Peter Watkins died a few days before I wrote these Notes. He was on my mind even before I saw Sudipto Sanyal’s piece on nuclear war documentaries in this issue of Documentary. Last night, I watched Watkins’s The War Game for the first time since I was a teenager in England 40 years ago. My mother, an activist for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, made me watch it. As is explained in “Atomic Light,” the film was made for the BBC in 1965 (and won an Academy Award) but was not broadcast until 1985. Even then, it arrived to an audience that still assumed nuclear war was likely, perhaps inevitable.

The War Game was one of three films from that time that taught me not only what documentaries could be but also what art (especially Realist art, in a tradition that spans Gustave Courbet through George Grosz and beyond) could be. The others were Shoah (1985) and Handsworth Songs (1986). I saw them all around the same time, at an impressionable age, and somehow they still sit side-by-side in my mind. The War Game and Shoah are documentaries of catastrophic mass violence. The latter documents traces in the present of a human slaughter that was not long in the past. The former documents a human slaughter that has yet to take place.

Docudrama always felt like the wrong term for The War Game. It’s a nonfiction film about an event to come. It documents the facts of a nuclear attack, extrapolating from the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the facts of planned government actions in this scenario. But it is also a document of social relations on the streets of regional English cities, the kind of place where I lived. Before Watkins shows the attack, he shows us the society—its habits, its attitudes, its class and racial makeup—that it will hit. The events then manifest the character of English society at that time, and how those social relations crack apart. This is the affinity, in my mind if not yours, between The War Game and Handsworth Songs. Both films examine the same society, but at different breaking points.

Watkins was at odds with prevailing British sensibilities, and not only because of his formal devices and Brechtian techniques. He refused the consolations of British culture: its irony, its moderation, its belief in character, its sense of heritage. He was too angry, too certain that the system would fail, too willing to say that British institutions—the BBC, the government, the apparatus of civil defense, but also civil society—were bound by comforting fictions. His work insists that catastrophe is coming and that we are not ready. That Britain will not hold together. That the breaking points are already visible in how society is composed.

After the controversy around The War Game, Watkins left Britain permanently. He made his subsequent films in Sweden, Norway, the United States, and France, where he died. It made sense that he chose to live and work outside the UK. But British culture was worse off without him.

Dominic