A Pioneering Voice in Radical Cinema: The Life and Legacy of Peter Watkins

31 October 2025

The film world bids farewell to one of its most daring architects as Peter Watkins, the British director whose landmark work reshaped the language of political cinema, has died aged 90. Watkins passed away in hospital on Thursday in Bourganeuf, France, where he lived for the last 25 years of his life. His family said in a statement that the world of cinema has lost one of its most incisive, inventive and unclassifiable voices.

Born in Norbiton, Surrey, in October 1935, Watkins studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art after completing national service. His early career included short films and a brief time at the BBC, but even from the outset his work marked him out as someone unwilling to accept the norms of how film and television portrayed reality.

It was his 1964 BBC production Culloden a modern-style news-reportage dramatization of the 1746 battle between Jacobite and government forces that first hinted at the disruptive power of his approach. With this work, Watkins introduced a method that would become his signature: non-professional actors, handheld camera realism and a documentary tone applied to historical or speculative subject matter.

But it was The War Game, made in 1965 for the BBC and later awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967, that sealed his place in cinematic history. The film imagined a nuclear strike on Britain and its aftermath in harrowing detail. Official broadcast was blocked by the BBC for being “too horrifying,” and it was not shown on television in Britain until 1985. Nonetheless it became recognised as a masterpiece of urgency and moral reckoning.

Watkins’ conflict with media institutions like the BBC became a recurring theme throughout his career. He viewed mainstream television and film culture as complicit in power structures and sought to awaken audiences to the mechanisms that control both the message and the medium. In a 2000 interview he remarked that if television had taken an alternative direction in the 1960s and 70s society would be more humane and just.

His subsequent work carried the same radical impulse. Privilege (1967) explored pop-culture manipulation; Punishment Park (1971) placed dissenters in a mock-documentary dystopia; later works such as the four-hour Edvard Munch (1974), The Journey (1987) and La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) pursued ambitious, experimental forms that challenged commercial conventions.

Watkins preferred a peripatetic existence, living and working across Europe and Canada, often in self-imposed exile from the mainstream British film world. He married twice and is survived by his two sons, Patrick and Gérard.

His legacy is not simply the sum of his films. Rather it lies in the enduring question he posed to filmmakers, television-makers and audiences: who controls the visual narrative, and how far are we prepared to accept it? In an age of media saturation and image-driven discourse the questions he asked are more urgent than ever. Many of today’s documentarians and political filmmakers owe a debt to the pathways he opened.

As we reflect on his career we see a cineaste who refused to separate form from politics. He used the tools of drama and the conventions of documentary to unsettle and provoke and in doing so he redefined the potential of film as a medium of critique. His name may not always appear in mainstream retrospective lists, but his influence runs deep.

Watkins’ passing invites renewed attention to his body of work and re-examination of those who challenge the boundaries between reality and fiction, between broadcast complacency and urgent intervention. For a filmmaker who once said that people in media have a responsibility to use their power for world peace, the fact that his voice is silenced in death prompts us to listen more carefully in his stead.