By the time he passed away at the age of 90, British filmmaker Peter Watkins had cemented his legacy as one of the preeminent media scholars of the late-20th and early 21st centuries. Over the course of eight decades, Watkins’ oeuvre represented unrelenting interventions in an industry that was repeatedly acquiescing to the profit motive. Among the themes explored in the director’s work are war (The War Game) and revolution (La Commune). Within these films, his most common approach was the pseudo-documentary. This format helped Watkins combat what he viewed as the passivity that was the dominant mode of discourse in media. His faux documentaries sought to extract the truth from both history, as La Commune takes us back to the Paris Commune, and the present, as his Academy Award-winning (yet subsequently banned) The War Game forced England to confront the realities of nuclear war. In particular, La Commune, the last film Watkins ever directed, synthesizes the director's trans-temporal concerns by creating a collective experience among non-professional actors. In diving into their roles as 19th century communards, the actors began reflecting on contemporary French society and asking how much had and had not changed in the Fifth Republic.

Aside from his Oscar, Watkins did not receive any major awards in his lifetime. This comes as a surprise when Watkins is a prophet of the postmodern not unlike media scholar Marshall McLuhan, whose infamous axiom of “the medium is the message” has defined decades of media studies inquiries. Watkins left us with the “Monoform” and “The Universal Clock.” The former refers to what Watkins described as the “uniform and repetitive language form” prevalent in filmmaking (and has since come to dominate social media), while the latter refers to a market-based “straitjacket” that traps most filmmaking both thematically and temporally.

“Punishment and Privilege: The Cinema of Peter Watkins” aims to explore the director’s filmography while transposing the questions his films posed to our highly mediated epoch, where celebrities and politicians are one in the same, wars are livestreamed on our phones, and as Artificial Intelligence threatens to upend the world of the image and “generate” false histories via deepfakes, amongst other such curiosities. It is a society of the spectacle where the medium no longer has a message—a world where Watkins’ critical approach to mass media is as prescient as ever. This seminar invites papers from a variety of disciplines, asking questions including but not limited to:

• The faux (or pseudo-) documentary as a truer form than the monolithic documentary form.
• The cinema of Peter Watkins and how it interrogates social movements.
• Non-actors and their “collective experience” on set.
• The relationship between media and other forms of collective embodied action (i.e., theatre).
• How the theories of the “Monoform” and “The Universal Clock” apply to our mediatic landscape.