Peter Watkins is an English film and television director known for pioneering the ‘docu-drama’ sub-genre of documentary. Presenting radical ideas in an unorthodox fashion, Watkins’ filmography offers an insight into scarily authentic but hypothetical near-future events.
Watkins established his reputation with two docu-dramas from the 1960s, Culloden and The War Game. Both document events from the past using actors and reconstruction. In asking questions of conventional documentary, Watkins reflects his deep concern with mainstream media, which he has called the ‘monoform’.
Throughout films such as The War Game, Watkins typically employs amateur actors and handheld cameras in order to purport a sense of authenticity throughout the dystopian future presented throughout. Alongside this, Watkins includes superficial news report footage as well as voice-over narration within his films to fully immerse the viewer. Watkins’ implementation of documentary filmmaking traits in a seemingly impossible scenario, such as the bloody Scottish battlefields found within Culloden, provide a vast sense of immediate enthrallment throughout his filmography.
Peter Watkins’ films can typically be classed as somewhere between an expository documentary and an observational documentary. Due to the utilisation of narration combined with seemingly impossible ‘fly on the wall’ scenes, Watkins’ films lie in an interesting middle ground within Bill Nichols’ modes of documentary.
Otis Morley’s A-Level Film Studies Blog 