peter watkins the journey

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The Journey : Peter Watkins’s Polyphonic Plea for Humanity

Famed in increasingly small cinephiliac circles as one of the great firebrands of film history, Peter Watkins’s singular reputation rests on his unabashedly leftist politics, his righteous indignation, and his openly polemical strategies. If, that is, he’s even known at all; always antagonistic toward traditional methods of distribution and industry conventions, frustrated by the fact that his films have been subject to active suppression if not outright censorship, he hasn’t made a film in twenty years, his output reduced to a few missives sporadically posted to his website. 1 “Aggressively provocative,” is how Jared Rapfogel describes Watkins’s consistent tonal register, his films designed “to shock [his audiences] with visions of the sickness at the heart of society and of the possible consequences of this corruption.” 2 “Prickly, often incendiary,” as Paul Arthur puts it, Watkins’s films are “blunt, rude instruments intended to scour encrusted attitudes from even the most complacent citizens.” 3 Michael Hirschorn suggests the reason for the filmmakers’ increasingly faded appeal largely lies in both his “his Village Voice -circa 1975 politics” and his didactic strategies, off-putting to many otherwise well-intentioned audiences, “as if continuing in your bourgeois existence after watching one of his films is a form of ethical suicide.” 4

All of the above diagnoses and accusations of this sui generis filmmaker maudit, of course, can certainly be more or less true, though what also needs to be added to the composite portrait of his oeuvre is his overwhelming sense of compassionate, generous humanism. If Watkins’s films can be shrill and strident, even hysterical – one need only remember the aggressive shouting matches between young radicals and the upstanding members of bourgeois society deciding their fates in Punishment Park (1971), or the long-winded debates about revolutionary praxis that dominate La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) – then that’s only because his is the voice of someone so outraged by the world he lives in, its inequities and injustices, a world in which entertainment has replaced education as the media’s raison d’être, passivity has been ingrained as the most powerful tool of the status quo, a world in which the high cost of the Global North’s war machine deprives ordinary citizens of a meaningful present while brazenly threatening to cancel the future for everyone. His is a cinema as alarm bell and wake-up call, not because he disdains his viewers but because he’s too in love with humanity, too desperate to try to do whatever he can to salvage some shared world before it’s too late. If watching his films frequently feels like you’re being shouted at, then it’s only because he’s shouting for dear life.

Watkins’s humanism, in a sad accident of film history, is most fully on display in one of his most little-seen films, The Journey (1987), a sprawling, polyphonic, intellectually and emotionally overwhelming, fourteen-and-a-half-hour-long investigation of nuclear proliferation during the last stages of the Cold War. Made in fifteen countries across five continents (“A virtual illustration of the dictum ‘think global, act local,’” as Arthur describes it 5 ), the film is notably the only straightforward documentary Watkins ever made, as opposed to the more famed deconstructions and fictionalizations of documentary techniques that mostly characterise his oeuvre. Evoking Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), not just because of its epic length and the urgency of its moral vision, but also because of its use of the normally staid talking-heads strategy, The Journey spends the majority of its time letting an increasingly wide cast of characters simply talk, about their experiences and their fears, about their anger and their hope, with Watkins’s interlocutor probing when he needs to but mostly intervening as little as possible. Indeed, in an essay on the film written for his website in 2013, outlining both the film’s production history and his hope for its future, Watkins suggests that it’s precisely the people we meet in the film, rather than its formal strategies or its argument, who comprise its beating heart.

The Journey – Location: Mozambique

In 1982, Watkins initially planned a sort of update of The War Game (1965) and its vision of the real threat of nuclear attack, one that would allow “citizens across Britain to express their concerns via their involvement in the production of this project,” conceiving of the film as a fundamentally collaborative one from the start. Funding, however, was quickly pulled by England’s Central TV as both his vision and his budget grew. 6 With no funding at all from the professional sector, Watkins paradoxically began to think ever larger and more globally about the film’s possibilities. Inspired by a screening of The War Game with the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS) in Stockholm in 1983, he became convinced that he could still pursue his vision while working solely on a grassroots level. Utilising the network of friends and colleagues he had built while traveling and lecturing around the world the previous two decades, he decided to build “an international fund-raising drive,” pursuing research wherever in the world he could, in each site organising local production crews for that place’s filming.

Traveling mostly on his own, with local support groups doing the necessary groundwork to locate possible subjects and crew members before his arrival, he eventually circled the globe three times over throughout the various stages of planning and production. 7 And amid the globe-trotting sprawl, “the film’s core concept” finally emerged in its new form:

I would visit families or groups of people in various countries, and interview them to find out what they knew about the state and consequences of the world arms race, and the effects of nuclear weapons. The interviews would also focus on the role that mass media and educational systems played in shaping a world view, and on the knowledge that these people had – or did not have – vis-à-vis these subjects. 8

Building on the strategies he had begun to use in productions like Edvard Munch (1974) and Evening Land (1977), films whose worlds were brought to life by mostly nonprofessional actors actively engaged in bringing their own cultural history and social conditions to life, in The Journey Watkins ended up going directly to the people themselves, free from the mediation of artifice or performance. From Utica, New York and Portland, Oregon, from Victoria, Australia to Hiroshima, Japan, from Toulouse, France to Tahiti, and from Mozambique to St. Petersburg, with many other stops in between, we meet a number of families, more often than not seated around their own kitchen tables, parents and children together in conversation with Watkins, who mostly remains just offscreen. It’s a radically collaborative kind of cinema in the truest sense, a method that would continue to define two of the three feature films Watkins has made since. In The Freethinker (1994) and La Commune (1871 ), Watkins doesn’t just use nonprofessional actors, but he actively foregrounds them as ordinary people in the final product, the actors responsible not just for bringing their characters to life, but for researching their backgrounds and historical contexts, frequently speaking to the camera directly about what they learned and about their own understanding of the characters and their conditions, and about what being involved with the film means for them personally, and for their own political understanding.

While The Journey makes many explicit (and explicitly didactic) arguments – about the collusion of mass media and education systems in keeping people ignorant of the cost of the nuclear arms race, about how news media specifically is carefully designed to prevent social change, about the structures of global inequalities – it’s these ordinary people, and their collective willingness to explore the world beyond their kitchen tables, and to actively consider their place in that world, that both necessitates the film’s colossal length and creates its passionate humanism. Writing for a volume of essays about the film in 1991, Watkins reflects that, amid all its achievements, “the most important example set by The Journey , though, is the one that transcends any debate on form and structure—it is the people who appear in the film.” 9 Indeed, the essay begins with him pondering a still from the film, one showing “four human beings who live in the island of Tahiti,” Joachim Tamatoa Lucas framed with his sister, his wife, and a family friend. “How have I,” Watkins wonders, “affected what we think about them and how we perceive them as human beings?” 10 And therein lies the question of his monumental epic as a whole: How is Watkins going to approach, on his own myriad journeys, the people of the world? And how are we, his fellow travellers, prepared to engage as human beings the members of the composite portrait of humanity that emerge? And maybe most startlingly, what might prevent us from otherwise perceiving other people in other corners of the world as human beings?

The Journey – Location: Tahiti

When first embarking on the film, though, viewers might understandably balk at the seeming dryness and clinical didacticism of what seems to be in store. “Well, hello,” Watkins casually says in the film’s first words over a black background, in a somewhat touching bit of offhand humanisation of his own, introducing himself as our narrator. “We’re going to look at some photographs,” another narrator soon chimes in, “that show the way nuclear weapons are made. It’s called the nuclear weapons production complex.” We then see a number of photographs of factories across the American South and Midwest in which uranium is enriched before being transformed into weapons-grade plutonium, culminating with a photograph of the chief public relations officer of a site in Ohio known as “the bomb factory.” The narrator relates how that officer denied the appellation, “because they did not manufacture bombs there, they made only plutonium for eventual use in bombs.” “He made a point of not knowing such things,” the narrator notes, regarding the number of nuclear bombs in the world, “because they didn’t pertain to his job.”

In just one brief opening sequence, one that seems to be setting us up for a film single-mindedly devoted to nuclear arms production and proliferation, two key meta-themes are already introduced. The act of looking, on the one hand, is clearly foregrounded; looking at photographs of things we’ve never seen before, things we may not even have known existed, and then going on to begin to find the links between what we’re looking at. And not looking, or not knowing, becomes equally important to the dense tapestry that follows; who decides what we don’t get to look at, when do we become coerced into deciding not to know something, when does sticking to one’s “job” become a more-or-less active decision not to participate beyond that job’s small confines. And by foregrounding his own personal role, Watkins suggests that both these acts, looking and not-looking, are always subjective ones, and that such objectivity as the PR officer claims only becomes its own sort of myopia.

While ordinary families will eventually become the film’s dominant motif, Watkins first takes us to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, where we learn that the landscape is being transformed to make way for a strategic military airfield. But then, not around a kitchen table but a community centre’s, we meet our first group of people, members of a local grassroots organisation who’ve protested the airfield for five years, as they actively debate both NATO’s exploitation of the island and the ignorance of most of the village’s inhabitants regarding the real stakes of what’s happening. “These people have been denied information by the system in which they live,” Watkins narrates. “They will be the first of many you will meet in this film.” If the first sequence dryly introduced us to the systemic network in which nuclear arms are made and eventually deployed, then Watkins swiftly decides that systems ultimately only matter insofar as they affect, shape, and even destroy the lives of the very real people – knowingly or not – who live within them. To think systemically, The Journey powerfully suggests from the start, is always already to think humanistically, just as Edvard Munch or La Commune (1871) suggest about thinking historically.

“This film is about systems,” Watkins narrates later in the first episode (the film is divided into nineteen, the first eighteen of which hauntingly end with a question mark on a black screen, as if asking us what we’re poised to do about everything we’re seeing), “the systems under which we all live, and the mechanisms they use to deprive us of information and participation.” And indeed, over the course of its epic sprawl, the film becomes a masterpiece of systemic thinking, finding that no one global issue or crisis exists in isolation, but they’re all part of one vast, interlocking network. If Watkins’s staunchest critics might argue that, like some impotent holdover from the ‘60s counter-culture, he’s left railing against some abstract “system,” then those critics might benefit from spending time with The Journey , among cinema’s most staggering and clearly articulated definitions of just what that “system” is and how it works. To speak about nuclear proliferation, it turns out, one also has to speak about the news media’s obfuscating tactics, the limits of democracy, systemic global inequalities, education’s role in manufacturing ignorance, women’s rights, the alienation of labour, staggering racial disparities in the United States, even the cost of groceries.

But even these more-or-less oppressive systems, Watkins suggests, mean very little unless they’re illuminated by the people whose lives they shape. To talk about nuclear proliferation, you also have to talk about fear and courage, and apathy and hopelessness and how impotent even rage feels in the face of all these interlocking structures of power and oppression (“There are many forms of colonization being shown in this film,” he drily remarks in one potent aside). Because what matters most of all is people; that the fact of nuclear arms being deployed against citizens only truly becomes understandable once we see the bodies of those burned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and once we listen to the people left remembering what no person should have to remember. “Not only human beings, but also cows, horses, virtually everything was killed,” one elderly survivor of the American attacks remembers. “Sometimes I had to walk on the dead bodies because the ground was too hot. I kept saying ‘sorry’ to them.” The myriad facts and numbers and collections of data Watkins throws at his audience are frequently staggering; but it’s that visceral memory of the witness that becomes truly unforgettable, and what makes the facts matter.

The Journey

While the older members of the family in Hiroshima we meet in the first episode have the terrible privilege of their own memories of the horrors of nuclear warfare, Watkins uses enlarged stills of a series of gruesome photographs of those horrors to inaugurate his conversations with the other families untouched yet (at least obviously) by such historical scars. The act of looking becomes a potent political intervention into any notions of domestic complacency, a way of welcoming the world’s uncomfortable truths to the table rather than pretending the table is somehow immune to any of them, maybe even transforming the kitchen table into a site of potential political activism. And as the first episode introduces us not just to those activists in the Hebrides and the survivors in Hiroshima, but to families in Seattle and Tahiti (where the French government continued to hide its locally conducted nuclear tests from the colonially occupied citizenry), with the other families gradually introduced throughout the next few episodes, the fact that the film is fundamentally made, not of facts and figures and didactic arguments, but only of so much human material becomes abundantly clear. “I should say that until I began The Journey ,” Watkins narrates, in a not uncommon bit of honest acknowledgement of his own subjective blind spots, “I had never heard of much of this information, and I wanted to find out if this was the same for other people.” What’s remarkable about his admission here is not simply his disavowal of the documentarian’s conventional position of all-knowing mastery, but also both the humanist sense of curiosity and the revelation of the film’s exploratory, almost aleatory structure.

