Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins (29 October 1935 – 30 October 2025) was an English filmmaker, documentarian, writer and film theorist. He is known as a pioneer of the docudrama and the mockumentary genres, typically with heavy political content. His films present pacifist and radical ideas in a nontraditional style. He mainly concentrated his works and ideas around the mass media and viewers' relation/participation to a movie or television documentary. Nearly all of Watkins' films have used a combination of dramatic and documentary elements to dissect historical occurrences or possible near future events. The first of these, Culloden, portrayed the Jacobite uprising of 1745 in a documentary style, as if television reporters were interviewing the participants and accompanying them into battle; a similar device was used in his biographical film Edvard Munch. La Commune (Paris, 1871) reenacts the Paris Commune days using a large cast of French non-actors. In 2004 he also wrote a book, Media Crisis, an engaged essay about the media crisis, the monoform and, foremost, the lack of debate around the construction of new forms of audiovisual media. Description above from the Wikipedia article Peter Watkins, licensed under CC-BY-SA,full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
    Known for
    Directing
    Place of birth
    Norbiton, Surrey, England, UK
    Birthday
    29 October 1935
The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins
The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins
5.8
The Journey
The Journey
3.8
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
7.27
Punishment Park
Punishment Park
7.3
The War Game
The War Game
7.7
The Freethinker
The Freethinker
6.7
The Diary of an Unknown Soldier
The Diary of an Unknown Soldier
6.4
Culloden
Culloden
7.365
Introduction to Punishment Park
Introduction to Punishment Park
0
The Role of a Lifetime
The Role of a Lifetime
0