The Pressure of Time, the Look at the Camera, and the Boundary in the Films of Peter Watkins
By Chris Fujiwara

A triple pressure acts on the people of Peter Watkins's La Commune (Paris, 1871): (1) the two-month time window of the historical Commune; (2) the need to define, in terms of the present crisis, the legacy and meaning of the Commune; (3) the pressure of the media, including Watkins himself and his film (long as it is), to reduce time to ever smaller quantities: a minimization of time that culminates in the scene at the barricades, when the Communard TV reporter (Gérard Watkins), converging with the camera on each of the actors in turn, requires them to acknowledge and testify about their double existence as modern-day actor and historical character: "Would you have been on the barricades in 1871?"

Time in Watkins's films is like the time that Walter Benjamin, in the fourteenth of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," qualified as "not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now." In Section XVI of the same essay, Benjamin argues for the necessity of "the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop." A perfect description of Watkins's procedure in La Commune, and a perfect description of the goals of the members of the Union des femmes shown in the film, who seek to break their identification with their work and liberate time for themselves.

In Edvard Munch, The 70s People, and Evening Land, time explodes: each film is a mosaic of moments far flung in time and space, in which sound and image overlap and diverge; the "cutaway" is constantly deployed in a way that relativizes the term and renders it meaningless, since here there is nothing but cutaway, no shot that is not cut away from or that is not cut-away-to from another shot. These films are penetrated and saturated by voices alien to the image, coming from other "scenes," making it impossible to identify and bracket the scene as a separate unit within the flow of displaced images and sounds. Everything is mixed, combined, juxtaposed; there is no unanimity in these films - no more than in La Commune, in which hardly a position is ever affirmed without eliciting a counterargument, a protest, or a catcall (indeed, "it's difficult to be a democrat," as a woman says in the film).

The ambiguity that Watkins cultivates from his earliest films achieves its fullest form in The Freethinker and La Commune. Watkins intersperses different kinds of profilmic events: staged historical or fictional events and situations involving "real people" - often the same people who appear as actors in the staged events and who, speaking as "themselves," comment on the characters they play. A character in these films appears not as a programmed embodiment of a preordained series of actions and responses within a precontrived plot whose outcome is known to the author (who, by this knowledge, assumes a privileged position outside and above the work), but as a consciousness that makes and determines the meaning of situations and that participates in dialogue with other figures, including the author (who is thereby placed within the work).

A further ambiguity arises from the undecidability of whether a given profilmic event is staged or "real-life." Though this ambiguity becomes especially acute in The 70s People and Evening Land, none of Watkins's films is ever totally free from it, and the blurring of the line between staging and real-life situation (or that between character and actor) constitutes one of the decisive formal facts of Watkins's work, one fraught with consequences. The place of the "real" fluctuates radically during a Watkins film.

In conventional documentary-film usage, any voice-over narration is almost automatically ascribed to a direct authorial address. But Watkins's films multiply narrators and distribute them across both sides of the line between staging and real-life situation. In several films, including Punishment Park, sometimes the source of the voice-over narration is an offscreen character (a journalist) who, at times, passes over on-screen. On the other hand, in The Gladiators, the voice-over narration sometimes anticipates events still to come in the narrative ("of the eight people in this room, four will shortly die, and the remainder will continue to play the Game as hard as they can") - why? Surely to subvert the form of the documentary by affirming that every outcome is already predictable in advance, an assertion that moreover links the narrator, as the agent of a media system, with the "system" that (within the fictional world of the film) determines the course of the Peace Game. In any case, knowledge is never enough. Knowledge can even become ridiculous: in The 70s People, the narrator irrelevantly announces the time ("time: 7:25 a.m.") over shots whose chronology is dispersed and in a context where such knowledge cannot inform of us of anything or be used for anything and thus has no meaning.

In Evening Land, on the other hand, the absence of a voice-over narrator becomes a source of uncertainty. (The various voices-off in the film are not associated with a position of knowledge and authority or with a function of information seeking.) Evening Land is, moreover, a model of a narrative feature film in which the illusions of "proximity" or "identification" are defused and destroyed - first by the fact, made unmistakeable by Watkins's techniques, that we never get "closer" to the characters than the camera and microphone allow, second by the narrativization of these recording devices so that their limitation by the conditions of recording (police lines, crowd movements, etc.) becomes apparent, and third by the foregrounding of the arbitrariness of recording choices (as when, during a speech by a labor leader, the camera stays for an extended time on the figure of a left-wing reporter in the crowd).

One result of the varying position of the narrator in Watkins's work is the relativization of the place of the author. In Privilege, as in other Watkins films, it becomes clear that the place of the author is not the same as the place from which the voice-over narration is uttered. The looks of onscreen characters at the camera in Watkins's films are crucial in this regard. In general, the look at the camera is supposed to acknowledge the act of filming and the act of watching, thus implying an address to the spectator and making apparent the act of filming as an act of discourse. However, looks at the camera in Watkins's films raise two crucial questions: to whom is the onscreen look addressed? And who is looking?