And in disavowing any of his claims to mastery of the subject, in embracing instead the stance of clear-eyed curiosity, a willingness to face up to so many infrequently faced facts, Watkins has clearly invited each of the families we meet to do the same. We ultimately meet twelve families, along with the activist group in the Hebrides and a women’s agricultural cooperative in Mozambique, most of whom were found or chosen by the fundraising support groups Watkins had been able to establish in each of their respective cities. 11 As Kenneth Noley, his contact in Oregon who helped organise a group in Salem to raise money to fund production in Portland, explained to me via email, Watkins “didn’t want families that were already devoted to the peace movement; he was more interested in finding people open to the process of finding out more and discussing the issues the film proposed to deal with.” And as Watkins noted in private email correspondence, their common link was only their humanity, as every person on the globe, no matter their location, was (and is) just as affected by the arms race and its consequences as any other.

For both himself and these families willing to engage the issues literally brought to their tables, Watkins describes the process in 2013 as indeed something quite like a journey. After he initially developed the core idea of interviewing families about their knowledge, or lack thereof, of the nuclear arms race, his process was one of near constant discovery. Almost offhandedly, for instance, he mentions discovering “the absurd civil defence measures designed for New York State” in the case of nuclear attack. 12 Something he had no way of knowing he would find until he ended up in Utica (itself a fortuitous case of circumstance, as Watkins counted among his global network of friends Scott MacDonald, a professor at Utica College), and it ends up blossoming into one of the most visceral and potent sequences in the entire film. As with most other stops on our journey, we first visit Utica via one ordinary family’s kitchen table, around which Watkins sits with Bill and Elizabeth Hendricks and their three children. And like those other families, the Hendricks’ journey begins with looking at pictures of victims of past atrocities that the global system has assured remain always perilously close to being repeated. “When they cry for war, I don’t really believe that they know what they’re saying,” is all Elizabeth Hendricks can say after a few moments of stunned silence.

Bill Hendricks and children

But following the film’s associative logic of sprawling ever outward from the act of looking to then grappling with the very real consequences of what we’re looking at, the Hendricks are eventually thrown into one of Watkins’s famed re-enactments (as are the Barnes family in Victoria and the Vikan family in Stjørdal, Norway elsewhere in the film), in sequences that both evoke The War Game and suggest the original vision of a far shorter and more straightforward film Watkins had back in 1982. And indeed, the sequence has something of the visceral intensity of certain stretches of famed early-80s nuclear attack fantasies like The Day After (1983) or Threads (1984), as the Hendricks family is thrust into a nightmarish scenario displaying the massive gulf between the “civil defence measures” officially prepared and the chaotic breakdown of the lived human reality. 13 When lives are actually on the line, panicked and afraid as the sirens blare, the state’s official response proves utterly inadequate, citizens consistently failed by the policies nominally put in place to save them when the unthinkable happens.

It’s an especially brutal sequence in a film otherwise devoted to looking for paths toward global peace and mutual understanding – breakdown as opposed to the continued promise of a collective breakthrough – but it stands out as one potent example of this aleatory process of discovery guiding Watkins’s methods throughout. Far less visceral and superficially dramatic, but maybe even more powerful, though, is the way that this faith in the unplanned and the accidental manifests itself in the conversations that comprise the majority of the film’s running time. Watkins initially establishes the parameters of each conversation, one might say aggressively, by putting these horrifying photographs in front of each group of participants, but if the act of making them look is aggressive, then he shows remarkable restraint in letting them slowly and carefully grapple with what they’re looking at. Minimally edited (indeed, as Watkins points out in his 1991 essay, the average shot length of The Journey is 45.9 seconds, as opposed to, say, the 3.6 seconds ASL of Star Wars ), these sequences are powerful testaments to patience, but also to respect and compassion.

Even in those moments when Watkins does display a heavy hand, throwing a shocking fact about global inequality at a family, for instance, and then asking “Did you know that?”, it’s never done with condescension or impatience. As is most frequently the case, the participants didn’t know what Watkins has just told them, but he’s most interested in letting them take the time to carefully consider why they didn’t know it, and the larger stakes of who benefits from all the things we don’t know about our world as opposed to the things we thought we did. The pauses and longueurs at these kitchen tables, as participants carefully ponder the photographs and try to articulate their evolving and frequently uncomfortable ideas, stand in marked contrast to what Watkins has long aggressively critiqued as the Monoform. Designed to keep its viewers always entertained because rendered unresponsive, the Monoform – the way that a Netflix drama series stylistically differs little from an evening news program or a televised sports match – is the endgame of, as he writes in 2013, “the role of mass audiovisual media (MAVM) in suppressing information on the global arms race and the developing environmental crisis.” 14 It’s an audiovisual logic actively hostile to the very notions of collaboration, reflectiveness, and open-endedness that characterise his own approach throughout constructing The Journey .

Indeed, the film’s great length becomes not simply the consequence of its humanist patience but its own urgent political argument, creating a space not just for witnessing, but for true, back-and-forth dialogue and mutual understanding and respect, a space where images and numbers become people, and where places on the other side of the globe end up feeling a lot like home. In the fourth episode, we meet Elena Ortega, a working-class mother of eight in Cuernavaca. While Watkins narrates statistics about Mexico’s widespread poverty and lack of basic critical social infrastructure, Elena still insists that “it’s better to be poor, but to stay in peace,” that no amount of power is worth a world that could be destroyed in minutes. And just as the Ortega family, like every other, is invited to look at those photographs of what they’ve never looked at before, Watkins’s own gently probing camera invites us to look at lives like Elena’s that we’ve never seen before, lives largely abandoned while global capital favours instead the ceaseless proliferation of the war machine. “Where’s the human heart?” Ken Barnes laments with bruised astonishment in Victoria when Watkins informs him, in episode twelve, that two weeks’ worth of global armament by the powers of the Global North could feed and house the entire world’s population for a year. And Elena herself pleads for those in power to recognise the vast gulf between the systems they perpetuate and their human cost:

All the races of the world want that, we want our peace and our tranquillity. And we should ask these presidents who are involved in these arms campaigns, that they should realize what is necessary in the world. Instead of destroying all the poor people, they should hold hands together, and go around the world and look at the situation of the people [at which point her face’s beaming small suddenly breaks down into tearful sobs, surrounded by her children]. This is our plea to the presidents of the big powers.

And this is surely Watkins’s plea as well, if not to the presidents of the big powers than to the citizens living in them; “to go around the world and look at the situation of the people” becomes The Journey ’s own raison d’être, a film that’s equal parts ethical challenge, curiosity-driven travelogue, populist gift, and humanist cri de couer.

Tricia Crippen

“I’m okay,” Tricia Crippen says through tears as she tries to comfort the child in her lap after she’s pored over Watkins’s photographs splayed out on her table, as we’re introduced to her and her family in Portland in the third episode. “I’m just a little bit sad about the pictures, because they are real pictures of real people.” Similarly, toward the end of the film, Watkins starts showing families in the West video of his interviews with the Kolosov family in St. Petersburg, inviting them to witness all the ways in which the Russian family’s feelings and ideas are very much like their own. “They just looked the same as ourselves,” Sam Smillie marvels in Glasgow. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen an ordinary Russian family,” his wife adds. On the subject of Russian’s “hostility,” Sam concludes that “this is an impression that has been foisted upon us, isn’t it? Distance, separation. Something that we all need to overcome.”

And maybe it’s ultimately this overcoming of separation, this collapsing of distance, that becomes the film’s most vital journey we’re asked to take; while Watkins travels all over the globe, and increasingly invites his collaborators to virtually visit one another’s kitchen tables with him, their journey might be said to be one of realising they’re actually just traveling from “here” to “here,” from one vantage point of the same place to another, from one pocket of shared humanity to another. And once one undertakes such a journey, the film persistently finds, you more likely than not end up feeling compelled to do something about everything you’ve seen, all the fellow travellers you’ve met. “It’s gotta start with us,” Tricia Crippen concludes, pondering the prospect of nuclear annihilation, “and it may end with us if we don’t all come to that kind of consciousness, I think.” It’s a sentiment ultimately shared by nearly everyone we meet in Watkins’s dense tapestry, a polyphonic vision of interdependent global experience, maybe even film history’s greatest monument to shared humanity.

Given the magnitude not just of Watkins’s vision but of that vision’s intent, it makes it all the more dispiriting how unknown the film is even by those familiar with the more exemplary works of his oeuvre. First shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987, The Journey was screened in the subsequent years at universities and by activist groups around the world, airing on local public television channels in Canada and New York in 1989, though never televised since. Indeed, Watkins’s 2013 essay was written in response to a rare showing at London’s Tate Modern Gallery in May of that year. “As I understand it,” he laconically notes, “the cinema was full for the initial evening, after which the audience diminished to a core group of some 30 people, some of whom stayed though to the end, participating in all the discussions.” 15 This anecdote, sadly, mirrors the film’s fate on YouTube, where it’s currently most widely available. At the time of this writing, the first episode has 7,440 views, with the number of views dropping with each subsequent part, episode 14 having the nadir of 240 views, with a slight uptick to the final episode’s 405. Some journeys, it turns out, are just too arduous for most to see to the end.

But in his 2013 essay, while mourning the film’s lack of real distribution, he still includes references to how the film has been used for educational purposes in the U.S., New Zealand, and Sweden, suggesting ways in which educators might include the film – conveniently broken up into chapters the length of typical classroom periods – in various curricula, stressing how important it is “for young people” particularly to experience the film, and to grapple with the polyphonic vision of what Watkins refers to as his “global peace film.” And while eighteen of the nineteen parts, at the time of this writing, are uploaded to YouTube, Watkins also directs us to the recent DVD release of the film in a 5-disc boxset, distributed by Doriane Films in Paris (in the original English language with French subtitles), as well as to the existence of a 339-page “User’s Guide,” with questions and materials meant for use in school and university classrooms, as pedagogical accompaniment (though this guide, however, remains unreleased in any official format).

The ending of the Cold War may seem to have turned The Journey into an instantly outdated curio, a relic of an argument that no longer needs to be made. But as unprecedented heatwaves shatter records all over the world, as Arctic ice loss rapidly grows and sea levels rise, as wildfires ravage vast swaths of land, as the already ongoing refugee crisis becomes ever more linked to these cataclysmic natural disasters, as nativist and nationalist tribalisms emerge in response to both increased human migration and the exacerbation of social iniquities driven by the current Covid-19 pandemic, and as the stark urgency of the climate crisis and its human cost becomes ever more undeniable the faster the globe hurtles to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the futurity of shared global experience is just as much in doubt as it was under the air of nuclear anxiety at the time of The Journey ’s production. The contours and circumstances may have changed, but the state of crisis remains the same. Watkins’s film is just as urgent today as it was in 1987, both in its vision of how to document a crisis and how to envision a collective awakening to what to do about it.

“They make me think of the whole planet disintegrating,” muses Ouiza Safou, an Algerian immigrant in Toulouse, as she pores over the photographs of scorched bodies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One might easily have the same thought as, seemingly every day now, in our newspapers and social media feeds, we’re invited to pore over the seemingly constant bombardment of photographs and videos of our own scorched earth. And nothing short of recognising that we’re all being scorched, together, is Watkins’s urgent plea as to how we might come to do something to mitigate whatever shared disasters lurk on the horizon. For all his fiery, prickly indignation, and despite the fact that he seems to have given up on filmmaking for good, The Journey stands as his towering plea to recognise our own shared humanity in a world where we’re easily invited to think of disasters as only happening to unknown people in far-off places. Despite all the bracing warning shots and collapsed revolutionary dreams that have defined his cinema, his most monumental work is still a testament to the fact that Peter Watkins is a filmmaker who believes in the future, if only we can recognise how close we really are to all those who will be living in it. Elena Ortega, surrounded by her impoverished family in Cuernavaca, notably gets the film’s very last word after the final credits have rolled. Answering Watkins’s question of what she and her fellow labourers do when they’re not working, she simply responds, “we look after the children.”

