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Hilo cerrado. A decir lo que sea a la...--------------------------------------------------
Mensaje original:Sus tres primeros films
The Diary of an Unknown Soldier
(UK, amateur, 1959)
In the mid 1950s, I underwent compulsory military service in Britain. Managing to avoid being sent on a draft to fight the Mau-Mau in Kenya, I landed a clerical post in Canterbury, Kent, where I fortunately met a group of people running an amateur theatre group called ‘Playcraft’. This group regularly staged a series of very clever productions in the small living room of Alan and June Gray - with Alan and Anne Pope, Stan and Phyllis Mercer, and other friends who acted, helped with designs and sets, and invited the local audience to the twenty or so seats tightly crammed into the room. A drama student bitten by the ‘acting bug’ in London before my military service, I acted in several of Playcraft’s productions - including in R.C. Sheriff’s anti-war drama, Journey’s End, set in the trenches during World War I. Immediately following my release from the army, I was bitten by another - amateur filmmaking - ‘bug’, and acquired a Bolex spring-driven 8mm camera. Together with the patient ‘Playcraft’ members, I produced a series of mini ‘test’-dramas, and then my first full-length 8mm amateur film, ‘The Web’, a saga set in France during the final days of World War II, depicting the attempts of an isolated German soldier to escape the attentions of the French ‘Maquis’. Although sensitively acted by the members of Playcraft, the filmic and dramaturgical elements were clichéd and heavy-handed - except for a grainy shot taken behind a German soldier inside a pill-box, preparing to fire. This one scene, which looks exactly like footage from a German newsreel, was a precursor of what was to come.
The amateur film movement was very strong in Britain at this time, with many hundreds of individual filmmakers and cine clubs competing for the annual “Ten Best” competition (the amateur “Oscars”), organized and sponsored by the Amateur Cine World magazine, under the editorial guidance of Gordon Malthouse, and subsequently Tony Rose. This competition drew entries from all over the world, and was a wonderful inspiration, not least of all because the winning films were shown at the London National Film Theatre, and then toured the country under the auspices of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers, which made archive and distribution copies of each of these films.
The failure of ‘The Web’ (which did, quite undeservedly, win Four Stars in the 1956 ‘Ten Best’ competition), and of a subsequent film, ‘The Field of Red’, set during the American Civil War - which was not only bad, but somehow (fortunately) disappeared - did not deter me. By 1959, I was working as an assistant film editor at ‘World Wide Pictures’, a documentary film company; and fortunate to have as colleagues many of the finest surviving filmmakers and editors from the days of the GPO and Crown Film Units - including the editor John Trumper, who had worked with John Grierson (and who later edited ‘Privilege’). Also with me at World Wide was Kevin Brownlow, a young filmmaker who was already making a great impact with his invaluable restoration work on Abel Gance’s masterpiece, ‘Napoleon’. Kevin was also steadily working on his own master-work, ‘It Happened Here’, a film depicting what would have happened if Germany had won World War II and occupied Britain. At the same time - with assistance from what had become the Playcraft Film Unit, Roger Higham from my army days in Canterbury, and a friend from London, Brian Robertson, who was to play the leading role - I was preparing ‘The Diary of an Unknown Soldier’.
In 1979, American writer and film teacher Joseph Gomez (then at Wayne State University in Michigan) wrote a book on my work, entitled Peter Watkins, published in Boston by Twayne Publishers. I will let Joe’s chapter on my earlier films continue the story [note that all quotations attributed to me come from that early period in my career] :
“The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) is a remarkable amateur film by any standard, but from the perspective of hindsight, its importance to Watkins' development as a filmmaker cannot be overestimated. Unlike most American directors who were rarely involved in the amateur film scene, British directors often used their amateur films as stepping stones to professional careers. John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, and Peter Watkins were all hired by the BBC on the basis of their amateur films, and many of these films reveal much about their later styles as feature filmmakers. The use of crowds, for instance, in John Schlesinger's first amateur film, Black Legend (1948), is markedly similar to the construction of crowd scenes in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967); and Ken Russell's camera choreography and experiments with music to define mood and reinforce theme appear as early as Amelia and the Angel (1957). In The Diary of an Unknown Soldier, however, Watkins initiated a style of filmmaking which he has consistently developed and experimented with in all of his professional films. The Diary of an Unknown Soldier deals with some of the same themes found in Journey's End, but whereas Sherriff allowed the conventions of the stage to limit his action to a claustrophobic dugout in the British trenches before St. Quentin, Watkins refused to be constrained by comparable cinematic conventions. Even at this stage of his career, he was quick to understand the nature of his medium; in this film, he freed the camera from the limitations of a fixed vantage point and forced it to take part in the action so that he could create strikingly realistic, almost newsreel-like, effects and directly involve the viewing audience in the events it was witnessing. The Diary of an Unknown Soldier, however, is not limited strictly to techniques of realism. It contains a curious, almost uneasy, mixture of expressionist and documentary styles, and one suspects that the financial and physical limitations that Watkins faced because of equipment and location problems played a major part in the evolution of this syncretistic approach. Synchronous sound was not possible for financial reasons; little of the surrounding countryside near Canterbury resembled the trenches of World War I, and a cast of fifteen to twenty had to give the illusion of being five times that number.