In La Commune, in scenes that are presented as the reportage of TV journalists, characters who look at the camera are understood to be looking at the (fictional) audience of the TV broadcast - in other words, at a space, at a group of people, that are not the same as the space and the people of the audience watching the film La Commune. They are looking, then, into an unreal, fictional world. But this fictional world is, of course, also a metaphor for the world of the real audience. In other scenes of La Commune, including those set in "real-life" situations, looks at the camera dispense with the fiction of the TV journalists, their camera, and their audience and aim directly at - what or whom? The author of the film? The audience watching the film? It's clear that the addressee of the onscreen look can fluctuate and vary, just like the figure who looks (who could be any onscreen character at any moment).

Then there are looks at the camera that arise from an "enacted" situation and whose meaning is undecidable. In the scenes (which recur throughout La Commune) in which a bourgeoise woman sits at her desk writing letters about events in Paris, she periodically looks up at the camera. Here (as also in some scenes in The Freethinker) the camera is like a familiar intimate, a presence as real and as somehow indeterminate as that of a spouse, a pet, or a mirror. Then there is the extraordinary moment in which, during a gathering at the bourgeoise's salon, while a guest speaks offscreen about the deplorable state of his business since the start of the Commune, the housemaid, in close-up, stares steadily and coldly into the camera lens.

The look into the lens in Watkins's films carries strong psychological and social connotations. The very first shot of Edvard Munch shows Munch looking at the camera and establishes contact itself as a category, and an act, of fundamental importance. The absence of contact stifles and irritates Munch; he challenges it in his work. The narrator (Watkins) points out: "In many of Munch's family studies, the faces are turned to the side. Human contact with the eyes is avoided." Munch stubbornly berates Mrs. Heiberg in the country house: "It's that inaccessibility of yours that makes me angry." Contrary to some theoretical models that have been proposed to explain the look at the camera in cinema, in Edvard Munch whether or not a character looks at the camera has no necessary connection with whether the shot is understood as an act of direct address. The looks toward the camera in Edvard Munch have no specific expressive intention: they merely reenforce contact.

In The 70s People, the intermittent looks of the two heroines at the camera are flat, seemingly intentionless. Their looks seem to hint (like Munch's stares at the camera in Edvard Munch) that their adhesion to the world of their family lives, as presented in the film, is faltering and weak; that they are not fully part of that world. Other looks express irritation, or - in the case of the girl who threatens suicide on the high window ledge - the explicit demand that the camera go away. These looks imply a kind of personhood that may have something in common with the "strange sort of emptiness" Vanessa sees in Steven in Privilege. Like Steven, and like Munch, the young heroines of The 70s People struggle to escape an inauthentic and unsatisfying existence.

The look toward the camera is thus the crossing of a boundary - a crucial act in Watkins's work. But what is the boundary and where is it located? In the "Set Me Free" production number in Privilege, the police barricade, contrary to our possible initial assumptions, does not mark the boundary between the spectacle and the (onscreen) audience but between two groups of figures who are mobilized within the spectacle. The girl who apparently slips through the barricade, unnoticed, to join Steven on stage is, we realize, also part of the show (just as in The Gladiators, everyone is subsumed under the "system," including the left-wing radical who thinks he is trying to destroy it). A continuity within the spectacle slides all the way from the represented world toward us, the film audience.

In our own time, as a woman says in La Commune, the enemy is invisible; a physical barricade is no help: now the problem is economic; it is globalization and media. Paul Virilio writes in Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles of a form of popular resistance that is "a defense without body, condensed nowhere." This is the form of defense that is needed, but which the historical heroes of La Commune were unable to marshal. Already, in The War Game and Privilege, Watkins's work has shown the displacement of struggle from external to internal space; the saturation of both regions (and also the region of time) by media; the state's denial of private space and its appropriation of private space for state use - a colonization of the interior.

Time, then, becomes the most critical boundary. In La Commune, when a character onscreen suddenly starts talking about the Commune in the past tense and from the perspective of today, the slippage reveals time to be - not a fiction, but a variable space for a kind of structured free play in which the consciousness that it is play (that this is 1999, that we are actors playing the people of 1871) is not suppressed but allowed open expression. This happens without any apparent loss in the intensity of the actors' commitment to their staged reality, with its minimized and pressurized time. This passage across what would, in "real life," be an insurmountable time barrier constitutes a radical step toward the decolonization of interior space, made possible by Watkins's drive to pin down and solidify the moment so that its acute tension can be felt in a new way.

Originally published in Peter Watkins (Chris Fujiwara, editor, Jeonju International Film Festival, 2007)

Chris Fujiwara
© FIPRESCI 2008

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