A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

(1987). By the end of 1983, Watkins had organized a grass-roots, voluntary, international system committed to the production of an openly political film. Many of those who agreed to work with Watkins were programmers and exhibitors who had presented his work on the college circuit. Watkins had challenged them to commitat least in this one instanceto the

production

of an openly political media critique. In fourteen countries, local organizations formed to raise money, to assemble local crews, and to find local citizens willing to be the focus of interviews and community dramatizations. During 1983 and 1984 Watkins filmed in three American locations (Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Utica/Ilion, New York); in France, West Germany, Norway, the Soviet Union; in the Hebrides Islands and Glasgow, Scotland; in Mexico, Mozambique, and Tahiti (despite some French government resistance); and in several Australian and Japanese locations. He did not travel protected by a personal or professional entourage; he moved from one nation to the next, from one language system to the next, alone, relying almost entirely on the good will of the people in the locales where he filmed.

When Watkins arrived at the National Film Board of Canada early in 1985 to edit the film, he had shot over a hundred hours of material, and more important, had demonstrated that a filmmaker could interrogate contemporary systems not simply by working within them, but by moving across them, continually exceeding their limits, and finishing a complex, expensive project (the

The Journey

cost the equivalent of more than a million dollars). His individual achievement in seeing the film to completion was a way of suggesting that all of us, whether we're involved in media or not, can and must do a good bit more than we tell ourselves we can do, if we care about delivering a more humane, progressive world to our descendants.

The 14 1/2 hours of

The Journey

are organized into an immense filmic weave that includes candid discussions with "ordinary people," mostly family groups from around the world, about international issues; community dramatizations of the absurdities of contemporary civil defense planning; a variety of forms of deconstructive analysis of conventional media practices; presentations of critical films and photographs by others; portraits of people and places; and a wealth of specific information about the knot of contemporary issues that include 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.

Page 406

Since 1987, Watkins has worked on a variety of projects related to

The Journey

and he has begun to formulate new projects. His commitment to critique has led him to undertake an extensive exploration of

The Journey

itself. With the assistance of Vida Urbonavicius, he has developed an epic "teaching guide" for the film, a critique of the widespread tendency among filmmakers of all kinds to move on after each film project without considering, in any sustained public way, the meaning and impact of the previous work: to become, in other words, obsessed with production itself while ignoring how this production fits into the larger network of eventsthe way those who produce nuclear weapons focus on each new job at hand, rather than its wider implications. Watkins has also continued to work with community and student groups in Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

Two interviews with Watkins follow. The first was recorded in Toronto in 1981, soon after Watkins had spent a summer teaching at Columbia University and not long before his Strindberg project collapsed (though, as this is written, Watkins expects to work with a Norwegian student group on a new version of the project in 199293). The second was recorded in Utica, New York, in November 1983 and January 1984, soon after

The Journey

(it was called "The Nuclear War Film" at the time the interview was recorded) had gotten underway.

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Part 1

Watkins:

Let's start with that

Roots

experience I had at Columbia. It was a summer session. There were about thirty-five students, a very interesting bunch. I selected four subjects for us to deal with: two were

Roots

[1977] and

Holocaust

[1978]. Then there was the material we were able to get from the Television News Archive at Vanderbilt University. They've been off-air recording all the major network news broadcasts every night since 1968. For a minimal fee, you can ask them to send you a copy tape of any item of the news, providing you can identify it. [The Television News Archive publishes a monthly index to the evening news

Television News Index and Abstracts