A carefully written script for the film existed before any footage was shot; and, after the film was edited, Watkins added an optical soundtrack of realistic effects and a commentary - presumably from the diary of the nameless protagonist who is about to face the front for the first time. The opening line of the film, "last day of my life," establishes the narrator's bizarre perspective and even suggests the film's expressionist mood. The remainder of the commentary complements and clarifies the film's visuals, and the rapid pace at which Watkins himself speaks these lines creates a sense of relentless urgency that reflects the protagonist's constant condition of tension. Occasionally, the pace is a bit too frantic. As a result, some images (trees metamorphosing into bayonets) seem to be a cliché imitation of Sergei Eisenstein's techniques. Also, certain overly emotional sections from the commentary ("The most terrible thing about war is not just the fact that we have to kill men so much like ourselves, but that we have to hate them and keep on hating them ... It seems so bloody pointless. We go forward to those guns. God only knows what will happen to us. God only knows.") reduce rather than increase the impact of the film's message. In all of his future films, with the exception of Evening Land (1977), Watkins would employ some form of narration, but never again in this obvious, Olidactic manner.
The strength of The Diary of an Unknown Soldier rests with its striking visual impact. Much of the film, photographed by Watkins himself, consists of close-ups and extreme close-ups of the protagonist or what the viewer sees from his perspective. These shots are noteworthy because of Watkins’ unique framing. He frequently frames the top of the shot below the hairline rather than cropping at the top of the head in what is often called a "Warner Brothers close-up." Indeed, Watkins intentionally creates disturbing shots in this film by ignoring a standard rule which indicates that a proper balance for large close-ups is achieved by framing the subject's eyes just above the imaginary horizontal center. Throughout his early career, Watkins experimented with this framing and by the time he made Punishment Park (1970), he had come to definite conclusions about the framing of close-up shots. "Normally the weight of most camera and most television shots is down-loaded. You always see air over the heads [in Hollywood films] ... I close the air off over the head to stop the strength of the scene going out. You can see more of the body. The whole thing is [more] solid, and you are forced to look at the person - into their eyes ."
Most of the other shots of the soldiers in the film are close-middle shots, and the frequency of this kind of shot was probably dictated in part by the limited number of cast members and by problems with location. The sequence depicting soldiers leaping into the mud of "no man's land" as they advance toward the German lines, for instance, was filmed in a cast member's backyard, after an eight-foot-square plot had been dug up and hosed down with water. Watkins, however, had more in mind than simply making do with what was available. By moving the camera in an adventurous manner, he made it a “participant” in the battle sequences. As Tony Rose, Britain's foremost amateur film authority, wisely observed, “... he went in close with his camera, filled the frame with writhing bodies and hurtling feet, allowed the lens to be jostled and jumped over and practically trodden into the mud. The result was magnificent and it looked like war as the soldier sees it." This aspect of the film impressed others as well, and Watkins won an “Oscar” in the Ten Best Amateur Films Competition of 1959.”
The.Diary.of.an.Unknown.Soldier.(Journal.d'un.soldat.oubliŽ).(1959,.Peter.Watkins,.VO.&.VOSTF).ogm 
The Forgotten Faces
(UK, amateur, 1960, 17 minutes)
“The Forgotten Faces (1961), a film reconstruction of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, won Watkins another amateur Oscar, and to this day, the film is praised in England as "one of the most memorable amateur films ever made". The Forgotten Faces advanced the methods of realistic reconstruction that he initiated in The Diary of an Unknown Soldier. Surely Kevin Brownlow must have supplied some encouragement in this direction, since, like Watkins, he also worked at World Wide in part to fund his own film project about what would have happened in England had the Nazis taken over [It Happened Here]. Watkins also found some inspiration in Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups and in the work of the Italian neo-realist directors who, if they did not attempt to capture a newsreel effect, at least frequently used non-professionals in location sequences filmed with available lighting. The films of Rossellini, de Sica, Olmi, and early Visconti, however, had little direct influence on Watkins' dismissal of traditional cinematic artifice in his attempts to realistically recreate events.
