cost the equivalent of more than a million dollars). His individual achievement in seeing the film to completion was a way of suggesting that all of us, whether we're involved in media or not, can and must do a good bit more than we tell ourselves we can do, if we care about delivering a more humane, progressive world to our descendants.
The 14 1/2 hours of
are organized into an immense filmic weave that includes candid discussions with 'ordinary people,' mostly family groups from around the world, about international issues; community dramatizations of the absurdities of contemporary civil defense planning; a variety of forms of deconstructive analysis of conventional media practices; presentations of critical films and photographs by others; portraits of people and places; and a wealth of specific information about the knot of contemporary issues that include the world arms race and military expenditures in general, world hunger, the environment, gender politics, the relationship of the violent past and the present, and, especially, the role of the media and of modern educational systems with regard to international issues.
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Since 1987, Watkins has worked on a variety of projects related to
and he has begun to formulate new projects. His commitment to critique has led him to undertake an extensive exploration of
itself. With the assistance of Vida Urbonavicius, he has developed an epic 'teaching guide' for the film, a critique of the widespread tendency among filmmakers of all kinds to move on after each film project without considering, in any sustained public way, the meaning and impact of the previous work: to become, in other words, obsessed with production itself while ignoring how this production fits into the larger network of eventsthe way those who produce nuclear weapons focus on each new job at hand, rather than its wider implications. Watkins has also continued to work with community and student groups in Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.
Two interviews with Watkins follow. The first was recorded in Toronto in 1981, soon after Watkins had spent a summer teaching at Columbia University and not long before his Strindberg project collapsed (though, as this is written, Watkins expects to work with a Norwegian student group on a new version of the project in 199293). The second was recorded in Utica, New York, in November 1983 and January 1984, soon after
(it was called 'The Nuclear War Film' at the time the interview was recorded) had gotten underway.
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Part 1
Let's start with that
experience I had at Columbia. It was a summer session. There were about thirty-five students, a very interesting bunch. I selected four subjects for us to deal with: two were
[1977] and
[1978]. Then there was the material we were able to get from the Television News Archive at Vanderbilt University. They've been off-air recording all the major network news broadcasts every night since 1968. For a minimal fee, you can ask them to send you a copy tape of any item of the news, providing you can identify it. [The Television News Archive publishes a monthly index to the evening news
which provides summaries of individual news items. Tapes of news stories can be rented from the Archive. In addition to several thousand hours of evening newscasts from ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Archive includes presidential speeches (since 1970), coverage of political conventions, the Watergate hearings, and other materials]; it so happened that someone had ordered every
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item relating to Iran from three months prior to the fall of the Shah to his leaving the countrytwelve hours of one- and two-minute segments. We pounced on that. Then we ordered everything about Three Mile Island transmitted for a month after the accident. So we had four great subjects, each relating to historyeither contemporary history or past history. What we wanted to see was what modern media is doing to change our perceptions of history past or present. We found that the distortions of past history in
and
are almost identical to the distortions of our perception of modern events.
Anyway, we got this mass of material, and these thirty-five people broke up into four groups. We used a very open methodology, which I would like to see become part of the educational system and part of normal community activity. It has to do with analyzing and participating in the way you receive information, which is something we have to get into very, very heavily now. The theories for everything I'm doing are based on that kind of practice. I gave the group various ideas of how they could work with the material, and they added many of their own, splayed off in many directions: one would go and interview the guy who produced a show; another would count the cuts and look at various audiovisual rhythms; somebody else would look at the historical value, or analyze the text looking for hidden messages or subtexts; another would look at the advertising. The
group was the strongest. One thing we found was that the values that come out underneath this superficially rather liberal, unusual, first-time look at the institution of slavery were really worrying, and it's not that we were being communistic or hyper-radically paranoid.
Can you give me an example?
The students immediately pounced on the fact that the only suggestions of overt rebellion on the part of the black people in the entire run of
was a single reference to the Nat Turner Rebellion: you see a body half covered in a ditch. That's the nearest you come to anyone rebelling, not only against slavery but against the values that are imposed in this series. The
