Set sometime in a none too distant future, Peter Watkins’ debut feature Privilege from 1967 told the story of god-like pop superstar Steven Shorter, who is worshiped by millions and manipulated by a coalition government to keep the youth “off the streets and out of politics.”

Inspired by a story from sitcom writer Johnny Speight (creator of Till Death Us Do Part which was remade in America as All in the Family), Privilege was an antidote to Swinging Sixties’ pop naivety. While Speight may have had a more biting satirical tale in mind, screenwriter Norman Bogner together with director Watkins made the film a mix of “mockumentary” and political fable, which was a difficult balance to maintain over a full ninety minutes without falling into parody.
 

 
Though it has its faults, Watkins succeeded overall, and presented the viewer with a selection of set pieces that later influenced scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Lindsay Anderson’s O, Lucky Man! and Ken Russell’s Tommy.

Watkins also later noted how his film:

....was prescient of the way that Popular Culture and the media in the US commercialized the anti-war and counter-culture movement in that country as well. Privilege also ominously predicted what was to happen in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s - especially during the period of the Falkland Islands War.

 

Paul Jones and Jean Shrimpton have a “private” moment.
 
On its release, most of the press hated it as Privilege didn’t fit with their naive optimism that pop music would somehow free the workers from their chains and bring peace and love and drugs and fairies at the bottom of the garden, la-de-da-de-dah, no doubt.

In fact Privilege was at the vanguard of a series of similarly styled films (see above) that would come to define the best of British seventies cinema. The movie would also have its fair share of (unacknowledged) influence on pop artists like David Bowie and Pink Floyd, while Patti Smith covered the film’s opening song “Set Me Free.”
 

 
What’s also surprising is how the film’s lead, Paul Jones (then better known as lead singer of Manfred Mann) never became a star. As can be seen from his performance here as Steven Shorter, Jones could have made a good Mick Travis in If…, or Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

Jones went onto make the equally good The Committee but (shamefully) little work came thereafter apart from reading stories on children’s TV.

Ah, the fickle nature of fame, but perhaps he should have known that from playing Steven Shorter.
 

 
Tonight at Cinefamily in Los Angeles, where they’ll be screening a brand new 35mm print of Peter Watkins’ counterculture classic, Punishment Park (showing for an entire week, co-sponsored by BAFTA) there will be a reunion afterwards of Punishment Park‘s cast and crew:

Completely singular in the world of cinema due to his one-of-a-kind blurring of the lines between documentary and fiction storytelling, Peter Watkins is one of the most neglected major filmmakers of the last half-century. Since the early 1960s, the British-born director has managed, against trying and often adversarial circumstances, to produce a highly original and powerful body of work that engages the worlds of politics, art, history, and literature. That these films remain obscure is a function of such factors as suppression by producers or weak-kneed film distributors, surprisingly unsympathetic — at times hostile — critics, and the filmmaker’s own legendary iconoclasm.

The Cinefamily is very, very excited to bring to Los Angeles the brand-new 35mm print of Punishment Park, Watkins’ lone 1971 foray into stateside filmmaking. An astonishing all-American dystopia that’s both terrifyingly realistic and fantastically hyperbolic, Peter Watkins’ masterpiece Punishment Park melts down the righteous anger of Vietnam protest politics into a nail-biting flow of pure narrative propulsion. In the film’s chilling “what-if” scenario, a uniformly groovy panoply of subversives (featuring pacifists, feminists, professors, draft dodgers and pop stars) stand in resistance against repressive establishment squares at a lethal government-sponsored kangaroo court — but survival soon trumps articulateness, as the prisoners are plunged into the deepest levels of hell right in the open air: a grueling, Most Dangerous Game-style desert death race with no food or water, but plenty of ticked-off cops. Shot guerilla-style on 16mm camera in a Mojave Desert dry lake bed, this docudrama trailblazer is unforgiving, raw, and scorching, and features shocking performances from its non-professional actors, who were cast primarily for their ability to speak on-camera about their real-life political beliefs. While insightfully awash in Seventies counterculture, Punishment Park is no time capsule, for what’s most terrifying is how relevant its alternate-reality police state still feels forty years later.

In addition to our one-week run of Punishment Park, the series also includes Watkins’ scathing showbiz satire Privilege (1967), and his early award-winning British productions The War Game (1965, winner of the 1966 Academy Award for Best Documentary Film) and Culloden (1964).

