Micro-study 2: Peter Watkins, The Gulf War, and The Media Project (1991)

FUm & History, Vol. XXII, Nos. 1 & 2, February/May 199241 Micro-study 2: Peter Watkins, The Gulf War, and The Media Project (1991) Joseph A. Gomez and James M. Welsh As a young artist the British filmmaker Peter Watkins quickly came to understand the power ofvisual images manipulated through the medium of film and transmitted through television to influence public opinion and to shape government policy. His second professional film, The War Game (1965) offered a disturbing anti-nuclear warning that was rejected by his corporate sponsors at the British Broadcasting Corporation, ostensibly because it was too "horrific" and would be too disturbing for children and the elderly, but also, no doubt, because it was critical of the Home Office's civil defense policies, which the film ridiculed as being inept, inappropriate, and absurd.1 The film was banned for twenty years from television worldwide andwas only released as atheatrical film because certain Members of Parliament supported Watkins and demanded the film's distribution. Once released, it went on to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1966. The problem of this film had to do with its message, its anti-nuclear thesis, not with its quality, which was quickly acknowledged, both in Britain and abroad. The War Game was effective because of its raw emotional power, which Watkins later came to regard as a shortcoming; he believed that fear of the Bomb and its consequences could produce a numbing effect, impending rationality. When Watkins made his "peace" film TheJourney twenty years later, he again undertook to expose the inadequacies of civil defense worldwide, but he also avoided overdramatizing scene of violence, panic, and horror when shooting parallel scenes of nuclear evacuation in upstate New York, and he chose not to dramatize the actual dropping of the Bomb in his later film, as had been done in later films such as The Day After (1983) in the United States and Mick Jackson's Threads (1984) in Britain (ironically, also produced by the BBC and far more devastating and grim than the earlier Watkins film).2 In TheJourney, an extended documentary nearly fifteen hours long released in 1987, Watkins confronted the nuclear issue in far more subdued way than he had done earlier. He dramatized the mass confusion and chaos that would surely result in the event of a nuclear Joseph A. Gomez is a Professor of English and the Director of Film Studies at North Carolina State University. James M. Welsh is Associate Professor ofEnglish at Salisbury State University in Maryland and Editor of Literature/Film Quarterly. 42 Joseph A. Gomez and James M. Welsh attack on Utica, New York, for example, as citizens attempted a mass evacuation. But the purpose of his later approach was to establish a global dialogue to show how ordinary people might intelligently address and discuss the nuclear dilemma. This subdued approach was the response of an older, wiser man who had devoted a lifetime to the study of the conventional uses and abuses of film and television. Part of The Journey also worked an analysis of the way Canadian television covered the so-called "Shamrock Summit" on St. Patrick's Day in 1985, when President Ronald Reagan met Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in Quebec City. Watkins showed in his mini-documentary (made behind the scenes) how official coverage was manipulated so as to suggest that everything was upbeat and positive, ignoring any evidence of dissent. The job of television is commonly to present the official story, and, when the Gulf War erupted in 1991, Watkins began work on his documentary The Media Project in order to study the way ordinary citizens in Australia responded to television coverage of the armed response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the "liberation" ofthat country in away that seemed to many at the time an heroic and impressive demonstration of massive, hightech warfare. Watkins has never accepted the myth of "objectivity" as it relates to history or to documentary filmmaking. The War Game and his earlier film Culloden (1964) were not intended to be objective. In each case the selection and presentation of "factual" material was informed by a clear thesis—Culloden argues that...