http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/49/privilege.htmAfter retailing Scotland’s Jacobite rebellion of 1746 to almost universal acclaim in Culloden (1964) and, in less than a year, establishing an undeserved reputation in the press as an irresponsible left-bent crackpot with 47 still-horrifying minutes of The War Game, Peter Watkins could look back in anger at the fastest, sharpest rise and fall the British film industry — or any film industry — had ever witnessed.
For a film director, the fallout was poisonous. The War Game (right) might have received an Academy Award here in the U.S. (a species of institutional insult all its own), but in Great Britain, Watkins’ meticulously detailed, despairing vision of a fictional nuclear war and its hopeless aftermath was officially banned by the BBC (a ban that took a quarter century to be lifted) after the Home Office reportedly advised against its transmission in what must have been a blood-freezing series of veiled threats. Not only did the Board of Governors at the BBC then refuse to permit the film’s broadcast in other countries — restricting it to clandestine, 16mm reduction-print screenings on the Nuclear Disarmament circuit — but Watkins himself was brutishly pilloried by newspapers on both the Left and the Right for his supposed recklessness in making a film that representatives of the BBC kept telling everyone off-the-record would result in headline-grabbing horrors such as chronic depression and even mass-suicide. Watkins resigned in protest from the BBC’s Documentary Programming division, loudly and forcefully accusing those spineless Orangutans at Shepherd’s Bush of caving in to government pressure. But the intensity of his protest did nothing to aid his cause. The way the press covered it it just made him look like a crank.
Worst of all, not a single film director in England rose to speak out publicly in his defense. All the Tony Richardsons and Lindsay Andersons, all those Free Cinema mavericks and Angry Young Men who’d made an aesthetic killing off of Britain’s decline after the War were nowhere to be found, it seemed, when one of their confreres (albeit one who worked in Television) faced an onslaught of public disapprobation and censorship the like of which they only faced in their grimmest nightmares. Some of his fellow filmmakers privately chastised Watkins for laying waste to his early success so soon; others later expressed regret at their own moral cowardice in staying silent. And Peter Watkins? All he could do was bear up under the pressure, tell his side of the story to anyone who would listen, and wait.
Is it any wonder, then, that the thousand turmoils of that awful season permeated his next film? The England of Privilege (1967) is a nation whose institutions are ruthlessly pursuing blanket conformity among its people. The Conservative and Labour parties, no longer having any discernible differences between them, have formed a coalition government: a benign two-party dictatorship that believes it can hold power indefinitely so long as rebellious impulses within the sensate brains of Britain’s youth can be distracted, rechanneled, and tranquilized. Toward that end, the state has taken an all-consuming interest in the career of Steven Shorter (Paul Jones), a Pop singer whose fame appears to know no boundaries. When we first see him riding through the mob-filled streets in his hometown of Birmingham, he waves and nods solemnly to his throng of worshipers in the midst of a ticker-tape outpouring of love sufficient to make Caesar bow with all the appropriate humility of triumph.
For that is who Steven Shorter is, you see: A Pop Prince, a Caesar for the “Tiger Beat” set with stature commensurate to that of presidents, kings, even astronauts. He is, in the words of Watkins’ off-screen narrator/interviewer, “the most desperately loved entertainer in the world,” and both the State, its financial institutions, as well as the Church of England have seen to his emergence as a presence in the national consciousness of Britain almost as great as the Queen herself. His name and face are on everything: discotheques, household appliances, any species of promotional tie-in that can turn a buck and inspire unending consumption on the part of the public. Without the government’s patronage, he’d be just another face on “Top of the Pops,” humping his latest 45 to bored teenagers; with it, he’s practically Jesus.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBqgHE1F3Dw2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkWJDNLqoPc&mode=related&search=3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iebF7Vk7q00&mode=related&search=4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAvbFKyYucU&mode=related&search=5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88_Y9aeDy9E&mode=related&search=6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6ySTJyNEn4&mode=related&search=7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ds_z9oWzs&mode=related&search=8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlUKKGMJ214&mode=related&search=9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtL4ukCdwS4&mode=related&search=10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iF3jdFr9hM&mode=related&search=11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sM-dtDmTSA&mode=related&search=12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvqntEI03GU&mode=related&search=13
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOZCALMXabc&mode=related&search=14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daG1p2KOw1A&mode=related&search=http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins/This section contains the text of the critical media analysis which I completed in August 2003. This analysis has suggestions on how to use the site, a newly revised Introduction, seven chapters, and a series of appendices, which give additional information and examples. In addition, there is a 5-page analysis by Canadian filmmaker Geoff Bowie of the newsbroadcasting on CNN
Suggestions for usage
This statement is intended primarily as a resource, being a combination of critical ideas as well as practical concepts for challenging the existing rigid and hierarchical processes of the mass audiovisual media (MAVM).
There are over 100 pages to this statement. As minimum reading, I would recommend the revised Introduction to the media crisis.
The chapter The American MAVM, Hollywood and the Monoform is very important because it contains key descriptions of the Monoform, the Universal Clock, and other standard media practices, which are subsequently referred to throughout the other chapters.
I would also recommend The public - alternative processes and practices, for at that point this statement turns from a critical perspective towards a series of alternative proposals. I hope that the Conclusion is also helpful, in drawing certain threads together.
The other chapters are: The European, Scandinavian, Canadian MAVM; Media education, popular culture, and violence; Filmmakers, festivals, and the repression, and The role of the Global Justice Movement
There are thirteen Appendices, which are also indicated where appropriate throughout the main body of the statement.
You have the option to continue reading through as much of the statement as you wish, or to select chapters or Appendices.
Finally, there is CNN - America's Pravda - an important 5-page analysis by Geoff Bowie of three CNN newsbroadcasts on Monday, October 7th, 2002.
Geoff Bowie is a Canadian filmmaker, and the director of THE UNIVERSAL CLOCK, a documentary film about the making of La Commune .
On several occasions in this statement, I briefly mention an element of the media crisis, saying that I have written about it elsewhere. This refers either to text which appears in PART 2 of this site or to another recent (as yet unpublished) article. If you are interested in any of the topics which are not developed at length here, please let me know.