Power, Imagination, and Reality in the First Decade of Peter Watkins Cinema

Cinema as “Art” and “Media” affects social actions and for this nature, it has been used and misused by powers. Their main tendency is unification, manipulation, and domination over the destiny of cinema and the whole process of shaping the filmmaker and his/her cinema. This is done through a vast set of social, political, economic, cultural, and individual powers. But cinema as artistic imagination is in relation to reality and representation. Thus, in the dialectic between cinema as the art of imagination and cinema as the skill of media manipulation, the boundaries are obscure and uncertain, and the work of some filmmakers has led to a different dialectic between reality and representation. The cinema of Watkins is explicit in its fight against this hegemonic system. He started from the amateur cinema with an exceptional ingenuity and after entering professional cinema he was censored and marginalized due to his independence from the mainstream. This article studies the first decade of his work with a documentary method to show the mechanisms of these two dialectics as much as possible. The findings indicate that Watkinsian imagination tries to improve reality and in an experimental process Watkins builds a political, social, and human cinema through the problem-based attitude; participation of ordinary people; efforts of eliminating hierarchical filmmaking; bringing awareness and education before catastrophic incidents; emphasis on film-itude of a film; fluidity in time and space; transparent expression of personal opinions; distancing from dominant narrative form; and creating a context of an agreement with the audience.