Peter Watkins stands as one of the most singular, committed, and powerful directors of the last 40 years. His prizewinning experimental documentaries Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1960), reconstructing respectively World War I and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, earned screenings and a job at the BBC, which he used to make the remark­ able Culloden, a Brechtian deconstruction of documentary technique in an account of the bloody defeat of the 1742 Jacobin rebellion in Scotland. Culloden already exhibits hallmark techniques: handheld camera, direct-to-camera address from historical and fictional characters, and interviews with them, though the near surrealism of placing a modem on-camera reporter on the battlefield is a humorous touch rarely paralleled in his later work. Using, as he has throughout his oeuvre, the heightened naturalism of amateur actors, the program contrasts the effete figure of Bonnie Prince Charlie, actually a European adventurer, with the impoverished and still feudally bound Gaelic-speaking peasantry of the Highlands, a cruel indictment of both Scottish patriotism and the brutal British reprisals on the Highlanders. His next work, The War Game, "pre­ constructs" the effects of a nuclear attack on southern

     England. Perhaps it was not just Watkins's deadpan voice-over, nor the matter-of-fact delivery of official prognostications of casualties and security measures, but his comparison of nuclear firestorms with the ever­ sensitive British bombing of Dresden in 1945 (subject of two later banned programs in the United Kingdom) that saw the film banned. Reduced to fund-raising shows for nuclear disarmament groups, the program has rarely been discussed in terms other than those of its subject and its political fate. But its groundbreaking and still-powerful juxtaposition of interview, reconstruction, graphics, titles, and the collision of dry data with images of horror still shock, the grainy black-and­ white imagery and use of telephoto, sudden zooms, and wavering focus creating an atmosphere of immediacy unique in British television. Fifty minutes that shook the world, it was banned for 25 years by the BBC amid storms of controversy, which were reopened when it finally made British TV screens in a Channel 4 season of banned titles.

     The War Game took the 1966 best documentary Oscar, opening the door to Hollywood. Universal bankrolled the feature film Privilege about a pop messiah in a near-future police state but pulled the plug on an ambitious reconstruction of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the subjugation of the Native Americans. From the late 1960s, Watkins's career is marked by projects cut, abandoned, or suppressed: Watkins himself listed 14 in a document seeking support for his 1980s film The Journey. The Gladiators, made for Swedish TV, about popular acquiescence in militarism, used the device of a fictional television program, "The Peace Game," in which generals play games of strategy, and the savage 16-millimeter allegory of Nixon's America Punishment Park, in which "deviants" are given their chance to survive in a nightmarish outlaw zone, both saw broadcast and theatrical release, though limited. These two titles extend Watkins's repertoire of effects by their focus on individual characters caught up in evil times, though the use of montage cutting and extreme naturalism in performances combine to minimize identification, and increase the intellectual engagement of the viewer with the narrative. Closer in technique to Brecht's practice than his theory, Watkins failed to benefit either from the vanguardism of contemporary film theory or the political clout of less challenging auteurs like Ken Loach and Denis Potter.

     Other  completed  projects  like The  Seventies People (on suicide and the failures of social democracy) and Evening Land (a terrorist kidnap contrasted with the quelling of a strike in a military shipyard), both for Danish TV, were suppressed. Only the biopic of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch has had major distribution, though  mainly as theatrical  film, rather than the three-part series it was originated as, Edvard Munch's passion derives not only from the subject and Watkins's handling, but from the identification between director and derided artist. The series is distinguished again by direct-cinema techniques, but also by complex editing around motifs, especially faces and flowers, and by multitracked sound design layering the characters' past, present, and future into a rich montage. As in his earlier documentaries, Munch adds voice-over to the sound mix, sometimes even over blank screens, to connect the narrative with worldwide events and political analysis. Carrying the use of natural light pioneered in his BBC projects into color, the film achieves a profoundly affecting image of a consumptive society unable to credit those who warn of its demise until it is too late. It is its political analysis and, stylistically, its use of sophisticated montage editing that distinguish Munch and its predecessors from the handheld stylistics of some recent U.S. cop shows.

     In 1982 an attempt to remake The War Game with Central TV fell through, and Watkins devoted the following three years to accruing donations and help to make The Journey, perhaps his greatest achievement. Running at over 14 hours, the film was a rarely screened account, shot in over a dozen nations, of nuclear war and its effects. It has yet to be broadcast. The Freethinker (1994), an imaginative account of August Strindberg made with students, was boycotted by Swedish TV. In 2000 Watkins completed a 345-minute video, La Commune, recounting the 1871 Paris uprising through an imaginary community TV station, again working with amateurs, tearing across centuries to cross drama with politics. This remarkable project has again found its main audience on the festival and film school circuit. Watkins's mountain of suppressed work, his occasional embittered testament to intelligence, passion, and skill have perhaps contributed to a peripatetic life, consistently dogged by controversy. He is the most neglected and perhaps the most significant British director of his generation.

     Watkins's mountain of suppressed work, his occa­sional embittered testament to intelligence, passion, and skill have perhaps contributed to a peripatetic life, consistently dogged by controversy.