Culloden

Peter Watkins's much underestimated Docu-Drama that, frankly, has to be watched by the individual to have the maximum impact. This is, without doubt, the fairest and most realistic depiction of war in cinema history. Here we have no poetic licence and no particular bias, despite some claiming a strong swing in favour of the Jacobites. Men are men, war is war and blood is blood.

There are few ways in which to describe this masterpiece in a simple review. If you desire a stark wake up call to the brutality and pain that war and Civil War creates, get hold of a copy of this film.

If you are not moved, then you have no heart.

One of the best war films I've ever seen, as powerful as Paths of Glory and Apocalypse Now. Watkins' black-and-white "documentary" looks like it came out of a time warp. "They made a desert and called it peace". I wept. Issued by Time-Life, may be available at your local cult video shop.

Brilliant. Uncompromising. Brutal. Seminal docudrama. Docudrama makes it sound pedestrian. It isn't.

I remember watching Culloden years ago on BBC2. The remorseless cannon fire, the savage battle and the immediacy of the action struck a cord. I picked up a copy of John Prebble's Culloden a couple of years after, in a second hand bookshop. Obtaining the book wasn't an automatic response to having watched the BBC film. I brought it without having the film in mind. That is what good film making is. Not a quick fix. More an experience.

A highly recommended watch.

This is one of the films (even though shown on TV, it absolutely qualifies as cinema) that shaped my childhood, my politics, and my love of film-making and its true potential. I remember being simply blown away, not merely by the intensity of the violence and aggression (I had never seen war filmed like this), but by the passion and the pain of the "ordinary people" - the Scots, especially the Scottish women - as they witnessed the English brutality around them. Totally extraordinary to me also, was the fact that the camera team felt so moved as to intercede in the violence - not merely breaking the boundaries of media "objectivity" in a way that had rarely, if ever, been done before in 1964, but also breaking the boundaries of time - remember, we are in a war here that is taking place in 1746, and yet it seems perfectly natural and believable to have a camera team pushing into frame, protesting the behavior of the English troops.

Peter Watkins went on to make many groundbreaking movies, but little can touch Culloden - the closest is Punishment Park, which uses much the same techniques to follow a group of students and protesters in a slightly fictionalized and rather fascist USA, where (as I recall - I haven't seen the movie in years), they are given a "choice" between internment or a (loaded) chance to "run", with the risk/likelihood of being shot and killed by their paramilitary pursuers.

A minor personal note: I saw Culloden on TV while I was very young and at school in Britain. It is a hard film to find - at least until the recent DVD - but I came across it again at the Sydney Public Library, of all places, during a trip to Australia in the 1990s, and sat watching it on 16mm, on a Moviola in the library - as stunned and moved as I had been the first time I saw it. It was reassuring to know that its power had not diminished.

Peter Watkins film "Culloden" is outstanding for all the reasons other reviewers have described and strips away the romanticism about Bonnie Prince Charlie,which began with Queen Victoria and Prince Alberts enthusiasm for anything Scottish. We all know war is brutal, but up until 1964 had film and TV portrayed it as such ? "Culloden" seems to have been the first film to show brutality and atrocities taking place. War films were still about the brave and upstanding allies fighting the nasty axis powers. Other reviewers have commented on the parallels with the Vietnam war, but it must be remembered that "Culloden" was transmitted in December 1964 and the only American troops in Vietnam at the time were advisor's. The full scale American troop deployments to Vietnam did not materialise until April 1965. It is an interesting parallel, but the scenes of US troops burning Vietnamese villages on the nightly news was still months away. But in a sense Peter Watkins previewed this. Quite simply an outstanding film.