The Freethinker

By the time Peter Watkins made his massive, four-and-a-half hour 1994 video project The Freethinker, he was thoroughly outside of most conventional media structures. Watkins originally planned to make The Freethinker in 1979, as a companion piece to his 1974 masterwork Edvard Munch, but after working on the project for over two years, his funding was cancelled and filming never commenced. As a result, the film was only made many years later, as a collaborative experiment conducted with the assistance of a video production class made up of Swedish high schoolers. The students, all inexperienced with film and video before the class began, handled nearly every aspect of the production: set design, costumes, acting, camerawork, lighting, even at times writing and directing. This behind-the-scenes history informs the resulting film in very deep ways, feeding into the themes about mass media, art and social reform that Watkins' script explores.

The film is nominally a biography of the Swedish playwright and author August Strindberg (Anders Mattsson), who Watkins sees as a non-conformist thinker whose radical ideas about history, religion and class caused his work to be suppressed and critiqued by the conservative institutions of his time. Watkins explicitly compares this treatment with the marginalization of his own work. It's very apparent that this examination of Strindberg's life and the conditions of late 1800s Stockholm is meant to parallel Watkins' own life and art, and what he sees as the suppression of his ideas by a mass media that has little patience for this kind of intellectual engagement.

The film is thus about its own conditions of production as much as it is about Strindberg's life and work. This is obviously a work made on a shoestring budget, in amateurish conditions. It was shot on video rather than film, and the imagery is often rough as a result, the colors muted, a long way from the grainy beauty of Edvard Munch. The sets are sparse and minimal, often looking like a bare theater stage with a few props scattered around the empty space. The dramatic scenes, both those taken from Strindberg's life and those enacted from his plays, are stagey and claustrophobic, with the camera hovering close to the actors, utilizing simple compositions that place the emphasis on the raw, heartfelt performances. This parsimonious style belies the structural and ideological complexity of the film, which is, typically for Watkins, a clear-eyed and intelligent examination of the intersections between art, life and society. As in Edvard Munch, Watkins applies a non-chronological, associative editing style that juxtaposes scenes from Strindberg's life with excerpts from his plays as well as contextual material involving contemporary political and social affairs in the world around him.


At several points, Watkins diverts from Strindberg's story to focus on the testimonies of Swedish working class people. A man working on a construction site complains that there's housing only for the rich, while the women working beside him note that they don't earn as much as the men even though they do the same work. In another scene, a family waits for a ship that will take them away from the poverty and lack of opportunities they find in Sweden, to the United States, where they hope to do better. One young woman turns towards the camera, sobbing, her face red, already regretting the necessity of leaving behind her homeland and some of her family and friends.

Such interludes help to ground Strindberg's story within the larger societal context of poverty, inequality, and unfairness, conditions that much of his work polemically rails against. Watkins adopts, as he often does, a pseudo-documentary style that speculates on what it might have been like if documentary camera crews had been on hand to question Strindberg about his ideas, to document his life and his relationships, to interview young radicals and grizzled workers in the streets about their complaints and their hopes.

At one point, Strindberg returns from exile to Sweden, facing criminal charges of blasphemy, and finds the streets full of exuberant young people celebrating his return and the boldness of his anti-orthodox ideas about religion and government. Watkins stages the scene so that it looks like a modern protest, like any number of post-1960s student movements that have taken to the streets in a celebratory mood to declare resistance. The only difference is the way the protestors are dressed. To underscore the point, Watkins inserts a title that reads, "On the same day that we filmed these scenes in 1993, the Danish police in Copenhagen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators." The film is continually drawing such connections between past and present, suggesting that the upheavals and social changes that have taken place in the intervening years have been largely cosmetic, doing little to truly disrupt an underlying dynamic of power and control that remains solidly in place.


In one of the most remarkable sequences, a group of radical Swedish writers discuss the problems of their time and try to come up with a plan to address gender and income inequalities, both in their writing, and as a broad social reform program. They debate methods and priorities, trying to decide how best to excite public interest in child labor, women's suffrage and the plight of the poor. During this scene, Watkins inserts shots that pull back from the table around which the young writers are gathered to show the cameras, microphones and film crew clustered around them in the room, revealing the cinematic context of this discussion. Soon Watkins goes even further by shattering the film's reality entirely, placing himself onscreen in a discussion with the actors playing the Swedish writers. The actors remain in costume, but now instead of debating conditions in late 1800s Stockholm, they're addressing the modern world, the problems of the mass media, the apathy and lack of belief in progress that prevents modern reformers from having a real voice with which to reach people.

