munch, finally seeing his film open in New York in September, 1976. Most of Peter Watkins’ career has been no smoother. It is seemingly only pain’s passion driving him forward. In Gomez’ book Watkins is quoted: “I knew, instinctively, that Edvard Munch himself — despite endless hardship and personal anguish, despite the acute repressiveness of his background and the social environment in which he worked — remained entirely true to himself, on every level of his existence, and let nothing stand in the way of his self-expression — no matter how much pain, or professional backlash, that self-expression caused him. It is on this level that I have tried to create this film — in recognition of the example that Edvard Munch set for me, and sets for all of us.” Watkins left the U.S. for Sweden, with a brief trip to Australia, in search of the situation that will click, that will seem intuitively right. When he learned that Edvard Munch had played to packed houses in Portland and had been held over for a week, he wrote that he had been quite taken with his experience in Portland and that things were finally looking up for the financing of his new film. ■ 32 Clinton St. Quarterly
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