“Most of my feelings about this kind of what I would call documentary or reconstruction of reality came from studying photographs. I think that's where my feelings about grain and people looking into the camera came from ... especially those very strong photographs taken in the streets of Budapest and published in Paris Match and Life. That was my first in-depth encounter with an actual situation ...”
The "feel" of these photographs permeates The Forgotten Faces as the close-ups of students, workers, children, and grandmothers stare out from the frame and incorporate us, the audience, into their world. The effectiveness of this technique depends, to some extent, on the editing and on the convincing nature of the street sequences, most of which are filmed in long and far shots. During these sequences, the camera is jostled and jerked and occasionally thrown out of focus as it moves through the action and records an ambush by police snipers, the wrecking of a vehicle disguised as a Red Cross truck, the execution of three members of the Soviet-controlled secret police, the flight of an escaping freedom fighter, and the stringing up of a man by his feet after the storming of party headquarters. Similar techniques are used in capturing intimate expressions of grief and quiet moments when the members (students, workers, and soldiers) of the revolutionary forces argue their diverse political views ... Watkins communicates the sensation that the camera is recording events as they actually happen because, as Tony Rose notes, he successfully breaks two deep-rooted cinematic conventions - the pretences that actors do not see the camera and that an "invisible observer always knows what is going to happen next so that it [the camera] is always pointing in the right direction, correctly focused and framing the picture nicely.” In The Forgotten Faces, the camera is fooled or surprised and must be quickly brought into focus. Also, its presence is almost always noticed by the people being filmed. Watkins has these faces of the inhabitants of Budapest stare out at us not so much to arouse our sympathy as to reinforce one of his dominant themes which is verbally articulated by the narrator near the end of the film...
“There has to be a right and wrong in any human conflict. This most tragic of revolutions can be no exception. But in any conflict between two major creeds, one of which you believe in, there has to be a final taking of sides. And if those who happened to believe - as these Hungarian freedom fighters believed - had also taken a strong moral stand on their behalf at a time when it most mattered, then it is more than likely that more than 20,000 of these people need not have given their lives or their liberty for this belief.”
The Forgotten Faces is not a one-sided, simplistic political tract. Watkins is clearly sympathetic to the revolutionaries, but still his camera and narrator do not refrain from revealing some of the atrocities carried out by mobs seeking revenge on members of the A.V.H. (secret police). The commentary even goes so far as to raise serious questions about the possible behaviour of the revolutionaries, had they won. "If the freedom fighters had actually won the revolution, would any of them have donned similar uniforms to hold these men [members of the A.V.H.] in check?" In the final analysis, Watkins' film convincingly depicts a situation in which numerous people died as the result of the failure of others to take "a strong stand." [- in this case, NATO and the Western powers, much involved at that precise moment in the invasion of the Canal Zone in Egypt - PW] As such, the film is not simply about an historic event; it is an appeal to us, the audience, to take positions, to give expression to our feelings and beliefs when it is necessary for us to do so. With this film, Watkins began his commitment to rouse us from the false security of our blissful apathy, and while his career has been plagued with frustration and personal hardships, he has never lost sight of this intention nor abandoned his belief in the dignity of the individual who defies the forces of a repressive society.
Watkins may not have formulated all of his reasons for wanting to be a filmmaker at the time he was making The Forgotten Faces, but he knew that he wanted to experiment further with the techniques of realistic reconstruction. The directing of large-scale amateur productions also made him realize that filmmaking under certain circumstances can be a gratifying communal experience and that amateurs, when given a special framework, can achieve levels of intensity and enthusiasm missing from more conventional ways of making films.
The enthusiasm and intensity which abounded during the nine days of shooting The Forgotten Faces resulted, in part, from the participation of most of the members of Playcraft, which formed the core of the cast. The chief location for the film was a dead-end street in Canterbury [Gas Street] which contained the city’s abandoned gas works; to make the area resemble a Budapest street in late October, 1956, small trees were wired to the pavement and piles of rubble were carted in. The shooting was non-stop during daylight hours, and since the script was never completed, Watkins improvised as necessity or good fortune dictated. At one point, for instance, a tourist passed by on his way to a nearby chapel. In a matter of minutes, he was in a soldier's uniform and thrust against a wall, about to be shot. In the final film, this sequence is especially effective because of the tourist's uncanny resemblance to one of the A.V.H. men depicted in John Sadovy's famous photograph of the actual incident. There were no speaking roles for any of the participants, with the exception of the narrator's commentary which was added after the film was edited, so Watkins simply worked with his cast in terms of movement and facial expressions. Finally, after exposing over sixty minutes of film, Watkins spent months editing down his material to its final form of seventeen minutes ... Not only was this period "the happiest" in his entire career as a filmmaker, but, for Watkins, the amateur years were essential. Without them, his work in film most certainly would have taken an entirely different direction. “I think not only did my work artistically stem from my experiences as an amateur, but I think that my ability to fight, to stick it out, and to develop and pursue my own kind of personal vision ... has its roots in that experience.””