This transition neatly displays the parallels and differences between the two times, suggesting that today's problems are extensions of those of the past, part of the same struggle for equality and justice that has gone on in so many forms over the decade without the need for the struggle ever going away. The issues of the present — class inequality and control over the media — are the same ones that the radicals of Strindberg's time were interested in. In Strindberg's time, the newspapers were battlegrounds for ideas about social reform, with certain papers being sponsored by the rich and the monarchy to attack the ideas of those papers on the left. Even history itself was a site of struggle, as Strindberg's The Swedish People, which for the first time focused on the lives of common people in different eras, represented a challenge to traditional histories which focused on successions of monarchies and governments, wars and treaties, big events and big men. Predictably, Strindberg's history received almost unanimous bad reviews, because the newspapers were largely controlled by precisely the entrenched conservative interests who were threatened by a book that refocused the eye of history so radically and dramatically.


Much of the second half of the film is concerned with the contradictions of Strindberg's life and personality, particularly his late-in-life repudiation of his earlier support for feminism, and his increasingly bitter and contemptuous feelings for his first wife, Siri (Lena Settervall). One of the central questions of The Freethinker is the relationship between life and art, including the paradox that Strindberg often expressed ideas of freedom and equality in his writing that he seldom put into practice in his angry, troubled personal life. Watkins' associative editing style creates linkages between childhood incidents — particularly the cruel punishments of Strindberg's stern, overbearing father — scenes from Strindberg's dramas, and incidents from his long relationship with Siri, with whom he stayed for 15 years. During the second half of the film, Watkins also explores Strindberg's private life through confrontational staged interviews with the playwright, in which a modern interviewer, a member of the crew, hounds Strindberg about his treatment of his wife and children, provoking the writer while Strindberg repeatedly protests that there's more to it, that no one understands.

Indeed, this is a project about understanding, but Watkins grasps that it is impossible to fully comprehend a subject so remote from our own time. The film's analysis of Strindberg can only be built on the writings he and others around him left behind, the incomplete records of their thoughts and feelings and the events that shaped them. Watkins stages a group discussion of Strindberg and Siri in which an audience of men and women of all ages talk about the relationship between the playwright and his wife, grappling with the questions about feminism, creativity, gender and psychology brought up by this story. As one older man says, as a postscript to his own personal take on Strindberg, "there must be many views of Strindberg," many ways of understanding him and his work, many perspectives on the ideas he explored and the kind of man he was during his life.

This is the essence of Watkins' multifaceted approach to his subject, dealing with the complexities of Strindberg's persona and art, and the many possible ways of thinking about his life. The filmed discussion sessions represent an attempt to contextualize Strindberg in a modern setting, and to suggest the kind of active engagement that Watkins desires for his films: the in-film discussion is a model for the kinds of discussions that the film as a whole might prompt in its viewers, so that the discourse and analysis started by the film might continue afterwards.


That spirit of discussion goes hand in hand with the intensely collaborative nature of the film. Watkins worked closely with the students from his class, and credits a few of them with writing and directing certain sequences of the film. The production process recalls the utopian collaborative spirit of 1960s radicalism, the student protests and communes, the attempts at creating art communally rather than individually. Those projects, like Godard's Dziga-Vertov Group, rarely lived up to the promise of true cooperation and communal creation that they espoused. But Watkins' work here is no mere leftist dream, he's actually putting into practice these ideals of collaboration, and the result is remarkable. The film employs a mix of amateur and professional actors, though most of the leads, notably Mattsson and Settervall, were not experienced actors; Mattsson was ordained as a priest after the film was finished. The performances are almost uniformly exceptional, especially since Watkins asks the actors to do more than simply play a role, but also to be present as themselves, commenting on the roles they're playing and the historical figures they represent. Mattsson and Settervall in particular often face the camera in intimate closeups, speaking about Strindberg and Siri in the third person, which makes it clear than in these sequences they are not "in character."

