Peter Watkins

Born: 1935-10-29

Peter Watkins (born 29 October 1935) is an English film and television director. He was born in Norbiton, Surrey, lived in Sweden, Canada and Lithuania for many years, and now lives in France. He is one of the pioneers of docudrama. His movies, pacifist and radical, strongly review the limit of classic documentary and movies. He mainly concentrates his works and ideas around the mass media and our relation/participation to a movie or television documentary. Nearly all of Watkins' films have used a combination of dramatic and documentary elements to dissect historical occurrences or possible near future events. The first of these, Culloden, portrayed the Jacobite uprising of 1745 in a documentary style, as if television reporters were interviewing the participants and accompanying them into battle; a similar device was used in his biographical film Edvard Munch. La Commune (Paris, 1871) reenacts the Paris Commune days using a large cast of French non-actors. In 2004 he also wrote a book, Media Crisis, an engaged essay about the media crisis, the monoform and, foremost, the lack of debate around the construction of new forms of audiovisual media. Description above from the Wikipedia article Peter Watkins, licensed under CC-BY-SA,full list of contributors on Wikipedia.


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Punishment Park

as Documentarist (uncredited)
Released: 1971-10-01

In this fictional documentary, U.S. prisons are at capacity, and President Nixon declares a...

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The War Game

as Documentist (uncredited)
Released: 1966-04-13

A docudrama depicting a hypothetical nuclear attack on Britain. After backing the film's...

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Culloden

as Field Interviewer (voice) (uncredited)
Released: 1964-12-15

Culloden, Scottish Highlands, April 16th, 1746. It was one of the most mishandled and brutal...

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Edvard Munch

as Narrator (voice)
Released: 1974-11-12

Edvard Munch's childhood is overshadowed by death: he suffers the loss of his sister and mother,...

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The Freethinker

as Policeman
Released: 1994-09-03

The film portrays the Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter August...

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The Journey

as Narrator / Self
Released: 1987-02-24

Peter Watkins' global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's...

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The Diary of an Unknown Soldier

as Narrator (voice)
Released: 1959-01-02

A short story narrated by an unknown British soldier who reveals his hopes, fears, and...

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The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins

as Himself
Released: 2001-09-07

This feature documentary is a portrait of Peter Watkins, an Oscar®-winning British filmmaker...

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