Elena Ortega and her family

“I have often been told that young people have not heard of my films,” Watkins writes at the end of his most recent polemical essay. “I think this is particularly true in my own country, where the status quo cinema organs have conducted a policy of ‘studied avoidance’ regarding my work.” Peter Watkins, “Dark Side of the Moon,” 2018. https://wolfberlin.org/new-media-statement . For a detailed account of the BBC’s active suppression of The War Game since the cancellation of its scheduled television premiere, see Tony Shaw, “The BBC, the State, and Cold War Culture: The Case of Television’s The War Game (1965).” The English Historical Review , vol. 121, no. 494 (December 2016), pp. 1351-1384. ↩
Jared Rapfogel, “Cautionary Tales and Alternate Histories: The Films of Peter Watkins. Cinéaste , vol. 32, no. 2 (Spring 2007), p 21. ↩
Paul Arthur, “The Troublemaker.” Film Comment , vol. 40, no. 3 (May/June 2004), p 59. ↩
Michael Hirschorn, “He Saw It Coming,” The Atlantic , November 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/he-saw-it-coming/307037/. ↩
Arthur, p 64. ↩
In private email correspondence from 31 st August, 2021, Watkins offered further examples of international broadcasting companies who refused to fund filming in their countries, including Australia’s ABC and Norway’s NRK1, the latter of whom withheld any assistance because they claimed they couldn’t decide whether the film was a drama or a documentary. Once filming was complete, support finally emerged when the National Film Board in Montreal gave him use, free of charge, of their editing and sound mixing facilities. ↩
Scott MacDonald, Watkins’s chief contact at Utica College, has detailed some of the extraordinary fundraising efforts that made shooting in each location possible, in an essay detailing the film’s production in upstate New York especially; amid the myriad benefits hosted by members of his college and its surrounding community, including dinners, art auctions, and “an ‘End of the World Beerblast,’ sponsored by the Gamma Sigma Sigma sorority and the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity,” the support group in Utica eventually raised $32,000 for the shooting to be done in the area. “The Mohawk Valley Journey to The Journey.” Adventures in Perception: Cinema as Exploration . University of California Press, 2009, p. 282. The relatively small sum suggests just how much these local sits of production were labors of love, activism, and community support, what Kenneth Nolley, Watkins’s contact in Salem, Oregon, described in an email from 12 August, 2021, as the film production’s “somewhat communitarian approach.” ↩
Peter Watkins, “The Journey,” 2013, http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/journey.htm. ↩
Peter Watkins, “ The Journey : A Voyage of Discovery.” Peter Watkins’ The Journey : A Film in the Global Interest , edited by Ken Nolley. Willamette Journal of the Liberal Arts, 1991, p. 11. ↩
Watkins, 1991, pp. 1-2. ↩
The exceptions to this, as Watkins explained to me via email, were the families in Tahiti, Cuernavaca, and St. Petersburg. Without established support groups in these locations, Watkins looked to activist friends with contacts in the first two areas to find him families to work with, while in the Soviet Union he worked with the Soviet Peace Committee. Regarding the latter family, he notes that while there was no pressure on what he could film or discuss, he suspected that the presence of a representative of the Committee throughout filming played a part in the family’s cautiousness in answering his questions. ↩
Watkins, 2013. ↩
The broadcast of these two films notably influenced Watkins’s expanded sense of scope and strategy as he planned the film throughout its early funding difficulties. As MacDonald explains, that earlier film “now seemed impossible—it would be seen as just another The Day After —and more important, would contribute to the development of an even deeper complacency about ‘the Bomb’: the more frequently mass media provided imagery of nuclear detonations, the less impact and importance this imagery would have, and the more inevitable nuclear detonations would come to seem.” Macdonald, 2009, p. 277. ↩
Watkins, 2018. ↩

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A global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it. A global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it. A global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it.

Peter Watkins
Francine Bastien
Brian Mulroney
Mila Mulroney
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4 Critic reviews

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Trivia Until 2019, this was the longest cinematic film, a length of 14 hours and 33 minutes.

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Connections Edited into Constructing Reality: Exploring Media Issues in Documentary - The Politics of Truth (1993)

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May 20, 2016
February 5, 1988 (Sweden)
New Zealand
Soviet Union
The War Game 2
Hiroshima, Japan (Memorial Park)
Tyresö u-lands och fredsförening
Svenska Freds- och skiljedomsföreningen
Abrahamsbergskyrkan
See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

Runtime 14 hours 33 minutes
Black and White

More to explore

Peter Watkins – Resan AKA The Journey (1987)

A global peace film produced in 1983-86 by the Swedish Peace & Arbitration Society and local support groups in Sweden, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, USSR, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany, with post-production support from the National Film Board in Montreal, Canada.

• Released on film in 1987 • 14 hrs 30 mins

A global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people’s perception of it.

Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Soviet Union, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany and USA 1987, 16 mm, 870 min

Following Tate Modern’s 2012 retrospective of Peter Watkins’s work, this special screening event offers the unique opportunity to see Watkin’s monumental film The Journey in its complete duration of 14 hours and 30 minutes. The Journey traces the systemic impact of the global nuclear regime across 12 countries, building an intricate series of connections between the state of the arms trade, military expenditure, the environment and gender politics that are more relevant than ever. Working collaboratively with activist groups from Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Soviet Union, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany and USA, over three years, The Journey is an astonishing epic that succeeds in expanding documentary’s powers of polemic, reflexivity and inspiration. Support groups debate the peace process, families discuss their fears of nuclear threat and the cost of world hunger, survivors recall the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while Watkins analyses the role played by mainstream media in normalising conflict. Peter Watkins’s vision of a political cinema that emerges from and documents the collaborative process which it analyses, reaches its most elaborated form in The Journey which is structured in 19 intricately edited chapters. The result is an unprecedented cinematic constellation whose inspiration and importance has only increased since its release in 1986. Since the late 1950s, Peter Watkins’s films such as Culloden 1964, The War Game 1966, PunishmentPark 1970, Edvard Munch 1973 and La Commune 1999 have reinvented historical drama and future speculation into impassioned, insurgent political cinema. And yet The Journey 1987, Watkins’s most sustained experiment with documentary, has not been screened in London since its LUX screening in 2003. In the wake of the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on 11 March 2011, the critical relevance of The Journey can be neither doubted nor overlooked.

13.55GB | 14 hrs 30 mins | 640×480 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/F65CF9224C9E8F9/P.Watkins_The_Journey_1.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/3409FB0FB01890D/P.Watkins_The_Journey_2.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/2F04719F35C8293/P.Watkins_The_Journey_3.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/5783E549B63EAFC/P.Watkins_The_Journey_4.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/00930124B1DABAB/P.Watkins_The_Journey_5.mkv https://nitroflare.com/view/C520ADA83CA2FBB/P.Watkins_The_Journey_6.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/CD33D29D1687AA5/P.Watkins_The_Journey_7.mkv https://nitroflare.com/view/A930F65016EF8FF/P.Watkins_The_Journey_8.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/309969E4B1EF8E2/P.Watkins_The_Journey_9.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/00166B8AE871DEB/P.Watkins_The_Journey_10.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/F95B30ED5237917/P.Watkins_The_Journey_11.mkv https://nitroflare.com/view/EEDB8C1E517D8F7/P.Watkins_The_Journey_12.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/454CA4614C00FAE/P.Watkins_The_Journey_13.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/5FB822E62C59FC0/P.Watkins_The_Journey_14.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/40172632DF5C536/P.Watkins_The_Journey_15.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/DA00E454324CF3B/P.Watkins_The_Journey_16.mkv https://nitroflare.com/view/26F7AFA8919D73C/P.Watkins_The_Journey_17.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/41ABFB193598404/P.Watkins_The_Journey_18.mkv http://nitroflare.com/view/F0C7DC5198D3AB9/P.Watkins_The_Journey_19.mkv

Language(s):English (French, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, German…) Subtitles:French / English

Achim Bornhak - Der Nachtmahr AKA The Nightmare (2015)

Sammaria simanjuntak - cin(t)a (2009).

lol How did you find this one? Thank you so very much! I’ve been looking for this for years…

Wow, wasn’t sure I’d ever get a chance to actually see this one. Thanks for sharing!

This is incredible. Thank you so much.

The Journey (Resan)

Years in the making, this monumental film dedicated to peace was a pioneering attempt at a fully international cinema. Watkins worked with groups around the world, raising money and assembling casts and crews in the U.S., Canada, Norway, Scotland, France, West Germany, Mozambique, Japan, Australia, Tahiti, and Mexico. The Journey consists of Watkins’s extended conversations with families and nongovernmental organizations about the arms race and its relationship to world hunger, gender politics, and the functioning of the mass media; gripping personal recollections of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Hamburg during World War II; and the dramatization of evacuation scenarios by community groups. Structured intricately into nineteen separate chapters (of which we present three), the film weaves carefully composed juxta-positions of visual and sound motifs into a powerfully wrought experience.

Part of film series

Uncomfortable Truths: The Cinema of Peter Watkins

Screenings from this program january 2001, thursday 11 january, the war game / culloden.

Friday 12 January

Punishment Park

Saturday 13 January

The gladiators.

Sunday 14 January

Tuesday 16 january, wednesday 17 january, edvard munch.

Thursday 18 January

The journey.

Friday 19 January

Sunday 21 january, evening land.

Wednesday 24 January

The freethinker.

Friday 26 January

La commune (paris, 1871).

Saturday 27 January

Monday 29 january, tuesday 30 january.

The Journey

Film details, brief synopsis, cast & crew, peter watkins, emma biermann, pancho lopez, shane barnes, kazushige shinya, arturo lopez, technical specs.

This pioneering attempt at a fully international cinema, consists of Watkins's extended conversations with families and nongovernmental organizations about the arms race and its relationship to world hunger, gender politics, and the functioning of the mass media; gripping personal recollections of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Hamburg during World War II; and the dramatization of evacuation scenarios by community groups.

Ron Crippen

Saeki toshiko, susan smillie, lucia huamba, hanano lucas, tadakichi mori, noriaki shinya, teruko shinya, martina duvel, audrey crippen, cornelia vikan, isabella huamba, camelia matao, torkeld vikan, werner brasch, ulrich duvel, lidia kolosov, carlos peniche, esperaca huamba, yoriko shinya, tricia crippen, kazuaki shinya, stelline vaitea teore, miron matao, johan vikan, terry barnes, ariioehau matao, frida tiare, paul drinkwine, melita eduardo huamba, troy drinkwine, ouiza safou, ragnveig vikan, carlos ponce, joanna matao, christian vikan, tara crippen, nicole drinkwine, tamara hendricks, tahuka matao, elizabeth hendricks, gerard lamari, al drinkwine, david smillie, jerrie drinkwine, kathleen smillie, alvaro ponce, alexander kolosov, joachim tamatoa, clara lopez, elena ortega, edgar mataiura samwela, petra lopez, marian barnes, rosia huamba, nachor lopez, ayona matao, cruz santa lopez, masha kolosov, amavaje tea, feliz lopez, tonya hendricks, sam smillie, augustine lucas, amelia huamba, john crippen, beate hajime hamada, shindo hiroshi, maruca ponce, teresa huamba, sonya hendricks, billy hendricks, sairah matao, hannelies duvel, ellen fugere, norddeutscher rundfunk (ndr), jane abercrombie, madlen abojan, dale abrams, mark achbar, mary achbar, bill affolter, lynn aitken, penny allen, jonathan amitay, siobhan angley, carmen arcuri, takeshi asami, christine assal, chris atkins, patrick auzepy, jacques avoine, robert baber, alain baggi, robin l p bain, sunithi bajekal, carmela baker, harry bardwell, jenny barnes, dianne barry, martin bartfeld, gwynne basen, jacinto bay-bay, philippe baylauco, claude beaugrand, klaus w becker, manfred becker, walentin belowolow, debbie benzer, tricia benzie, marie-r bernard, hans-dietrich beyer, angelika birk, jacqueline blanchard, joan blanchfield, roxanna blat, roxana blatt, katie boanas, edmund boerger, wladimir bogdanow, bernard bordeleau, jon gisle borseth, denise bowman, catharina bragee, catherina bragee, gabi brandt, hans brecht, philip brockway, heinz bruer, david bruno, hans brunswig, richard burman, christine burt, muriel burt, fernando camara, allison campbell, dan campion, don canfield, genevieve capelle, uwe cardaun, alistair carr, alistar carr, anthony casale, armando castillon, anne catling, guy cavagnac, chris cavanagh, sertorio chambale, claude chamberlan, ann-marie chandler, helene chatlain, diane chaurett, adrian cherubin, claude chevalier, peter chrisrtoff, peter christoff, kim dok chul, jane churchill, joan churchill, susan clarke, carol collins, eric coulter, frances courtney, neil courtney, john cumming, bengt danielsson, marie-therese danielsson, barbara davies, kerry davis, mary ellen davis, georgia deal, grant dearnaley, p deffontaines, robert del tredici, cheryl delaurentis, huibert den draak, daniel desmarais, marie desousa, boris deswaan, carole deswaan, sylvia deswaan, debbie devgan, arlette dion, stella douglas, jim douglass, shelly douglass, joanne lee dow, martin duckworth, georges dufaux, raymond dumas, catherine dunn, krista perry dunn, dr. michael dworkin, marion eadie, charles eddis, carla edelenbos, l s edmondson, eric alan edwards, dr. gordon edwards, brigitta elv s, jan a engebretsen, peter englen, matthew ennis, robin esterkind, tihipua faatauira, dagmar fagerholt, harriett fels, daniel fleming, angie flores, dominic cappello foj, francis fourcou, joachim frank, norges fredslag, norbert friedlander, anna fudakowska, joseph fusco, jan erik gammleng, ralph gardner-white, maria gargiulo, peter garstang, miguel garzon, armand gatti, serge gaudreau, fay gervasoni, annette gillies, david gislason, adrienne gohler, michael goldberg, shelley goldstein, oleg golowkin, winnie gosselin, roger grange, jaems grant, miscellaneous notes.