The Freethinker is continually working on multiple levels in this fashion, blending biography, literary criticism, sociopolitical commentary and media analysis. It's an amazing film that reflects Watkins' ideas about media hegemony and its connections to class imbalance, but most importantly its polemics are integrated into a larger whole that also wrestles with the nature of art and the relationship between the individual and his or her historical and social context. Even its cooperative production seeps into the film, providing an example of an alternative media model that skirts around the corporate mass media that currently dominates the distribution of information.

Privilege

[This was originally posted at the online journal Bagatellen, where I write about both film and experimental music. This review is also archived there.]

In 1967, Peter Watkins was best known as a political provocateur who had been more or less banned from the BBC after stirring up a storm of controversy over his brutally honest semi-documentary, The War Game. The film was a savage, relentless demonstration of Britain's frightfully low level of preparedness for a nuclear assault, and more broadly a denouncement of the whole ludicrous idea that a country ever could prepare adequately for the horrors of nuclear weapons. Watkins lost his TV platform as a result, but he had established a reputation as an uncompromising maker of political and historical documentaries. Few could have expected that his first non-BBC film would be a bizarre, visually lavish piece of pop science fiction about a near-future rock star whose image is manipulated by the government, organized religion, and various powerful businesses to control the youth of Britain. Privilege follows the story of the singer and teen idol Steve Shorter (Paul Jones), who rises to fame on the strength of a violent, masochistic stage show in which he is beaten and abused by police officers, locked in a cage, and handcuffed so tightly that his wrists become raw and bloody. Somewhere in there he sings a bit, the obviously overdubbed and flatly unmusical voice perfectly matching this uncharismatic star's blank eyes and hopeless expression.

This image is perfectly calibrated by Steve's handlers to turn him into a "safe" outlet for teenage rebellion. Watkins' film predates the mass-media packaging of the punk movement by over a decade, but already he recognized the potential for music and celebrity to be exploited as a means of control. When the film opens, Steve is being used to channel destructive and rebellious impulses into venues where it will be harmless to the status quo. This is already a potent social critique, but Watkins soon goes further, imagining an elaborate conspiracy that manipulates and manages Steve to such a degree that he is used to establish a megalithic Christian/nationalist conversion of the British youth, indoctrinating them into the worship of God and country through the celebration of a pop star. The film's imaginings become increasingly absurd and wild as it progresses, but Watkins presents each new wrinkle in the plot with a disarming matter-of-factness that puts the audience in Steve's position: unable to effectively protest or react, simply sputtering at the absurdity of what's going on. The people around Steve are all heavily caricatured manipulators, none more so than his manager Alvin (Mark London), who hilariously tries to demonstrate his charity by saying that, when Steve gets a haircut, they do not sell the clippings but donate them.

Even funnier is a ridiculous scene where Steve is enlisted to do a commercial for apples, as a public service to help over-producing apple-growers unload their excess fruit on the populace. Watkins employs his signature mockumentary style throughout the film, directly addressing characters via an off-screen interlocutor. When the commercial's director answers one of these interview questions by expressing a desire to make an "existentialist" TV ad, Watkins cuts away immediately from the director's face to a surreal shot of a man in an apple costume walking through a field. This fruit with legs gradually joins up with two more, one of whom is carrying an umbrella, and Watkins holds this uncomfortably funny shot while the director's pretentious musings continue on the soundtrack. The film's style, including its habit of employing interviews that break the fourth wall of the fiction, is typical of Watkins' color films, with a bleached-out palette and a tendency to over-saturate the scene with light. Throughout, Watkins frequently populates his sets with bright spots directed head-on into the camera, an effect that contributes to the film's fuzzed-out aesthetics. The rambling, discursive form of the narrative is also typical of Watkins, though it is more tightly and traditionally plotted than later masterpieces like Edvard Munch, with its disjunctive time-shifts and fragmented editing.


