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| The Journey |
Peter Watkins’ The Journey, completed in 1987, is three things in addition to a culmination of an unusual and often remarkable career: it is an index of the unusual process that produced it; it is a generally under-appreciated, epic (14 _ hours) “documentary”; and it was, or was meant to be the catalyst for an international community committed to ongoing political involvement and action.
Watkins is probably best-known for The War Game (1965), which dramatizes events leading up to a nuclear holocaust in Britain, the moment when the holocaust begins, and its seemingly unending aftermath. Though widely understood as a documentary, The War Game is actually a critique of media convention: specifically, of the forms of “involvement” promoted by commercial media fiction and of the “detachment” and “objectivity” of mass-media news. Made for prime-time broadcast by the BBC, The War Game proved so powerful—it is still a film of considerable power—that it was banned not only from BBC broadcast, but from broadcast on television anywhere in the world for twenty years (after Watkins created a press brouhaha over the suppression of the film, the BBC did release The War Game as a feature, and it toured art-house cinemas). The fear seems to have been that if The War Game were seen by a wide-enough public, a mass public, it might actually have a serious political impact in England and throughout the West.
The process that produced The Journey began in 1982 as an attempt to remake The War Game, using a network of grass-roots organizations throughout Britain, along with some support from Central Television in London, to raise funds—so that this film could not be summarily suppressed by a single centralized organization. When his attempt to remake The War Game collapsed, Watkins began to conceptualize not only a different kind of film, but a new kind of filmmaking. The collapse of “The Nuclear War Film” convinced Watkins, once and for all, that film and television production organizations were essentially so inflexible that there was no point either in trying to collaborate with them on a truly political film or in trying to change them. He looked toward a new, untapped resource.
During the 1970s, in between filmmaking projects, Watkins had traveled—as many independent filmmakers did (and do)—through that network of arts organizations and institutions of higher learning that program alternative cinema. And like other filmmakers, Watkins had developed ongoing contacts with people in a variety of locations in North America, Europe, and Australia. Until 1982 Watkins had accepted these contacts as an alternative exhibition network within which programmers and audiences were committed to a broader, more openly politicized exhibition schedule than was evident in commercial theaters or on television. Watkins’ first step was to challenge this alternative network to become involved in producing an openly political film, a collaborative global film.
By the end of 1983 Watkins had been able to organize a loose international grass-roots organization committed to providing resources for what was at first called “The War Game 2” and/or “The Peace Film.” Watkins saw this organization as a means for activating the participants’ political ideas and feelings and for creating channels of communication that could reach beyond the participants’ local surroundings. Local networks formed in each of ten nations (in several instances in more than one location in particular nations) to raise funds, to assemble a crew in each proposed shooting location, and to arrange for local families and individuals to be the focus of extended interviews and to participate in community psycho-dramatizations of disaster scenarios that could result from current political policy. At this stage, The Journey had much in common with Christo’s projects, which are as much about the redirection of community process as they are about the finished artwork that the community process produces.
At the directorial level Watkins’ own process differed from conventional media procedures both in the amount and the kind of work he was willing to take on. During 1983 and 1984 Watkins functioned continually as an international person, organizing and filming in three American locations, in Canada, Mexico, Scotland (in Glasgow and on the Hebrides Islands), in France, West Germany, Norway, the Soviet Union, Mozambique, Japan, Australia, and on the island of Tahiti. He did not travel with an entourage, but moved from one nation to the next, from one language system to another, alone, relying on the good will of the people in the locales where he filmed. He arrived at the National Film Board in Canada, which donated editing facilities, in early 1985 with more than a hundred hours of footage and spent the following year and a half editing the film. It premiered in various film festivals in 1987.