If you’re unable to make it out to Cinefamily’s historic Punishment Park cast and crew reunion Q&A — you can catch the whole thing streaming live at their blog. The Q&A will kick off at approx. 9:15pm (PST)
 

 

 
A retrospective of the work of film-maker Peter Watkins will take place at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), in Oslo, between the 7th and 14th May.

Watkins is a great and important film-maker, whose career spans over 5 decades and includes such works of brilliance as Culloden (1964), the story of an English massacre of the Scots, retold as an analogy to the Vietnam War; The War Game (1965), the essential banned drama of the after-affects of a nuclear war; Punishment Park (1970), a harrowing imagining of the National Guard pursuing members of the counter-culture; Edvard Munch (1973), Watkins’ personal take on the life of the artist; and La Commune (de Paris, 1871) (1999), an examination into the cause and effects of political interpretations of historical events, through the re-telling of revolution in France.

The retrospective will include screenings of Watkins’ key films, with a discussion of his work.

Peter Watkins: A Retrospective will start with the screening of Edvard Munch, Watkins’s film on three decades of the life of the artist, and will be followed by a public discussion in which the director will address, together with members of the cast and the technical team, the meaning of the film, both at the time it was released and today. Edvard Munch, considered by Watkins the most personal film he has ever made, dramatises three decades of the life of the artist and provides a raw and haunting portrait of the creative process as embedded within the spirit and the social relations of its time.

This will be followed by screenings of Watkins’s other Scandinavian projects, The Gladiators (1968), Evening Land (1976), and The Freethinker (1992–94), a biography of August Strindberg with four different timelines and a spiral structure that will be shown on the 100th anniversary of the artist, writer, and playwright’s death in 1912. Additional screenings will include The War Game (1965), Punishment Park (1970), and La Commune (de Paris, 1871) (1999), films in which the dramatisation of historical past or the present results in revealing political assessments that are at the same time critical reflections on filmic language, distribution networks, and media in general.

Central to much Watkins work is the role of mass media within society and its insidious effects. Here, in an interview from 2001, Watkins discusses the damaging role of mass media, in particular the misunderstanding in the role of mass communication, and how the contemporary media landscape allows little space for independent and critical thought. Though Watkins may sound like a man with bad indigestion, his thinking and analysis is clear and still hugely relevant.

Fop details of Peter Watkins: A Retrospective check here.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

‘The War Game’: Peter Watkins terrifying film from 1965

 
You had 3 minutes to close the windows, pull the curtains, fill basins with water, then collect together foodstuffs, torches and radios, before removing the door from its hinges, leaning it against a wall, covering with cushions or sandbags, and sheltering with your loved ones underneath.

Three minutes.

Time enough for one last smoke, and a tumbler of that 25-year-old Macallan - a dash of spring water, no ice.

At school in the 1970s, we were shown Civil Defense Films on flickering Super 8 projectors that depicted the seeming inevitability of nuclear war. Now it’s localized terrorism, back then it was the annihilation of the country, the planet, us.

Of course, through time, we became inured to all of that, and the thought of an all-out nuclear war became a hovering shadow - sometimes we noticed it, sometimes not. It only seemed real when presented as a film The Day After, or as a TV drama, Threads. But it would have hit home hardest, if the BBC had ignored the pressure from the Labour government, and shown Peter Watkins’ film The War Game.

The BBC withdrew the film from its planned transmission on August 6 1965, the twentieth anniversary of Hiroshima, claiming:

“...the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting…”

“Too horrifying” was one of the reasons it should have been aired. Instead we were shown those strangely surreal Civil Defense Films, Duck and Cover, Protect and Survive, in dusty, distracted classrooms, where they had little lasting effect.

The War Game was given a limited cinema release, making it eligible for the Oscars, where it won the Best Documentary Feature award in 1966. Watkins was so outraged by the BBC’s cavils, that he quit the UK for Sweden, and continued to make his distinct, powerful and political films - most recently La Commune (2000), a “6-hour re-enactment of the 1871 Paris Commune which examined the role of media in the modern global economy.”

With The War Game, Watkins continued his:

...experiments in blending fiction and documentary techniques which he had begun with his earlier play Culloden (1964), Watkins presented data drawn from his detailed research - encompassing interviews, Civil Defence documents, scientific studies and accounts of the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts and the non-nuclear devastation of Dresden, Hamburg and other cities during World War II - in the form of charts, quotes and vox-pop style face-to-face interviews with ordinary people. These he embedded into his own imagined scenario of the impact of a blast in Kent following the escalation of an East-West conflict.

The War Game was eventually transmitted in Britain on July 31 1985.
 

 
Bonus Civil Defense Films, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Damien Smith