Released in United States April 1988

Released in United States March 30, 1988

Shown at Berlin Film Festival February 24-26, 1987.

Released in United States February 1987

Released in United States April 1988 (Shown at Global Village Documentary Festival in New York City, April 14-17, 1988.)

Shown at Global Village Documentary Festival (50 minute version) in New York City, March 30, 1988.

The film is 14 1/2 hours in length divided into 19 seperate chapters.

Released in United States March 30, 1988 (Shown at Global Village Documentary Festival (50 minute version) in New York City, March 30, 1988.)

Released in United States February 1987 (Shown at Berlin Film Festival February 24-26, 1987.)

Shown at Global Village Documentary Festival in New York City, April 14-17, 1988.

Broadcast over PBS August 1988.

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Authorship, activism and creative struggles: Peter Watkins’ The Journey revisited

Media and Communication Studies

Research output : Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Subject classification (UKÄ)

Studies on Film

Free keywords

documentary film
media activism
peace movement
Nuclear disarmament
fundraising
useful cinema

Access to Document

10.1386/jsca_00106_1

Fingerprint

Peace Social Sciences 100%
Activism Social Sciences 100%
Journey Arts and Humanities 100%
Films Arts and Humanities 100%
Documentary Arts and Humanities 75%
Swedish Social Sciences 66%
Production Social Sciences 66%
Social Systems Social Sciences 66%

T1 - Authorship, activism and creative struggles

T2 - Peter Watkins’ The Journey revisited

AU - Stjernholm, Emil

PY - 2024/5/8

Y1 - 2024/5/8

N2 - Based on research in the archive of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society in Stockholm, this article sheds light on the complex production history behind Peter Watkins’ fourteen-and-a-half-hour documentary Resan (The Journey) (1987). Set in a dozen countries around the world, the film presents a complex web of thematic tropes about global peace, consistently highlighting the connection between the local, national and international. The way in which the film subverts documentary form – in terms of both scope and aesthetic strategies – raises questions concerning the institutional conditions within which it was made. Although Watkins’ authorial position between avant-garde and documentary film culture has been investigated in-depth, particularly from a textual point of view, little attention has been afforded the creative struggles permeating the production and circulation history behind this epic documentary. Bridging the gap between the scholarly fields of media activism, useful cinema and documentary film, this study zooms in on the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, Scandinavia’s largest peace movement, and their fundraising drive for this film. In doing so, the article provides new information about the negotations that shaped the relationship between Watkins, the activists and the organization that made this film possible.

AB - Based on research in the archive of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society in Stockholm, this article sheds light on the complex production history behind Peter Watkins’ fourteen-and-a-half-hour documentary Resan (The Journey) (1987). Set in a dozen countries around the world, the film presents a complex web of thematic tropes about global peace, consistently highlighting the connection between the local, national and international. The way in which the film subverts documentary form – in terms of both scope and aesthetic strategies – raises questions concerning the institutional conditions within which it was made. Although Watkins’ authorial position between avant-garde and documentary film culture has been investigated in-depth, particularly from a textual point of view, little attention has been afforded the creative struggles permeating the production and circulation history behind this epic documentary. Bridging the gap between the scholarly fields of media activism, useful cinema and documentary film, this study zooms in on the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, Scandinavia’s largest peace movement, and their fundraising drive for this film. In doing so, the article provides new information about the negotations that shaped the relationship between Watkins, the activists and the organization that made this film possible.

KW - documentary film

KW - media activism

KW - peace movement

KW - Nuclear disarmament

KW - fundraising

KW - useful cinema

U2 - 10.1386/jsca_00106_1

DO - 10.1386/jsca_00106_1

M3 - Article

SN - 2042-7891

JO - Journal of Scandinavian Cinema

JF - Journal of Scandinavian Cinema

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Where to watch

The journey.

Directed by Peter Watkins

A global odyssey for peace

Peter Watkins' global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it, as well as a meditation on the inherent bias of the media, and documentaries themselves.

Peter Watkins Francine Bastien Brian Mulroney Mila Mulroney Ronald Reagan

Director Director

Peter Watkins

Producer Producer

Writer writer, editors editors.

Peter Watkins Peter Wintonick Petra Valier Manfred Becker

Title Design Title Design

Louise Overy

Sound Sound

Peter Watkins Tony Reed Raymond Vermette Manfred Becker Vida Urbonavicius

Svenska Filminstitutet Australian Film Commission

New Zealand Australia Canada Denmark Finland Italy Japan Sweden UK

Releases by Date

24 feb 1987, releases by country.

873 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by matt lynch ★★★★½ 5

A manifesto of sorts, with Watkins' grievances only exacerbated in the 30 years since he made it. Global militarization is an engine of capital, in turn a colonialist oppressor of women and minorities via deliberate economic inequality, all cheerfully shepherded by a fully complicit media that ignores dissent in favor of approved narratives. Hardly new news, but this sprawling 14 1/2 hour document extends so many tendrils into so many lives and points of view that the full extent of these allegedly obvious issues becomes suffocatingly all-encompassing. Extremely dry (it was ostensibly meant to be shown in Swedish schools, hence the 19 lesson-plan-friendly 45-minute episodes, complete with on-screen discussion questions) but constructed of intercut components intended to be as unmediated…

Review by Michael Stuhlman ★★★★★ 1

This is essential cinema. Basically what Shoah is to the holocaust, The Journey is to nuclear war.

Review by Dávid Klág

nem találom már azt a tweetet, amiben az állt, hogy ha valakinek hiányzik az Oppenheimerből a szénné égett ártatlan emberek széleskörű bemutatása, akkor az ne pampogjon, hanem okosítsa magát, és kezdje el nézni Peter Watkins majdnem 15 órás dokumentumfilmjét, fenn van Youtube-on az egész. nekem nem hiányzott egyáltalán, mégis elkezdtem, egy percét sem bántam meg, példátlan fejtágítás arról, hogy mik a lehetőségek egy dokumentumfilmben, még egy olyanban is, aminek bevallottan az a szándéka, hogy az atomtechnológia és hidegháború hatását akarja felképezni a bolygó társadalmán, és ezért semmi kompromisszumot sem hajlandó tenni, sőt, mások kompromisszumaira hívja fel a figyelmet azzal, hogy minden egyes híradórészletben puttyog egy hangosat, amikor vágással, grafikával, vagy bármilyen más megoldással manipulálnak minket.

elképesztő, hogy Watkins bement hétköznapi…

Review by Eliecer Gaspar ★★★★★ 2

A political education and a realization of the ideal that closes Here and Elsewhere (1976). The Journey contains the world and the human circle (or pyramid) through newsreel, found footage, and staged footage. Dziga Vertov would be proud.

"The others, the elsewhere of our here ."

Review by jrhovind ★★★★★

Watkins’s monumental plea for humanity, and his furious condemnation of all those in power, and their systems in which we’re all enmeshed, actively invested in making us think humanity isn’t a shared enterprise. “Two of our principal concerns in this film are to do with time and money, and the ways in which we use them on this planet.” And both, of course, are being disastrously, apocalyptically misspent (“During this time,” he calmly notes just over an hour in, “we have spent on the world’s arms race at least twelve million dollars”). A film of such dense repetitions and interplays, the dominant motif that of ordinary families around the world sitting together at their kitchen tables and pondering photographs of…

Review by ZephSilver ★★★½ 4

An exhaustive, and quite frankly, exhausting film experience, Peter Watkins's The Journey flattens geopolitical borders and physical space in its attempt to create a shared consciousness. To form a linkage of like-minded concerns over the nuclear arms race and the sense of helplessness it conjured up in all those that understood its power to eradicate everything. An attempt to give shape to the Cold War paranoia of its time. The industrialization of mass destruction and fear-mongering. To bridge information-gathering between the vigilant and ignorant, years before the internet would expedite—and for the better—truncate similar content for easier accessibility.

The most terrifying aspect of this film is the feeling of totality showcased by the direction of governing bodies and the media's…

Review by TheOperator ★★★★★

“ First of all, thank you, Peter. ”

Peter Watkins wants to save the world. He is a humanist empiristic guy thus he performs a survey film not by showing its results but by reporting all the data, combining everything in a breathing whale of a movie. “Perform” is not a casual word, interviews have never been this near to a communal performance, shared at 360 degrees between people and crew, in the n-th occasion Watkins tells us documentary forms can do miracles. Living as a political being in the world is really a performance, and that’s so true Watkins does not need to do his usual mockumentary thing, because being ourselves is a piece of artistic expression. The explicit tips about…

Review by Abdessamad Nadif ★★★★★

"I had to walk on the dead bodies, because the ground was too hot. I kept saying "Sorry" to them". - Hiroshima survivor

يتناول الوثائقي رؤية مواطنين من عشرة دول مختلفة تتوزع على أربع قارات حول قضية استخدام السلاح النووي في الحروب وإنفاق الأموال على الجيوش بينما يعصف الفقر بحياة البشر في مناطق مختلفة من العالم. وثائقي عن كابوس الحرب النووية، الحرب الباردة، السياسة، التعليم، تحريف وسائل الإعلام لبعض الحقائق أو عدم عرضها بمصداقية و أكثر شيء مؤثر فيه هو شهادات حية لناجيين أو من عايش واحد من أبشع الجرائم الغير إنسانية و هي تفجير كل من هيروشيما و وناجازاكي. رغم أن الوثائقي طويل و تم صدوره منذ أكثر من 3 عقود لكن يجب تفكير في المخطط الذي أراده المخرج وهو إدراج عمله هذا في المؤسسات التعليمية، لأنه غني جدا و قوي المحتوى بمعلومات و رؤية يمكنها أن تجعل العالم أفضل

Review by sacrifyx ★★★★½

Collapsing all distance. Stretching time to its fullest. An extraordinary gesture towards a truly international peoples’ cinema. A film designed to generate a new consciousness, whose ambitions outstrip anything as straightforward as activist filmmaking or agitprop. But despite the seemingly empowering pedagogical effect that The Journey has on its participants (a category which has to include the viewer), the cumulative radiological impact of the thing is just kind of nauseating. It fulfills the ambitions of The War Game on a twenty year half-life. The imminent possibility of “the unlikely event” remains.

By the mid-80s of the film’s production, at least three decades since the emergence of any real self-articulated anti-nuclear movement, violent reconquest and sustained processes of entropic dispersal keep…

Review by MaxSargent | Wizard ★★★★★

Simply monumental and overwhelming, deftly constructed and intricately detailed with deeply sincere human interaction and an endless, sobering list of research / statistics. It's horrifying trying to comprehend what these statistics would comparatively look like nowadays, how much more irrelevant and obscene, and how much more we could do for the world.

Review by Andrea_Ratti

Can we progress? What else can we achieve when we spend most of our money on weapons? What have you been made to think from the media? How much do you know about the media, about TV, about images and sounds? Where is the money going? What are we learning from others? What are the children learning? What is our plea to the big power? Do you want change? What do you think should be the ultimate national interest? Do you feel the inevitability of nuclear mass destruction? Where and with whom does responsibility begin? Why the silence? Why isn’t there an outcry?

“I was convinced that what was said was pretty much reality and the worst part about it is it didn’t seem to frighten me as much as it just made me give up”

Review by Asaad ★★★★★ 2

i am jealous that this exists

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The Journey

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Duration: 873 mins

Cast and crew

Director: Peter Watkins

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GOING NUCLEAR

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ONE OF THE SCORES of interviewees offering their opinions on nuclear proliferation in Peter Watkins’s The Journey (1987) is a middle-aged Mexican woman in Guadalajara who implores that the presidents of powerful nations might link hands to “go around the world and look at the situation of the people.” This is among the not-inconsiderable undertakings attempted by The Journey , a film little seen in part because of availability issues and in part because of its daunting runtime: 873 minutes, which comes in at a frisky fourteen and a half hours.

Watkins’s film was shot during the last escalation of the arms race, between 1983 and 1986, in countries that were nuclear players—the United States, the unknowingly near-death Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France—as well as several that were used as test sites and landing strips by those powers: Norway, for example, or Mozambique, where people speak of their struggle for subsistence living while a king’s ransom is spent on armaments every day, or Japan, where the relationship with the mushroom cloud is somewhat more than abstract, or what Watkins, a good anticolonialist, pointedly refers to as “(French) Polynesia.” In each place, he sits down with what we will broadly call average citizens, many of them living in proximity to a hidden-in-plain-sight facility that plays a role in the construction, housing, or transportation of nuclear arms, and asks them the same questions, intended to discover what these average people know about these weapons, and how they feel about them. Often they don’t know much but are willing to learn—sometimes I hoped to see some subjects with a bit more resistance in them, in fact—and Watkins, for whom this ignorance is indicative of a vast conspiracy of obfuscation, makes a point of regularly confessing his own ignorance prior to the research and production: “Did you know this?” he asks more than once via voice-over. “I didn’t.”