The.Forgotten.Faces.(Les.Visages.Oubliés).(1960,.Peter.Watkins).(English.+.Sub.FR).ogm Culloden
(UK, BBC-TV, 1964, 1 hr 15 mins)
Background: This was the first of my two films made for the BBC. Late in 1962 I was engaged as an assistant producer for its newly established Channel 2, and some eighteen months later, after I had worked as an assistant to the producer Stephen Hearst on several of his documentaries, Huw Wheldon, then Head of the Documentary Film Department, gave me the opportunity and a small budget to produce a film on the Battle of Culloden. The idea for this project had its genesis with friends from ‘Playcraft’ suggesting that I read the excellent study by John Prebble, entitled Culloden - which was to become the main foundation for my film.
The Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16, 1746, was the last battle fought on British soil. Some months earlier Prince Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonne Prince Charlie’), son of James Edward, the Catholic Pretender to the British throne, had landed in Scotland, raised a ragged but tough-spirited Jacobite army from amongst the Gaelic-speaking Highland clans, and marched as far south as Derby before having to retreat back to the Highlands. He was pursued into Scotland by a powerful force of 9,000 redcoats under the command of William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, strengthened by Protestant Scot Lowlanders and several Highland clans loyal to King George II. Outside Inverness, on the bleak, rain-swept Culloden Moor, nearly 1,000 of Charlie’s army, made up of 5,000 weak and starving Highlanders, were slaughtered by the Royal Army, who lost 50 men. The Highlanders finally broke and fled. Approximately 1,000 more of them were killed in subsequent weeks of hounding by British troops, during what became known as the “rape” of the Highlands, and which led to the destruction of the Gaelic clan culture and to the deportations, known as the ‘Highland Clearances’, during the following century.
Motivation: This was the 1960s, and the US army was ‘pacifying’ the Vietnam highlands. I wanted to draw a parallel between these events and what had happened in our own UK Highlands two centuries earlier, including because our knowledge of what took place after ‘Culloden’ was basically limited to an exotic image of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ on the label of a Drambuie whiskey bottle. Secondly, I wanted to break through the conventional use of professional actors in historical melodramas, with the comfortable avoidance of reality that these provide, and to use amateurs - ordinary people - in a reconstruction of their own history. Many of the people portraying the Highland army in our film were direct descendants of those who had been killed on the Culloden Moor.
Filming: ‘Culloden’ was filmed in August 1964, near Inverness, with an all-amateur cast from London and the Scottish Lowlands playing the royalist forces, and people from Inverness in the clan army. With photographer Dick Bush, recordists John Gatland and Hou Hanks, make-up artist Ann Brodie, battle co-ordinator Derek Ware, film editor Michael Bradsell, and with the help of friends and actors from ‘Playcraft’ in Canterbury, we made and edited our film as though it was happening in front of news cameras, and deliberately reminiscent of scenes from Vietnam which were appearing on TV at that time.
Reaction: ‘Culloden’ was first screened by the BBC on December 15, 1964, and - with the possible exception of ‘Edvard Munch’ - remains the only film I have produced which has been broadly accepted in the UK. Its use of amateurs, mobile camera, “you-are-there” style, were seen as a breakthrough for TV documentary, paralleling advances being made at the BBC by Ken Loach, and by Ken Russell and other filmmakers.
‘... an artistic triumph for its maker’ (The Scotsman)
‘One of the bravest documentaries I can remember’ (The Sun)
‘An unforgettable experiment ... new and adventurous in technique’ (The Guardian)
‘ ... a breakthrough ...’ (The Observer)
‘Almost compulsively viewable’ (The Times)
‘... it worked brilliantly ...’ (Daily Mail)
‘ ... a sadistic and revolting programme’ (Birmingham Evening Mail)
‘The result was so unexpectedly convincing it gave me quite a shock. I have no hesitation in raving about it, even to the extent of muttering: breakthrough.’ (Observer Weekend Review)
The.Battle.of.Culloden.-.1964.Peter.Watkins.avi De la última por desgracia creo que no hay fuentes completas, en cuanto a las otras dos son en versión original con subtítulos en francés (incluidos en el ogm)
http://www.peterwatkins.lt/
