Peter Watkins’
1967 Oscar win was a huge Academy Awards blunder. In his movie The War Game,
Watkins simulated the realistic style of newsreels to create an ingenious cautionary
fable against nuclear proliferation and nationalist aggression. But the Academy
couldn’t tell truth from fiction and awarded Watkins the Best Documentary
prize. Watkins’ audacious craft and 60s thinking are still apparent in
his
latest venture, the nearly six-hour La Commune (Paris 1871), which runs
for a week at Anthology Film Archives. This time, the gaffe is his own.
Indulging our digital-video age, Watkins’ commitment to the docu-drama style he helped forge now looks like sophomoric impertinence. He videotapes a reenacted history of the Paris Commune, presenting it (like War Game) as a "You Are There" television broadcast. After such video con-jobs as The Blair Witch Project and the new 28 Days Later, Watkins doesn’t seem to be in on the joke: Documentary veracity is so routinely mixed with cynicism that verisimilitude is now for geeks. The only viewers likely to be impressed with La Commune are die-hard lefties nostalgic for revolution. At the core of this historical saga is Watkins’ disdain for how regular journalists, throughout the centuries, distort news and the politics of the unempowered masses. Such banal media skepticism suggests Watkins’ senility.
Watkins has made some admirable films—the prescient rock-music alarum Privilege (1967) and the epic biography Edvard Munch (1976), which fascinatingly blended art criticism with historical immediacy. Watkins’ "genius" comes out of his belief in expanding cinematic representation. The Oscar mistake surely taught him to distrust the conventions by which people watch movies, yet La Commune relies on their gullibility—asking viewers to swallow his promise to deconstruct filmmaking and filmwatching habits.
But the rules have changed in the digital-video era. Because La Commune isn’t a movie, its historical recreations actually look less rigorous than Edvard Munch—and less credible. Shot entirely inside an abandoned factory in Montreuil with a French-speaking cast, La Commune has that over-lit, underwater look of old Playhouse 90 and Hallmark Hall of Fame prestige dramas. With Watkins determined to teach a history lesson, its over-all visual texture recalls a handful of Sesame Street episodes—but with far less graphic playfulness and visual wit.
La Commune’s conceit is not uninteresting, nor is it poorly researched; it’s just not film. It’s tv. Watkins, ever the 60s thinker, indulges a style as obsolete as those pop-art dresses made of paper. He wants to permanently establish video as the mode for representing history rather than a curious interregnum. It’s now fashionable to drag cinema back to the primitivism of video as in critical praise of La Commune and Russian Ark, but I’m not having it. This video-centered style leads contemporary tv-bred audiences by the nose—not the mind or the eyes—simply by privileging the experience of television over the tragically forgotten revelations of cinema. Thus, La Commune is, at heart, anti-historical. A key moment shows masses of French protestors crowded around a tv set and reacting with disappointment to the latest news. The pandering and disingenuous suggestion that we can only understand history (or the world) when it is presented to us in didactic reenactments contradicts Watkins’ supposed critique of media conventions.
There’s a good, if facile, expose of tv-reporter arrogance ("[The news] needs rhythm") but bourgie presumption could more accurately be shown in an honest portrayal of the 19th-century press. Watkins ignores how the French press was actually controlled in 1871. Instead, he bizarrely contrasts the manifestos Pere Duchene and Cri du Peuple to factitious tv broadcasts. Every time his male-female team of reporters pops up in a scene, shoving mics in the faces of the roistering folk, the absurdity is dispiriting. Watkins’ deliberately anachronistic, pseudo-Pirandellian device is needlessly fussy. To demonstrate that journalists insult our intelligence, he parodies a form of hegemony that never happened—based on the self-satisfying pretense of satirizing the hegemony we accept today. It’s no better than the age-old news-man mythology of The Paper or All the President’s Men, except that Watkins ignores print in order to accustom us to the tv habit. Why? For no other reason than Watkins’ own inability to resist the way tv has encroached upon his own consciousness. A grown man, he’s as sophomoric as McG.
Toward La Commune’s third hour, Watkins reveals his propagandistic heart. Titles inform us that, "The USA’s number one import industry is not aeronautics, computers or cars but the entertainment industry, films and tv programmes. TV is now a global presence, the number of tvs per citizen has doubled from 1980 to 1995. Since 1976 Hollywood foreign profits have risen from 30% to 50%. In 1996 the U.S. film industry held 76% of the European market and 83% of the Latin American one."
It’s capitalism, more than women’s oppression or the politicization of the Church that Watkins attacks (though never Europe’s own capitalism, just ours). His angry mob chants, "We can no longer build barricades like this! We have to use the [enemy’s] weapons: Computers! Internet! Tv!" Some of the acting showing tumult, chaos, difference of opinion is vivid and robust ("Jesus was an anarchist, the carpenter was always on strike...you have made him the God of the bourgeois.") but the mob scenes always come back to "Freedom! Freedom!" apodictic slogans, hortatory cliches. In his confused zealotry, Watkins has resorted to the very means of prevarication he distrusts.
La Commune’s worst fault is that it lacks the richness of film—history made photochemically radiant as in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Birth of a Nation, La Marseillaise, The Red Badge of Courage, Amistad, Queen Margot, Alexander Nevsky. Motion pictures’ glorious legacy derives from Griffith, Renoir, Spielberg, Eisenstein, Altman, Chereau, Huston continuing the rich tradition of Hugo and Dickens and Shakespeare. These artists grasped the detail and pageantry, the ugliness and beauty, of social struggle. Watkins’ mundane video approach—and failure—comes down to not making history vivid.
Relying on intertitles to explain action outside his budget, Watkins abjures scenes of violence—a pious cheat. This not only compares poorly to, say, Antonioni’s firing squad "documentary" in The Passenger, or Wajda’s emphasis on the tension in Robespierre’s neck in Danton, but it equally refutes Goya and Tolstoy’s bold, physicalized confrontation with historical violence. Watkin’s insistence on video leaves viewers deprived and history diminished.
Distracted by fancy new technology, many forget why the first great historical epic, Birth of a Nation, is still great esthetically. Griffith caught the visual urgency in Matthew Brady’s photojournalism of the Civil War and passed that phenomenological creative fervor on to cinema. Decades later, Gillo Pontecorvo, Francesco Rosi and Godard took up the baton; Godard eventually made a series of documentaries on 1980s labor anxieties that shame Watkins’ sentimental view of the exploited rabble. Now, in La Commune, they (and we) are exploited once again.
La Commune (Paris 1871)
Directed by Peter Watkins
Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle
When is "fun" no longer fun? When it’s stuffed through your eye sockets and into your head with mind-deadening relentlessness as in Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle. Another sequel-that-never-should-have-been, this presses one’s tolerance for the inanity of the first movie. It luxuriates in the wasteland of tv culture—a fool’s paradise. But the cheesy tv references—from Charlie’s Angels to Good Times to MTV—don’t mean anything except, "Hey, I remember that cheesy tv series and my taste has not matured since then!" Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu smile and wiggle as characterization, and the return of the very dull Demi Moore (as an ex-Angel villainess) is a non-event. In a sane world, people would be embarrassed to enjoy this junk, let alone sell it.
No more proof is needed that television has lobotomized popular culture. The action sequences directed by music video vet McG—motocross chases, surfing chases, kung-fu fighting chases—have no visual continuity. It’s as if he’s determined to chase people out of the theater—or out of their minds.