The Journey is baldly didactic, and Watkins states his purpose for undertaking the project in plainspoken terms. “These people,” he says in the first of the film’s nineteen chapters, each of which ends in a hanging question mark, “have been denied information by the system in which they live.” Watkins’s intention, then, is to reveal “the mechanisms they use to deprive us of information and participation.” (The “they” is, of course, the powers that be.) One of the mechanisms brought in for extended scrutiny is television news, with its elisions and misrepresentations. The Journey is on the ground for the Shamrock Summit of 1985, a Saint Patrick’s Day meeting between Ronald Reagan and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney in Quebec City. Not only does Watkins go behind the scenes to film the production meetings and man-in-the-street interview shoots of French-language station Radio-Canada, he also shows “finished” excerpts from international television news, employing the deconstructionist technique of using blips of various tones to show the sutures, drawing attention to the busy editing and the intervention of on-screen graphics.

In a sense, the capsule-size packaged, easily digestible television news report provides Watkins with an antimodel for The Journey , which acts as a rebuke to TV news just as the snatches of native folk song and unsullied landscape are a rebuke to the images of airstrips and bulldozers and windowless government buildings—the world we’ve been handed against the world that’s been made of it. In contrast to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which devotes 0.3% of its Shamrock Summit coverage airtime to the public, Watkins gives the public his full and undivided attention. Rather than streamlining and simplifying, he keeps everything in: the mountains of statistics (dollars, casualties, destructive power), the tally of expenditure on nuclear weapons throughout the film’s runtime (of which we’re kept abreast), the maps, and, above all, images of the burned and carbonized victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which we see time and again splayed out across various families’ kitchen tables, with Watkins listening to the families as they respond, aghast, to the scenes of horror. Some of these same families participate later in visceral “reenactments,” recalling Watkins’s approach in his Punishment Park (1971) or La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), as they perform their roles as panicked refugees playing out the clearly insufficient, haphazard civil defense plans in place to deal with what is referred to, in the deadpan delivery maintained throughout, as the “unlikely event” of nuclear catastrophe.

The making of a movie as enormous as The Journey is, in itself, an act of defiance. I’m reminded of something the film director and shit-stirrer Nick Zedd once wrote about avant-garde deity Jack Smith: “Attending a [Smith] event was a long march of endurance, a challenge: the realization of a way of life not lived by people on time schedules dictated by jobs, personal responsibilities, or the need to be distracted and amused.” Watkins tells us that his subjects in The Journey are “money and time, and the ways which we use them on this planet,” while the sheer heft of the film—by most reckonings the longest nonexperimental film ever made, an achievement even more remarkable when you consider the rigor of construction on display throughout—is a reproach to how we do use them. (I write this on a day when the internet is abuzz with rumors concerning the iPhone’s new “theater mode,” which presumably will allow the cubicle dweller to remain on call and on the clock at the multiplex.)

Watkins is still a filmmaker, however, and he avails himself of the medium’s tools, helpfully announcing his own pieces of deceit. (He explicates his motives for an associative edit, and during a Gaelic-language community meeting in the Scottish Hebrides discussing the militarization of the region, he announces, “These are cutaways I put in . . . to condense the main scene.”) Most freely used is cinema’s ability to collapse distances, moving, for example, between sunny Polynesia and the frozen Saint Lawrence River in the blink of an eye. At least one journey, though, he is eager for the viewer to experience step by trudging step—one on foot along the tracks that carry assembled warheads on a so-called white train from the Pantax assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, to a nuclear submarine base in Bangor, Washington. He returns to images of walking the last leg of this journey throughout the film, like a sort of refrain; following the trajectory of the warheads provides the film a kind of structure. These tracks are the film’s spine, one journey among many, and I doubt that anyone can walk their entire length with Watkins and remain wholly the same.

Peter Watkins’s The Journey runs January 6 through 8 at Light Industry in Brooklyn, New York.

The Journey - ( Resan in Swedish)

- Released on film in 1987 - 14 hrs 30 mins

The Doriane Films / Project X Distribution release of The Journey DVD is in the original English language version with optional French subtitles. The box-set cover of the first available version (see below) is currently in French. It includes 3 sleeves with 5 DVDs that contain a total of 19 chapters (or Parts) each approximately 45-50 minutes in length. This release of The Journey is NTSC region 0, which means that it will play worldwide on all except first generation DVD players.

Formed in 1883, the Swedish Peace & Arbitration Society (Svenska Freds- och Skiljedomsföreningen) is the world's oldest and Scandinavia's largest peace movement. To find out more about its work, please contact www.svenskafreds.se

Teaching / Discussion Aide

In 1990, Vida Urbonavicius and I completed a 339 page Users' Guide that proposes ways of utilizing The Journey , including for in-depth discussions and analysis of the film. As noted, the film is divided into 19 parts that vary in length, but average ca. 45 min. each. The Guide has 4 parts: an introduction; a summary of each part; an index of people and themes (e.g., role of media, role of education, etc.); a detailed analysis with possible further questions for each part. These are followed by a reproduction of the credit reel, which lists all of the support groups and film crews, and gives brief descriptions of the scenes that accompany them (this chapter was prepared by Derek Bolt of Motueka, NZ).

Some years ago Oliver Groom scanned the entire Guide, but the scanned version is not included with the DVD at this time. We plan to produce it as a separate unit for educational screenings or public debates, and are looking at ways to package it (as a separate file on the internet, or a CD addition in the box-set). The text in the present scanned version is somewhat "contrasty and blocky" - it was scanned from the original paper version, which was printed on a dot-matrix machine 25 years ago. However, the text is completely legible, though we hope to be able to eventually produce a "cleaner" version.

Copies of the scanned Users' Guide (in English only) are available from Oliver Groom at Project X Distribution for North America, and from Cecile Farkas at Doriane Films for Europe and elsewhere. We hope that a summary version in French may appear in future.

Without a doubt, The Journey is the most difficult film to write about within the confines of this website. The production and the organizing of the film were on a scale that I had never undertaken before, nor have since; it involved a great many people in at least a dozen countries around the world, and resulted in a work with a highly complex internal structure, and multiple themes.

The Journey was born directly out of a collapsed project in 1982, when I tried to organize another antinuclear war film, to be funded by Central TV in England, and working with a number of peace groups across the UK. I felt that The War Game was out-of-date, and I was concerned about the escalating nuclear arms race, that was allied to the US foreign policy of a nuclear war that would be limited to Europe. My idea was to create a series of scenes, again depicting the consequences of a nuclear attack on Britain, on a larger scale than The War Game, that would allow citizens across Britain to express their concerns via their involvement in the production of this project. However, Central TV withdrew its funding, on the grounds that the budget was becoming too large, and the project collapsed. After rethinking the scale of the project into a more global film dealing with the general silence on the burgeoning nuclear arms race, I appealed for funding to a number of international TV channels.

Without exception, every TV channel that I contacted refused, even though I was only requesting support for filming an ultra low-cost segment in each country, where I would ask local people what they knew and felt about the world arms race.

As it transpired, the only financial support for The Journey from the global audiovisual sector eventually came from Peter Katadotis at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, who summoned the full post-production resources of the NFB for the project - from developing and printing all the negative material through to the final sound mixing.

But that was a few years later. During the time while I had no funding from the professional sector, I happened to be showing The War Game (BBC, 1965) to the world's oldest peace movement association, the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS), in Stockholm. In May 1983, during its 100th anniversary congress, SPAS unanimously decided to support fund-raising for a new film about the nuclear threat. Based in Stockholm, and with initial funding from SPAS, I immediately began to involve the network of friends and acquaintances that I had acquired over many years of travelling and lecturing, to build an international fund-raising drive for the new film, and to start research in those parts of the world where I would organize local productions groups for the actual filming.

The film's core concept started to emerge: I would visit families or groups of people in various countries, and interview them to find out what they knew about the state and consequences of the world arms race, and the effects of nuclear weapons. The interviews would also focus on the role that mass media and educational systems played in shaping a world view, and on the knowledge that these people had - or did not have - vis-à-vis these subjects.

As I travelled, and developed support groups in different countries, I discovered more about the global situation, and conceived other elements and ideas for the film - ones that would eventually emerge as scenes of point and counter-point to the principal interviews with the families. For example, in the United States, with the help of local activist Shelley Douglass, I discovered that there were railway lines carrying nuclear missiles on a White Train directly to their destination at a submarine base in Bangor, Washington. With the help of other American activists, I found 8mm film footage of this White Train moving across the US from a nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo, Texas, to Bangor. Peter Wintonick and others of the support group in Canada filmed Ronald Reagan's visit to Canada in 1984 - the ludicrous and humiliating Shamrock Summit. Peter Wintonick also filmed revealing scenes of Canadian TV crews filming their own (completely biased) material on this Summit.

I discovered the absurd civil defence measures designed for New York State. And on the other side of the world - the semi-underground vault in Hiroshima, where the ashes of people killed by the atom bomb are stored in numerous rows of small tin cans. I met the courageous women of the 'September 25' agricultural collective in the outskirts of Maputo in war-torn Mozambique (at that time suffering the brutalities of the right-wing South-African backed Renamo 'resistance' movement); Hinano Lucas, his family and friends on the Island of Tahiti, including those who had worked with (and consequently suffered from) the French nuclear testing on the atoll of Murarowa; the Lopez family in an impoverished village in the State of Morelos, Mexico; the Drinkwine family in Seattle, Washington, who were paying a high price for Al Drinkwine's refusal to continue working on a nuclear base; the Kolosov family in Leningrad, USSR, who provided a Soviet perspective (this was still the period of the Cold War), and who described the suffering during World War II, etc., etc.

I also met with - and filmed in discussion - the Hendricks family from New York State; the Barnes family from Victoria, Australia; Gerard and Ouza, of French-Algerian origin, in Toulouse, France; the Mori family in Japan; the Vikan family in Norway; the Smillie family in Scotland; the Crippen family in Portland, Oregon; the Ponce family in Mexico; Toshiko Saeki, Hajima Hamada and Hiroshi Shindo, survivors of the atom bombing of Hiroshima; Emma Biermann and Werner Brasch, survivors of the firestorm following the Allied bombing of Hamburg during World War II; and Frida Tiare and Miron Matad in Tahiti, with their children Hiro, Ayona, Ariioehau, Camelia, Tahuka, Sairah and Joanna.

They, and many other incredible people, together with all the information gained - including the tragic and on more than one occasion, the utterly absurd - constitute the complex fabric of the 14 hr 30 min film called The Journey, that emerged in 1987.

Reactions to The Journey

The first reactions were generally positive. The film was shown in the Forum at the 1987 Berlin Film Festival, and at a number of venues in Sweden, New Zealand, France and the U.S. Some of these screenings were organized by peace groups, others as special courses in local colleges. Interestingly, in 1989, The Journey was even shown on TV by 3 local channels in New York City and in Canada.

Then a counter-reaction set in. I should have been alerted when a producer at the National Film Board came into the auditorium part-way through our first preview screening of The Journey, stared at the screen for a moment, and then yelled out, "what's all this about?!" Also, at the Berlin Film Festival, a West German TV commissioning editor slammed up the bottom of his seat after the first 3-4 minutes of the screening, and then demonstratively stormed out of the cinema. Were these men having a visceral reaction to a film that was visibly different from the Monoform? Whatever, it soon became clear that TV channels were avoiding The Journey - its long and complex process, its subject matter and its explicit critique of the role of the mass audiovisual media (MAVM) in suppressing information on the global arms race and the developing environmental crisis. To date (to the best of my knowledge), no TV organization anywhere in the world has shown the film since those initial screenings in 1989.

The Journey also discusses the complicity of education systems - which has apparently not helped in the distribution of the film. With the exception of the early college screenings, and perhaps a dozen more in subsequent years (see the following articles), few schools or universities have worked with The Journey - despite its having been structured with educational screenings in mind. In my opinion, The Journey is 'problematic' for media educators because it analyses the role of the MAVM in withholding, or subverting, information on the world arms race (among other serious issues) - including by the application of the standardised Monoform in virtually all audiovisual material. Countless media classes and teaching institutions worldwide extol the manipulative and hierarchical aspects of the Monoform 'popular culture', and its overt bias in favor of mass consumerism, and encourage students to view such material as harmless 'entertainment' or a source of 'aesthetic pleasure'.

The role and use of the DVD version of The Journey

I would like to hope that the possible reasons for the prolonged resistance of The Journey are the very ones that continue to give it crucial relevance in our problematic world today. I believe that the form and process of this film, including that it gives people time to express themselves (contrary to standard media practice), is important. I believe that the participants in the film are important - the things they say, the observations they make, their critical opinions. The film allows feeling, emotion, and genuine concern to emerge (hopefully, in most cases, without interruption by the filmmaker). The Journey allows time for silence and reflection, and in doing so, breaks with the standard ideology of the MAVM, which is anchored on the premise of 'impact' upon a compliant audience.

