This film is about systems: the systems under which we all live and the mechanisms they use to deprive us of information and participation.
Peter Watkins’s The Journey (1987) covers a lot of ground—from the American Pacific Northwest to Stockholm, Victoria, Maputo, Hamburg, Tahiti, Leningrad, Morelos, and Hiroshima. It also takes time: 873 minutes, or just over 14 and a half hours, across 19 chapters.
In the mid-1980s, before binge-watching and round-the-clock video installations, such a duration from a film seemed like an impossible demand on the average viewer, a quasi-Warholian stunt. The film’s end credits alone take up nearly all of the final 37-minute episode. But the film’s relation to time and space were precisely the point: along this journey we can draw connections, digress, and think carefully about systems that threaten humanity’s very existence.
20 years earlier, in 1965, Watkins’s second film for the BBC, The War Game, and its urgent interrogation of the issue of atomic warfare were censored by the government, a violation of the British broadcaster’s charter and commitment to serving as a media outlet independent of interference from the state. With The Journey, Watkins took a different approach, drawing on a vast international array of activist media resources to fund and produce a more sprawling and capacious work, one that tries to account for an emerging global populace and the mediascape attempting to feed and circumscribe it. We would now call this approach “crowdsourcing,” but in the pre-internet ‘80s this was achieved through activist networks and an assemblage of non-profit and state-funded institutions. The sheer ambition and scope of the project allowed for a more capacious understanding of the way questions of nuclear armament and military spending impact wealth disparity, education, and gender. More crucially still, Watkins’s probing reveals questions about the role of governments, the media industry, and education in misdirecting, circumscribing, and stifling public debate.
Compelling, harrowing, and sometimes just downright bizarre, The Journey harnesses an unprecedented array of styles and modes of address in Watkins’s oeuvre—indeed, in cinema in general. In the vast expanses of The Journey, Watkins’s unique processes of collective fabulation and future pre-enactment share time with talking-head interviews, Farockian image analysis, confrontational direct address, and even a bit of animation, braided together in an intricate, continually destabilizing montage that pitches us between these registers in continually incisive and enthralling ways. It is Watkins’s most musical film, the extraordinary rhythmic and structural achievement of which are often impossible to perceive from within. And yet, the film is most striking for a solicitous mode of political address, a humility in its effort to meet people—ordinary people, and not other media folk, critics, politicians, or academics—at home. Throughout, Watkins’s voice-over narration is directly interrogatory and confessional: “Did you know that? I didn’t.”
Watkins’s film serves as both a model and a lesson for our times. We should take careful note of the labor and methods this film and its global production stages for us. The Journey required its own journey, the difficult work of building a coalition—however ad hoc, however divisive—against an urgent peril, the survival of quite literally everyone and everything you know. Watkins’s work offers a roadmap for the politically and socially urgent journeys of our own time, as we are forced to navigate a new sprawling nexus of evils: climate collapse, genocide, refugee crises, neofeudalism, technocracy. There are no shortcuts.
The Journey screens this afternoon, March 29, through tomorrow, March 30, at Spectacle.
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