one can learn to love the Bomb, 'provided that it is clean and of a good family'; ordinary citizens revealing their utter ignorance about strontium 90are either candid or based on real statements.
emphasizes the fact that both entertainment films and documentaries are fabrications, the function of which is to maintain the system through which more products of both kinds can reach consumers.
In the years immediately following
Watkins completed a series of feature films that, in one way or another, elaborated on the critique of mass media he had developed in
and
(1967),
(1969), and most notably perhaps,
(1970), the one Watkins film produced entirely in North America. Like earlier Watkins films,
takes place in a potential near future: the war in Southeast Asia has expanded and China has become involved, fueling an even more fervent resistance at home and causing President Nixon to use the authority given him by the 1950 Internal Security Act to establish a set of Punishment Parks, where war resisters are punished and law enforcement personnel trained, simultaneously. The film reveals what happens to one group of resisters who have been found guilty of treason, while the next group is being tried and found guilty by a citizens' tribunal. Watkins used nonprofessional actors, most cast according to type: people in sympathy with the war resistance 'played' the resisters; people committed to 'law and order' 'played' law enforcement personnel. Their dialogue was improvised. The finished film is a relentless, candid psychodramatization of the attitudes and language of a large group of Americans in 1971.
Watkins's next project,
(1974), critiqued conventional
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Boy's eyes burned by atomic flash in Watkins's
(1965).
film and television biographies.
is, simultaneously, an explicit, carefully researched biography of the Norwegian expressionist
an implicit autobiography. Like
recreates a historical period on the basis of careful research, but 'modernizes' the period by interviewing citizens of nineteenth-century Norway and Germany as if they are our contemporaries. Again, the result is a negation of the conventional cinematic boundaries between past and present and between different nations.
was followed by two films and a video
(filmed in Denmark in 1975),
(videotaped in Sweden in 1975), and
(filmed in Denmark in 1977)none of which received widespread attention or distribution. Several other projects collapsed, including film biographies of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, Italian futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg, and a proposed remake of
.
By the early eighties, Watkins had become convinced that film and television production organizations were essentially so inflexiblein terms of their means of production and in terms of the media language they usethat there was no longer any point in trying to change them
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from the inside. He began to develop plans for a new kind of project, which was to become his magnum opus: the 14 1/2-hour
(1987). By the end of 1983, Watkins had organized a grass-roots, voluntary, international system committed to the production of an openly political film. Many of those who agreed to work with Watkins were programmers and exhibitors who had presented his work on the college circuit. Watkins had challenged them to commitat least in this one instanceto the
of an openly political media critique. In fourteen countries, local organizations formed to raise money, to assemble local crews, and to find local citizens willing to be the focus of interviews and community dramatizations. During 1983 and 1984 Watkins filmed in three American locations (Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Utica/Ilion, New York); in France, West Germany, Norway, the Soviet Union; in the Hebrides Islands and Glasgow, Scotland; in Mexico, Mozambique, and Tahiti (despite some French government resistance); and in several Australian and Japanese locations. He did not travel protected by a personal or professional entourage; he moved from one nation to the next, from one language system to the next, alone, relying almost entirely on the good will of the people in the locales where he filmed.
When Watkins arrived at the National Film Board of Canada early in 1985 to edit the film, he had shot over a hundred hours of material, and more important, had demonstrated that a filmmaker could interrogate contemporary systems not simply by working within them, but by moving across them, continually exceeding their limits, and finishing a complex, expensive project (the