For these and many other reasons, I believe that it is important for The Journey to be shown, and for its process, themes, and questions, to be debated. Open public debate is more crucial than ever - not debate that is popular culture driven, or given fleeting and fragmented form by the social media, but debate that happens directly among live groups of people.

The Journey can be screened in schools and universities, even within a typical class period. It can also be shown at special sessions in cinemas, to the general public, or within community groups.

One such presentation of The Journey was the excellent screening at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, which took place in May this year (2013) The film began on a Friday evening, and continued through to the Sunday evening, punctuated by debates organized by the Otolith Collective. As I understand it, the cinema was full for the initial evening, after which the audience diminished to a core group of some 30 people, some of whom stayed through to the end, participating in all of the discussions.

Extracts from the Tate Modern booklet for The Journey: The Journey - Friday 17 May - Sunday 19 May 2013 Peter Watkins, Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Soviet Union, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany and USA. 1987 870 min. Friday 17 May 2013 18.00-22.00: Chapters 1-4 Saturday 18 May 2013 11.00-13.00: Chapters 5-6 14.00-18.00: Chapters 7-9 19.00-22.00: Chapters 10-13 Sunday 19 May 2013 1.00-13.00: Chapters 14-15 14.00-18.00: Chapters 16-19

"Following Tate Modern's 2012 retrospective of Peter Watkins' work, this special screening event offers the unique opportunity to see Watkins' monumental film The Journey in its complete duration of 14 hours and 30 minutes. The Journey traces the systemic impact of the global nuclear regime across 12 countries, building an intricate series of connections between the state of the arms trade, military expenditure, the environment and gender politics that are more relevant than ever.

Working collaboratively with activist groups from around the world over three years, The Journey is an astonishing epic that succeeds in expanding documentary's powers of polemic, reflexivity and inspiration.

Support groups debate the peace process, families discuss their fears of nuclear threat and the cost of world hunger, survivors recall the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while Watkins analyses the role played by mainstream media in normalising conflict. Peter Watkins' vision of a political cinema that emerges from and documents the collaborative process which it analyses, reaches its most elaborated form in The Journey which is structured in 19 intricately edited chapters. The result is an unprecedented cinematic constellation whose inspiration and importance has only increased since its release in 1986.

Since the late 1950s, Peter Watkins' films such as Culloden 1964, The War Game 1966, Punishment Park 1970, Edvard Munch 1973 and La Commune 1999, have reinvented historical drama and future speculation into impassioned, insurgent political cinema. And yet The Journey 1987, Watkins' most sustained experiment with documentary, has not been screened in London since its LUX screening in 2003. In the wake of the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on 11 March 2011, the critical relevance of The Journey can be neither doubted nor overlooked."

Support in the U.S.

UPON ITS initial release, The Journey was significantly supported via the writings of Scott MacDonald, a leading historian and chronicler of the American avant-garde cinema, and English professor Ken Nolley, both of whom also used the film in their courses - Scott in Utica College, NY, and Ken in Willamette University, Oregon.

Scott MacDonald, whose book 'Avant-Garde Film Motion Studies' (Cambridge Film Classics, Cambridge University Press, 1993) ranges over the works of Yoko Ono, Michael Snow, J. J. Murphy, Hollis Frampton, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Yvonne Rainer and other avant-garde filmmakers, and who produced the segment of the The Journey that took place in Utica, New York, wrote the following:

"The 14½ hours of The Journey are organized into an immense filmic weave that includes candid discussions with "ordinary people" from many countries; community dramatizations; a variety of forms of deconstructive analysis of conventional media practices; presentations of art works by others; portraits of people and places; and a wealth of specific information about the knot of contemporary issues that includes the world arms race and military expenditures in general, world hunger, the environment, gender politics, the relationship of the violent past and the present, and, especially, the role of the media and of modern educational systems with regard to international issues ...

The actual filming of the family discussions was extended and private, and I would guess that no one except Watkins understood the depth of his commitment to them. In conventional documentaries, and even more so in standard news coverage, interviews are rigorously edited: the amount of recorded interview that finds its way into a finished film or news item is determined by the director's assumption about the usefulness or impact of what is said. This is especially the case when the interviewer is not an expert, the subject of the film, or a crucial witness to the actions of an "important" person: interviews with the so-called man-on-the-street are usually little more than decoration. The focus of The Journey, however is the thoughts and experiences of average people, and Watkins' commitment to the people who agreed to talk with him was nearly absolute. He was determined to provide them with an opportunity to respond to his questions and to treat the responses with respect, not simply in a metaphoric sense, but literally, in the overall allocation of screen time and in his use of continuous, unedited shots ...

As is true in a number of the films discussed earlier in this volume, the most fundamental and pervasive structural dimension of The Journey is the network of interconnections among layers of image and sound. Early in the film, for example, when Watkins is introducing the [CBC] coverage of the Shamrock Summit, he juxtaposes a visual of a Canadian newsperson ... doing a "topo" [a news summary which is either an item in its own right, or which functions as an introduction or conclusion to the filmed and edited main news item - usually delivered while standing and facing the camera] with a voice-over translation of what [the newsperson] says: "Wrapped in a thick cloak of protocol and reception, the Mulroney-Reagan Summit has a full agenda..." The image of [the newsperson] is framed so that, at first, she is seen surrounded by darkness [she was filmed standing in the street on a bleak winter evening in Quebec City] - her face is visible through the space between a technician's arm and body [this scene was filmed by the Canadian Support Group for The Journey, who followed the Canadian coverage of the Summit]: She is surrounded by a "thick coat" of media protocol and reception. In fact, the documentation of the topo reveals that the primary concern for [the newsperson] and those responsible for recording her is not the issues of the summit, but how she looks and sounds [she was very concerned not only about her speaking rhythm, but also about her makeup, and whether her hair was mussed-up by the wind]; the topo is redone several times, not to provide increased information, but to package the obvious more "professionally." This concern with appearance, with "cloaking" information in a specialized, elite language is not only parallel to the summit itself, it reveals how fully the commercial media is an arm to the government systems, functioning within the limited spaces and times determined by the government ...

The more one fully attends to The Journey, the more the coherence of its vision becomes apparent. At first, the film seems to jump abruptly from one place and time to another, but by the end of the film, Watkins has made clear a belief that has been one of the foundations of all his work: that fundamentally, all places are simultaneously distinct and part of one place; all times are special and part of one time; all issues are important for themselves and as parts of a single, interlocking global issue. The Journey creates a cinematic space in which the viewer's consciousness circles the earth continually, explores particular families and places, and discovers how each detail ultimately suggests the entire context within which it has meaning. Like the other films [described in Avant- Garde Film Motion Studies], but more fully than any of them, Watkins' film develops in the direction not of narrative climax and resolution, but of an expanded consciousness of the world ..."

For a glimpse into the pedagogical potential of 'The Journey' in terms of film analysis, and an idea of issues and questions which the film can bring to the classroom, here is what Ken Nolley of the Willamete University, Oregen wrote in the concluding chapter of a series of essays ('The Journey: A Film in the Global Interest', Willamette Journal of the Liberal Arts, Supplemental Series 5, 1991):

"Although The Journey presents itself to an audience largely by invoking documentary codes, it transforms those codes in a variety of ways, calling attention to certain elements of the coding system and recoding certain other elements. The result is a partially transformed reading space for the viewer, which can (and I would argue should) lead to a transformed reading strategy on the part of the viewer. To begin, Watkins re-presents certain traditionally coded items so that we are forced to reconsider what those items mean in the context of this film. For example, though the hibakusha, survivors, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are generally used in films as emblems of victimisation, Watkins uses several devices to make that simple designation more complex. Particularly, he employs the image of Jikkon Li, a Korean who was doing forced labour in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, to speak of Japanese racism against Koreans at the time of the bombing and after, as well as to point out the singularly aggressive nature of Japanese foreign policy in the first half of the century. By adopting such a strategy, Watkins fixes a more complex and troubling code on subsequent images of Hiroshima in the film. In The Journey, speakers are identified upon initial appearance as in a conventional documentary. Apart from television sequences used in the film, however, none of the participants in the film are identified as particular authorities on anything, and they are typically photographed in their homes, usually in their kitchens gathered around a table (except for the Mexican family and the women and children on a Mozambiquan collective farm, both of which appear to lack such facilities).

Speech from non-experts in such surroundings is much less clearly marked as authoritative than is most speech in most documentaries, and thus it is more easily questioned or criticized. Furthermore, Watkins lets many of his questions to the participants remain in the film. This is particularly true of the first several hours of the film, where he is often clearly "leading" the discussion by showing the participants a collection of photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with a group of charts, graphs, and other visual aids. It is somewhat less true as the film progresses, but the reduced presence of Watkins' questions later in the film also seems to correspond with the increased comfort and volubility of the participants. During the filming of the three family sequences which I observed, the early stages of the discussion were more halting and limited, and Watkins probed more with questions and aids; by the second day, however, the families had grown more comfortable with the camera and had thought and talked about the issues of peace and global justice enough that they were beginning to speak more spontaneously and for longer periods of time. But Watkins' strategy here reveals the source and direction of the manipulation which provokes the increasingly comfortable discussion, so that the audience is reminded with some frequency of the presence of a questioner.

The Journey also makes use of a large number of charts and graphs, but here many of them are presented in clearly mediated ways. Sometimes Watkins himself (whose arms and hands are often onscreen moving these visual aids around) is the visible mediator. At other times, the mediator is someone like Bob del Tredici, whose photographs, published and displayed elsewhere under the title At Work in the Field of the Bomb, occur at intervals throughout the film; usually these photographs are filmed over del Tredici's left shoulder and they are always accompanied by his gently ironic descriptions. Again, the effect of these more mediated presentations is to make them somewhat more accessible to investigation and question, especially since in Watkins' presentations there are two audiences for these visual aids -participants in the film, whose reactions to the documents we can evaluate and consider, and we in the film audience, who may have somewhat different responses. Watkins himself appropriates the role of narrator. Although his voice in the film shares many of the characteristics of traditional narrators (especially the carefully modulated tone achieved through reading what must have been written script much of the time), that role is transformed partially by the fact that Watkins allows errors in the narration to stand in the finished film. On one occasion early on, for example, he wrongly states that the French nuclear test site in the Pacific is uninhabited, only to correct that error later while pointing out the earlier mistake. Likewise, at another point, Watkins is asked a question by a participant and hesitates in momentary confusion. That moment, too, is allowed to remain in the film, and is followed by a narrator's explanation and clarification. Both point clearly to the fallibility of Watkins as participant, as well as to the hitherto nearly invisible space between the role of Watkins as interviewer (present during the filming) and Watkins as narrator (intervening during post-production work). These moves, too, undermine and problematize the narrator's voice.

Finally, The Journey, like all documentaries, modifies and brackets speeches of participants through its use of editing juxtapositions. But whereas the traditional documentary edits small bits of speech on film together to create its own discursive voice, this film allows speakers to talk for relatively long periods of time, and thus individual shots often contain complex trains of thought which do not fit entirely smoothly together to create a seamless discourse. Brian Henderson, trying to distinguish in Godard's work this more complex and problematic style of connection from traditional montage, has preferred to call it collage rather than montage (Henderson, 1970-71:5). And all of these devices are called into more serious question by the extensive use the film makes of television news coverage, which it criticizes extensively and analyzes in detail, noting everything from editing pace (by means of added sounds to announce cuts and changes in image) to the artifice involved in shooting a reporter on location or the choices involved in photographing a news conference or a demonstration. For example, the film documents how television collaborates with governmental power by its cooperative presence at an announced news briefing or by its revealing presence near the police during the demonstrations. Since the film occasionally turns these deconstructive devices back on itself as well (by discussing editing strategy of the sequence under view, or by adding sounds to its own cuts), it pushes viewers to develop a viewing strategy that is somewhat more active, critical and complex than merely attempting to locate the authorial voice of the film."

Since 'The Journey' has been shown so infrequently on TV, no-one knows the film exists, and this has hardly helped to get it into schools. Furthermore, the entire direction of media education in the last decades has been such that a film like 'The Journey' - which is critical of the media - is not seen as having any meaning ... As I describe elsewhere in the website, the massive onslaught in terms of teaching (and eulogizing) the Popular Culture of the MAVM has created a climate in which any audiovisual subject with a slower rhythm, which deconstructs the very manipulation of the Popular Culture modes, and which seeks to engage us in a developing process with the people on the screen, is considered passé, boring, and irrelevant. Yet it is precisely because media education has come to this point of condoning intolerance to anything that is not manipulating the audience at an image per second, of automatically accepting on-screen violence, of totally eliminating critical thinking - that it is important for young people to experience seeing a film like 'The Journey'.

Peace Studies in the U.S. and The Journey

A DEPARTMENT of Peace Studies was established at Colgate University, NY, in 1971; in 1985 the Cooley Chair of Peace Studies was occupied by Prof. Nigel J. Young, a founding member of the Bradford (U.K.) Peace Studies Department.