As a finished film, The Journey is an immense weave of elements, including interviews with individual families, documentations of aspects of the global arms race, recollections by survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Hamburg during World War 2, community psychodramas of possible disaster scenarios, presentations by other artists (a photo show by Robert Del Tredici, songs by various participants . . .), and textual information of various kinds. Each element becomes a motif and intersects in a variety of ways with other motifs to elaborate Watkins’ critique of modern life.
The primary focus of the film is the family discussions, which are edited so that each person’s input is included as completely as possible. For Watkins the continual affirmation of family values throughout Western cultures is both hopeful and deeply ironic. While we pretend that family interaction is the source of education and morality, the family is seldom the site of serious thinking about political realities. In Watkins’ discussions with families around the world, it is obvious—often from the body language of family members—that these mothers and fathers, however committed they are to raising their children well and however concerned they are about their children’s education, have almost never talked with their children—seriously, patiently, and in detail--about the social and political issues that involve them and have never used the family as an organization working for social change. The Journey models new forms of familial interaction both “around the kitchen table” and with neighboring families, and new ways of using media as a catalyst for family and community education.
Because it is a “peace film” and full of polemic, because Watkins’ political attitudes, and those of his collaborators, seem quite clear, the tendency has been to assume that The Journey is obvious, even shallow. And yet, the moment one begins to consider particular images, specific sequences, individual juxtapositions of sound and image . . .—and to read the film’s gestures as conscious and careful critique of conventional media practice, The Journey opens up. While the ostensible subjects of The Journey are the arms race, world hunger, racism, and gender, Watkins’ real goal is a thorough critique of those institutions ostensibly dedicated to human development and awareness: the nuclear family, schools, and the news media; and of the ways in which these institutions help to confirm a feeling of powerlessness that keeps even people who consider themselves politically free, from taking part in progressive change.
As a whole, and in its every detail, The Journey is meant to model a new way of coming to terms with the realities that surround us and new ways of engaging modern media in this process. Even when The Journey seems most conventional, it is in fact engaged in critique. For example, the film begins with Watkins, on the soundtrack (the screen is dark), introducing himself and the film. While his comments are straightforward and unusually candid for voice-over, Watkins’ introduction is also an instance of the disembodied male voice of traditional documentary (“the voice of god”), a dimension of film rhetoric Watkins has been examining since his earliest films. As The Journey proceeds, Watkins-as-narrator takes his own “journey” and soon enters the imagery, becoming engaged with those he talks with—critiquing the tradition of journalistic and documentary detachment and objectivity. The Journey is that rare film that is both clear about its politics and endlessly subtle and suggestive in its particulars.
Finally, I’ve come to realize that Watkins meant The Journey to be a means to an end, even beyond what has already been suggested. Watkins has always distrusted the tendency of mass media to capitulate to the vertical structuring of national power. The Journey developed as a form of horizontal media communication: those who were involved in the production in various parts of the world were in contact with one another, sharing information and resources, and later on, during and after the shooting, sometimes even visiting other participants. I’m sure Watkins hoped that, once The Journey was finished and the original screenings were over, those of us who participated in producing the film would remain in contact and would continue to see each other as colleagues in working across national and linguistic boundaries toward a more humane world, that we would become an on-going, informal, grass-roots, global political organization that would continue to open up channels for communication and to produce community events and media. That this didn’t happen, or didn’t happen for long—at least not on the scale that one might have hoped--was not Watkins’ failure, but ours.
© Scott MacDonald
LUX is showing Peter Watkin’s The Journey: A Film for Peace in two parts over two days on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd November 2003 (approximately 7 hours each day with breaks) starting at 1pm each day. Multilingual with English subtitles
At: The Curtain Theatre, (behind the Arts Café) Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London, E1 6AB (nearest tube: Aldgate East)
Tickets: £15 for the weekend (£10 unwaged/students). (day ticket £10/£8 concessions)
Tickets available in advance from LUX. Send cheque payable to ‘LUX’ and s.a,e. to The Journey, LUX, 3rd Floor, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ. Tickets also available on the day
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