In other ways, though, Watkins is in unfamiliar territory here, and his satire of popular culture is not always as sharp as when he takes on subjects he's more comfortable with. In particular, he makes some basic misunderstandings of the nature of celebrity that soften the blows he's trying to deliver. At one point in the film, the egotistical investor Andrew Butler (William Job) delivers a soliloquy about the stupidity of the mass public, their susceptibility to manipulation and their inability to think for themselves. To some extent, Watkins is guilty of holding the same point of view: he drastically overestimates the sway that popular figures can have over their audiences, believing that the screaming idol worship of rock concerts can be easily transferred into deeper socio-political realms. Watkins apparently drew much of his insight into celebrity from watching and re-watching the Paul Anka documentary Lonely Boy (included on New Yorker's DVD of Privilege), and his surface-level understanding of the phenomenon unfortunately shows through. When a conglomerate of government officials, business interests, and religious leaders conspire to transform Steve from a counterculture rebel into a God-fearing, flag-loving good boy, Watkins depicts Steve's audience as going along en masse. Watkins seems to miss the basic fragility of celebrity, not getting that the teen girls crying and screaming over a rebellious outcast wouldn't accept his abrupt one-eighty so uncritically.

Despite the imprecision of some of the satire, for the most part Privilege holds up as a remarkable, and remarkably odd, send-up of pop culture and its sometimes messianic marketing. Watkins' love of confrontational cinema leads him to stage the film's climax, the performance where Steve unveils his new religious faith and "repents" for his crimes, as a Wagnerian combination of the Olympic ceremonies, a rock concert, a Nazi rally, and an overblown religious celebration, in an era before megachurches even existed. He's most obviously inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will, here translated into the neon brightness of a pop culture happening. Watkins stages this event as a dazzling and horrifying sensory overload, with burning and lit-up crosses, a hilariously out-of-time marching band, flag-bearers with disturbingly fascist symbols held aloft, and a giant blown-up photo of Steve looking like he's about to throw up. The film is an exercise in absurdity that asks its audience to see themselves in sheep-like people, and in their ridiculous situations. At the time, this was too much to bear, and the film was widely panned and has been nearly forgotten ever since. New Yorker's DVD resurrects the film from this undeserved obscurity, allowing for its re-evaluation both as part of Watkins' now critically praised oeuvre and as a document of its period. In retrospect, looked back on from a time of ubiquitous celebrity, with powerful commercial interests pulling the strings, Watkins' lurid, overblown satire unfortunately doesn't seem nearly as implausible as it once did.

Films I Love #6: Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974)

Despite its title, Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch is more than just a biographical film about the painter of the famous Scream. Munch's tortured life story, from his sickly childhood to his adult affair with a married woman, figure prominently in this fragmentary, elliptical masterpiece, but these dramas are far from the film's only subject. For one thing, the film is one of the best chronicles of the art of painting that has ever been committed to celluloid. Has there ever been a film that engages more thoroughly or more analytically with the physicality and texture of paint on canvas? Watkins lovingly pans across the surfaces of Munch's paintings, lingering on the scratched-out areas and dense layers of overpainting that indicate Munch's obsessive, often violent process of creation. This recursive creativity, with Munch revisiting the same canvases over the course of many months and compulsively worrying at their details, is mirrored in the film's aesthetics. The chronology is frequently disrupted by scenes that recur over and over again, primal scenes from Munch's youth or the short-lived affair that haunted his entire life. As the film goes on, its linear narrative is increasingly complicated by such diversions and the continual looping back that gives equal emphasis to all times at once.

Watkins injects further variety into the narrative through the use of faux-documentary techniques, as a narrator provides commentary on Munch's life, surroundings, and painting process. Most importantly for a political filmmaker like Watkins, the film also makes every effort to position Munch in the broader context of the social and political upheavals of his time. One of Watkins' theses is that Munch was an artist tragically ahead of his time, reflecting a more unfettered, emotionally honest, and deeply personal artistic expression, as though he belonged to a much freer era than the one he was born into. As such, the film frequently diverts from Munch's story in order to document problems of social class, women's rights, and sexual oppression and repression. The film is a revolutionary form of biography that resolutely refuses to limit itself to a simple chronological accounting of events. Not only does Watkins shatter chronology in order to communicate emotional truths rather than dry objective facts, but the film expands beyond the immediate details of Munch's life to explore his social context and the ways in which creativity is shaped by political realities.