This is a description of the syllabus - using The Journey - taught some years later by Prof. Young:

"Peter Watkins' world "journey" takes us through time and space in an epic documentary film, an odyssey of the nuclear age. Centered on the ethics of nuclear technology, Watkins' film is as much about "peace" as it is on the preparations for global war; it is critical about the role of media and focuses on families, members of various communities (including Utica, NY, UK and Norway) in twenty countries all around the globe. This, together with the complete script, will be the main text organizing the "trunk" of the semester. The "branches" will be the assigned readings relative to each individual culture in this journey, and on a period of millennial "modernity" (e.g. reading Hiroshima, by John Hersey, studying the Maruki's Hiroshima panel paintings).

Through comparing these two perspectives - global and local - in a journal each week, and in short, critical statements, students will hopefully look at themselves in the globalizing context of the industrialized and developing worlds and the impact of our western culture (e.g. media, environment, arms trade, consumerism, and waste) since 1945, not least in "nuclear numbing."

In conclusion we ask whether Universities and Colleges and also media adequately address these planetary issues at a time of uncertainty and instability. Is a more positive peace building strategy through nonviolence conceivable? Can civil disobedience and direct action be justified?

Peter Watkins' 14 ½ hour film The Journey (1985) represents his ambitious attempt (after his notorious 1966 classic, The War Game was both awarded and banned) to make a peace film. It is more about living in a highly interconnected global society, which as a species we have been preparing to destroy for over fifty years. It suggests that this environment also contains the germ cells of a more healthy human community. By viewing this epic in as many as thirty segments, we will find a core for this semester's Introduction to Peace Studies: this spinal "text" and a careful reading of its script, will be the base of intense discussion and frequent, critical written comments each week.

At first, student reaction to this revolutionary work is frequently sheer boredom mixed with puzzlement at so many broken conventions. However, through related readings and viewing, as well as meetings with local people (including several Colgate faculty who helped make this film), we will begin to appreciate, interpret, and critique the various levels of The Journey, and the ethical and practical issues it raises: equality and democracy, nationalism, cultural oppression and/or language, gender and race as well as environmental destruction and the role of the media.

Through the "War and Peace Atlas", we will contextualize and assess these diverse cultural journeys, and ask what kind of peace building makes sense as the millennial clock turns. We learn just what a nuclear weapon can do, and where they are. Watkins' discussions relate past memory to future and present action. Watkins helps us to unravel layers of meaning and identity: encouraging a cooperative effort to learn more about ourselves and our environment in a planet made up of both industrial and developing countries. Many of these are both increasingly militarized, volatile and in conflict. The Journey is a trip across all these boundaries of gender, race, culture and political frontiers, as well as the 19th century western academic disciplines. We travel across our own time and geography, history and space. The hope is that we might even emerge with a sharper sense that we are, as well as the source of such problems, the makers of some of the solutions.

This is a basis for studying global peace."

The Journey (Resan) in Sweden

When The Journey was first released, Catherine Bragée, Lena Ag, Thomas Magnusson, Åke Sandin and other members of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS) in Sweden, which was seminal in producing the film, prepared an excellent booklet (Boken om Resan, 1988, Pax förlag, Frölunda, Sweden), with many photographs and all the text and dialogue from the film. During this time, I visited a number of the SPAS peace movement organisations throughout Sweden, and showed the film.

The Journey in New Zealand

Following its release, Marion Hancock, Katie Boanas, Hedy Barta, Derek Bolt and other members of the NZ Foundation for Peace Studies, as well as local teachers, including Roger Horrocks, used The Journey in various ways, both during and after school hours at a high school in Motueka, a continuing education course in Auckland, a Canterbury University Peace Studies project, a meeting in Golden Bay, and elsewhere.

Included are a series of abridged comments from people who watched the film on these occasions. I am indebted to Derek Bolt of Motueka for compiling The Journey Newsletter (1988) from which I selected the following NZ quotations:

"Thank God someone had the energy to make it ..."

"Am impressed by the restraint and lack of hysteria the producer has held to. It could easily have been put across too emotionally. Its impact slowly sinks in and will be most lasting in consequence ..."

"... a strong impression of feeling about the people in the film - everyone agreed that by now we know them and like them ..."

"They keep saying, "What can I do ... it's only little me?" ...well, the world's made up of little me's..."

"It gives you time to think about what you are watching ..."

"Excellent movie, I really like its pace and techniques."

"... it communicates in feelings ..."

"This film is like a meditation ..."

"It was captivating, drew one in so completely. More should be made of the fact that it is really so effortless to watch. I wasn't prepared for that ..."

"I find lots of good things in The Journey. BUT I expected more - I began with very high expectations, and these were disappointed. It did not justify its excessive length ... [The film] would have done more good if it were less relentlessly slow moving, earnest and numbing. Where was the humour, the affirmation of energy and hope? ... Whoever hailed The Journey as a masterpiece did us all a disservice - including Watkins. I see it as a very interesting, very ambitious, very noble failure. I would be delighted if the future proves me wrong."

"A great warmth of feeling for all the families that I've spent time with and by patiently staying with them have come to know them, and language wasn't that important. For some, the simpler they appear the more profound their understanding and responses. Their sheer humanity wins through."

"Pretty one-sided. Got any other solutions apart from stopping arms production?"

"Peter, your biases are showing beautifully. Thank you for passionate, subjective filmmaking. It is hard for people to break from conventions of editing and pacing. To make it "uncomfortable" viewing is to make the medium itself truly part of the message. Thank you."

"... the feeling I have is like waking up. I'm not quite sure what's reality ..."

"14½ hours is just long enough to let a picture of the real people involved sink in. Was surprised at my ability to stay awake through a movie with no plot, suspense, etc. - decided I could because it was about real life, people, and opinions I recognised."

"Do you feel moved to take any action in response to the film?" "No."

"I am going to write to my friend in America and tell her about this film, because she lives near Hanford Nuclear Plant and I think she should hear what this film has to say ..."

Introduction
Diary of an Unknown Soldier
The Forgotten Faces
Culloden
The War Game
Privilege
The Gladiators
Punishment Park
Edvard Munch
The Seventies People
The Trap
Evening Land
The Journey
The Freethinker
La Commune

Peter Watkins: The Journey

Peter Watkins, The Journey 1987, film still

Courtesy the artist

The Journey

Find out more.

Peter Watkins, Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Soviet Union, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany and USA, 1987, 16 mm, 870 min

The Journey traces the systemic impact of the global nuclear regime across 12 countries, building an intricate series of connections between the state of the arms trade, military expenditure, the environment and gender politics that are more relevant than ever.

Working collaboratively with activist groups from Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Soviet Union, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany and USA, over three years, The Journey is an astonishing epic that succeeds in expanding documentary’s powers of polemic, reflexivity and inspiration.

Support groups debate the peace process, families discuss their fears of nuclear threat and the cost of world hunger, survivors recall the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while Watkins analyses the role played by mainstream media in normalising conflict. Peter Watkins’s vision of a political cinema that emerges from and documents the collaborative process which it analyses, reaches its most elaborated form in The Journey which is structured in 19 intricately edited chapters. The result is an unprecedented cinematic constellation whose inspiration and importance has only increased since its release in 1986.

Since the late 1950s, Peter Watkins’s films such as Culloden 1964, The War Game 1966, Punishment Park 1970, Edvard Munch 1973 and La Commune 1999 have reinvented historical drama and future speculation into impassioned, insurgent political cinema. And yet The Journey 1987, Watkins’s most sustained experiment with documentary, has not been screened in London since its LUX screening in 2003. In the wake of the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on 11 March 2011, the critical relevance of The Journey can be neither doubted nor overlooked.

Presented by Tate Film in collaboration with The Otolith Collective. Introduced by The Otolith Collective, with guest speakers and audience discussion after each screening.

Friday 17 May 2013

18.00 – 22.00: Chapters 1 – 4

Saturday 18 May 2013

11.00 – 13.00: Chapters 5 – 6

14.00 – 18.00: Chapters 7 – 9

19.00 – 22.00: Chapters 10 – 13

Sunday 19 May 2013

11.00 – 13.00: Chapters 14 – 15

14.00 – 18.00: Chapters 16 – 19

Download the programme notes [PDF, 2MB]

Tate Modern

17 May 2013 at 19.00–23.00

18 May 2013 at 12.00–23.00

19 May 2013 at 12.00–19.00

Peter Watkins: Films, 1964-99

Peter Watkins (born 1935) is an award-winning pioneer of the docudrama, typified by his combined use of fictional and documentary elements to dissect historical events

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Friday, January 6 - Sunday, January 8, 2017 Peter Watkins's The Journey 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Introduced by Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith

The Journey , Peter Watkins, 1987, 16mm, 870 mins

Since the late 1950s, Peter Watkins has engineered a unique form of moving image practice, making collaborative, hybrid non-fiction as interventionist art. His films, including The War Game , Edvard Munch , Punishment Park , and La Commune (Paris, 1871) , are complex, deeply engaged essays on social struggle and the mediation of history and contemporary life. His career-long preoccupation has been with turning historical drama and future speculation into insurgent political cinema, through a method of production that invites both participants and spectators to think critically about the ways in which media shape our understanding of the past and the present.

The Journey is Watkins’s most ambitious experiment with form: at once a documentary, a dystopian science fiction film, a handbook for media analysis, and an organizational structure linking activist groups throughout the world. From 1983 to 1986, he undertook a transcontinental project to map the corrosive anticipation of impending nuclear catastrophe. Watkins worked with an international network of support groups to raise money and assemble crews while shooting the film in the US, Canada, Norway, Scotland, France, West Germany, Mozambique, Japan, Australia, Polynesia, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. The result is a fourteen-hour cartography of capitalism, historical memory, and fear that weaves together an analysis of the global arms race, recollections of survivors of the bombings in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Hamburg, and community preenactments of possible disaster scenarios. It is also a sustained critique of the media’s role in distraction, misinformation, and the normalization of nuclear geopolitical strategy, environmental destruction, gender inequality, the erosion of public education, and the spread of world hunger. Mixing nighttime news tropes, culture-jamming tactics, and even a dash of comedic animation, The Journey also continually questions and makes visible its own formal strategies. Watkins encourages us to challenge how we take in media, information, and entertainment, and, furthermore, to take them over.

Once again, we face political and social crises similar to the conditions of the 1980s, now with an updated vocabulary for disasters in progress—Standing Rock, Flint, Fukushima, Iran, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, India, China, Diablo Canyon, San Onofre, Sequoyah, Watts Bar, Indian Point. Once again, the helplessness of the citizen, the artist, and the activist are pitted against hysterical militarization and the relentless pursuit of energy in its most volatile forms. Thirty years on, The Journey has lost little of its relevance, and the long and complex struggle that it stages is now more urgent than ever. - RR/LG

Friday, January 6 7pm: Chapters 1-2 + Discussion

Saturday, January 7 2pm: Chapters 3-5 + Discussion 5pm: Chapters 6-8 + Discussion 8pm: Chapters 9-10

Sunday, January 8 2pm: Chapters 11-13 + Discussion 5pm: Chapters 14-16 + Discussion 8pm: Chapters 17-19

Each chapter runs approximately 45 minutes.

Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith are the editors of the film section of The Brooklyn Rail and authors of a forthcoming book on Peter Watkins, which was awarded an Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation in 2015. Rakes is a Programmer at Large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, an Editor at Large for Verso Books, and an independent curator and critic focusing on nonfiction aesthetics. Goldsmith is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, and writes on film and media for Artforum , art-agenda , Cinema Scope , and the Village Voice .

Tickets - Pay what you wish ($10 suggested donation), available at door. A single ticket is valid for entry to the entire sequence of screenings.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens 30 minutes prior to the day's first screening.

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This past Tuesday, luminaries in the worlds of visual arts, music, and philanthropy turned out in style at the historic Cipriani 42nd Street for The Gordon Parks Foundation Annual Awards Dinner and Auction—raising a record-breaking $2.3 million to advance the work of the foundation.

Patti Smith and Tony Shanahan performed a moving rendition of "Peaceable Kingdom."

The annual gala celebrates the enduring legacy of visionary photographer and multidisciplinary artist Gordon Parks. All proceeds from the event and auction support year-round educational programming, as well as fellowships, prizes, and scholarships awarded to up-and-coming artists, writers, and students whose work advances Parks’ legacy.

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The evening’s events opened on a high note with a performance by Anthony Morgan’s Inspirational Choir of Harlem, followed by remarks from The Gordon Parks Foundation’s Executive Director Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., whose grandfather, Philip Kunhardt, co-founded GPF with Parks in 2006.

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The impressive roster of honorees, including Alicia Keys and Kasseem Dean (aka Swizz Beats), Colin Kaepernick, Mickalene Thomas, and Myrlie Evers-Williams were selected for their commitment to inspiring future generations. In a moving statement, Kunhardt Jr. noted that Parks’ “camera was his weapon of choice to fight racism and poverty–he knew that art could be a powerful weapon, more potent than violence, and that through pictures and words, he could open our eyes.”

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Event highlights included Tim Reid and Sherry Bronfman’s tribute to the late, great Richard Roundtree, star of Gordon Parks’ iconic 1971 film Shaft. In a moving moment, Roundtree’s daughter accepted the award from Parks’ daughter, Leslie Parks Bailey, and shared that her late father had been excited to attend this year’s event. Gayle King honored civil rights activist and former Chairman of the NAACP, Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Daughter Reena Denise Evers-Everette accepted on her mother’s behalf and shared a moving video message in which Myrlie shared that her “heart is filled with profound gratitude for this extraordinary honor...Gordon Parks was a visionary who used his art to advocate for equality and justice. To be recognized in his name is deeply humbling.”

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For more information, visit The Gordon Parks Foundation .

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Aston Villa’s player of the season: Ollie Watkins

If a team’s transformation was ever reflected in a player’s own evolution, then Ollie Watkins holds a mirror up to Aston Villa .

A floaty wide forward at Exeter City became a dovetailing striker after a move to Brentford, and at the start of his time with Villa, improved but still being refined, he was prone to peaks and troughs. Considering he had played with multiple strike partners for Exeter, Watkins became strangely inhibited when paired with someone else up top, namely Danny Ings .

The widely held opinion of Watkins was a solid Premier League striker, without ever offering elite incision. He was a nice enough player, but not ruthless. Sharp around the box, but blunt in front of goal. At the start of 2023, before Unai Emery decided to discard Ings — a gesture that symbolised Villa were building their offensive structure around Watkins — the former was the club’s top scorer for that season, with six league goals.

Emery’s arrival just over a month earlier provided Watkins with main-man status and the centre-forward role in which he would flourish as Villa’s attacking nucleus.

At 28, he is an anomaly; he strikes a chord between general selflessness in his role for the team and yet, oxymoronically, a distinct newfound selfishness.

As a measure of Watkins’ steep trajectory, there was a natural tinge of disappointment following the final-day game against Crystal Palace when he missed out on getting to 20 Premier League goals for the season. T he last Villa player to score 20 or more in a top-flight campaign was Peter Withe in 1980-81 (20).

“It had been an aim, but there is always next season,” Watkins said. “I am not surprised by how well I have done this season because of all the hard work I’ve put in. Has it been a breakthrough (season)? Yeah. But next season will be better — I am sure.”

Still, Watkins’ overall style combines selfish goalscoring with selfless creating for others. In the end, any frustration was compensated by winning the Premier League’s playmaker award, registering a league-leading 13 assists.

While he presses with sacrificing endeavour, leads the line that connects Emery’s two No 10s and stretches opposition back lines, his cutting edge has been sharpened by Villa’s head coach demanding Watkins stay in selfish positions.

Emery asked Watkins, a player inclined to drift into the channels, to remain within the width of the penalty area. This chimed with the England international, who was keen for greater responsibility, particularly as Villa were only going to play with one forward following Ings’ mid-season departure to West Ham .

Moreover, he understood if he was going to put up the type of meaningful numbers that would warrant an England recall and elevate his game, he had to concentrate on his effectiveness inside the 18-yard box and within the span of the goal. Emery held individual meetings with Watkins, showing him clips of two strikers he coached at other clubs, Carlos Bacca and Edinson Cavani .

Watkins is considered one of Villa’s most conscientious and hardest trainers, described to The Athletic by a source close to the dressing room, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their position, as “working relentlessly with staff to get to these levels”.

He has a close relationship with Villa’s individual development coach Antonio Rodriguez Saravia, known around the club as Rodri. Saravia tends to work with Watkins after training, fine-tuning the nuances of a striker. This includes finishing practice, more analysis meetings and learning the type of runs to make.

The overarching sense of vindication has been immense.

The statistics are remarkable.

This season, Watkins was the first player in Europe’s top five leagues to get to 15 goals and 10 assists. His combined final league total of 32 — 19 goals, 13 assists — means he is only the ninth English player of the Premier League era to have 30 or more goal involvements in a 38-game campaign.

Since Emery’s first game in charge in November 2022, no Premier League player has scored more non-penalty goals, and Watkins has racked up 49 goal contributions in 61 appearances.

His 27 goals in 53 club appearances across all competitions this season have solidified his England position, knowing one more good camp would ensure he remains in the squad for the European Championship starting on June 14, with seven players to be culled from the provisional squad named on Tuesday.

“He’s adding more things tactically to himself to feel comfortable playing,” said Emery. “He plays in the structure we have tactically and his commitment to do the work we always need has been fantastic — more than scoring goals and the assists. I appreciate him and his progress. I think other coaches and (the coach) of the national team are aware of him and how important he’s been for us.”

Watkins’ propensity to make constant elastic-type runs against opposing defences — stretching the play before contracting it by dropping deep and receiving the ball to feet — works perfectly with the two No 10s on either side of him. September’s hat-trick against Brighton was a blend of clever, more cutting runs, complemented by a finishing edge that has raised his game.

A sign of an evolving forward can be judged by the variety of their finishes. From a neck-cranking header at Bournemouth to salvage a point, to the dink to damage Arsenal ’s Premier League chances irreparably, to peeling off Kurt Zouma , offering a quick stepover and slamming a weak-footed effort into the roof of the net against West Ham, these are three goals that show Watkins’ level of dexterity. Each came at a crucial time in the game concerned and at a crucial point in Villa’s season.

Missing out on 20 goals means Villa’s talisman will sit through the summer being one away from equalling Dwight Yorke’s tally of 60 league goals for the club, the second most of any player. Given his current rate, it is probable Watkins will surpass Gabriel Agbonlahor (74) as their record Premier League scorer next season, putting paid to the previous school of thought that Emery would need to sign a striker with a more clinical edge.

December’s goal against Brentford was Watkins’ 21st in the league in 2023 — no Villa player has ever scored more in a calendar year.

Emiliano Martinez , Leon Bailey and John McGinn have all been talismanic figures and are leaders in their own right, essential in achieving Emery’s top-four target this season. But it is Watkins’ goals, and transformation into becoming one of the Premier League’s best and most reliable scorers, that mean he is our Villa player of the season.

His rise matches the club’s journey, turning sceptics into believers and proving that he, like his team, can break through the top flight’s glass ceiling.

(Top photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

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Jacob is a football reporter covering Aston Villa for The Athletic. Previously, he followed Southampton FC for The Athletic after spending three years writing about south coast football, working as a sports journalist for Reach PLC. In 2021, he was awarded the Football Writers' Association Student Football Writer of the Year. Follow Jacob on Twitter @ J_Tanswell

COMMENTS

Resan
Resan (Swedish for The Journey) is a 1987 documentary film by Peter Watkins, made between the years 1983 and 1985 on several continents, and structured around the theme of nuclear weapons, military spending and poverty.Ordinary people are asked about their awareness of these issues. With a running time of fourteen hours and thirty-three minutes, Resan is the longest non-experimental film ever ...
The Journey (Resan)
One of the most significant filmmakers of his generation, Peter Watkins has made compassionate, uncompromising films and videos that challenge not only conve...
The Journey : Peter Watkins's Polyphonic Plea for Humanity
If watching his films frequently feels like you're being shouted at, then it's only because he's shouting for dear life. Watkins's humanism, in a sad accident of film history, is most fully on display in one of his most little-seen films, The Journey (1987), a sprawling, polyphonic, intellectually and emotionally overwhelming, fourteen ...
Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins (born 29 October 1935) is an English film and television director. He was born in Norbiton, Surrey, ... The Journey: A Film for Peace; weaves together family interviews, the global arms race, survivors of the bombings in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Hamburg, community psychodramas of possible disaster scenarios, and works by other ...
RESAN (THE JOURNEY)
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Resan (1987)
Resan: Directed by Peter Watkins. With Francine Bastien, Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Peter Watkins. A global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it.
Peter Watkins
1987, 16 mm, 870 min. Following Tate Modern's 2012 retrospective of Peter Watkins's work, this special screening event offers the unique opportunity to see Watkin's monumental film The Journey in its complete duration of 14 hours and 30 minutes. The Journey traces the systemic impact of the global nuclear regime across 12 countries ...
The Journey
Directed by Peter Watkins. Sweden, 1988, 16mm, color and b&w, 134 min ... From January 11-30, audience members may visit the video library at Harvard Film Archive to view all episodes of The Journey on video, free of charge. For viewing hours, call (617) 495-4700. Part of film series.
The Journey (1987)
Brief Synopsis. Read More. This pioneering attempt at a fully international cinema, consists of Watkins's extended conversations with families and nongovernmental organizations about the arms race and its relationship to world hunger, gender politics, and the functioning of the mass media; gripping personal recollections of s.
Authorship, activism and creative struggles: Peter Watkins' The Journey
T2 - Peter Watkins' The Journey revisited. AU - Stjernholm, Emil. PY - 2024/5/8. Y1 - 2024/5/8. N2 - Based on research in the archive of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society in Stockholm, this article sheds light on the complex production history behind Peter Watkins' fourteen-and-a-half-hour documentary Resan (The Journey) (1987). Set ...
The Journey (Resan)
About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features NFL Sunday Ticket Press Copyright ...
‎The Journey (1987) directed by Peter Watkins
An exhaustive, and quite frankly, exhausting film experience, Peter Watkins's The Journey flattens geopolitical borders and physical space in its attempt to create a shared consciousness. To form a linkage of like-minded concerns over the nuclear arms race and the sense of helplessness it conjured up in all those that understood its power to ...
Peter Watkins 's The Journey
Film series. Mar 20-21, 2004. One of the most significant filmmakers of his generation, Peter Watkins has made compassionate, uncompromising films and videos that challenge not only conventional styles and techniques but also notions of history and the media. The ever-timely The Journey: A Film for Peace, made between 1984 and 1987, is a pioneering attempt at a fully international cinema.
Journey_PeterWatkins
Peter Watkins' Web site and latest critical media statement, along with detailed information regarding each of PW's films and their current availability. ... 'The Journey' was born directly out of an earlier, collapsed project in 1982, when I tried to organize another anti-nuclear war film, funded by Central TV in England, and working with ...
The Journey 1987, directed by Peter Watkins
The Journey. Film; Advertising. ... Peter Watkins is celebrated for his groundbreaking BBC films The War Game and Culloden. Since then he's made half a dozen features in Scandinavia, North America ...
Going Nuclear
Peter Watkins, The Journey, 1987, 16 mm, black-and-white, sound, 870 mins. ONE OF THE SCORES of interviewees offering their opinions on nuclear proliferation in Peter Watkins's The Journey (1987) is a middle-aged Mexican woman in Guadalajara who implores that the presidents of powerful nations might link hands to "go around the world and look at the situation of the people."
Authorship, activism and creative struggles: Peter Watkins' The Journey
Based on research in the archive of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society in Stockholm, this article sheds light on the complex production history behind Peter Watkins' fourteen-and-a-half ...
Journey_PeterWatkins
Peter Watkins' 14 ½ hour film The Journey (1985) represents his ambitious attempt (after his notorious 1966 classic, The War Game was both awarded and banned) to make a peace film. It is more about living in a highly interconnected global society, which as a species we have been preparing to destroy for over fifty years.
Peter Watkins: The Journey
Peter Watkins's vision of a political cinema that emerges from and documents the collaborative process which it analyses, reaches its most elaborated form in The Journey which is structured in 19 intricately edited chapters. The result is an unprecedented cinematic constellation whose inspiration and importance has only increased since its ...
The Journey (1987) by Peter Watkins
Here are three of the Stjørdal scenes from Peter Watkins' brilliant 1987 documentary film The Journey. The film is a co-production between several countries ...
Light Industry
Friday, January 6 - Sunday, January 8, 2017 Peter Watkins's The Journey 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn. Introduced by Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith. The Journey, Peter Watkins, 1987, 16mm, 870 mins. Since the late 1950s, Peter Watkins has engineered a unique form of moving image practice, making collaborative, hybrid non-fiction as interventionist art.
The Gordon Parks Foundation Annual Gala Celebrates The Arts And
Peter W . Kunhardt Jr., and ... Baltimore author D. Watkins. ... Alicia Keys drove home the heart of the event—using her own journey as a kid growing up in Hell's Kitchen and The Bronx to ...
Aston Villa's player of the season: Ollie Watkins
T he last Villa player to score 20 or more in a top-flight campaign was Peter Withe in 1980-81 ... Watkins is considered one of Villa's most ... His rise matches the club's journey, turning ...
The Journey (Resan)
About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features NFL Sunday Ticket Press Copyright ...

The Journey : Peter Watkins’s Polyphonic Plea for Humanity

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A global odyssey for peace

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The Journey

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The Journey - ( Resan in Swedish)

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Peter Watkins: The Journey

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Friday 17 May 2013

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