Overview
- The Daily Mail reports that Peter Watkins died on October 30 at his home in France at age 90.
- His 1965 film The War Game was commissioned and then banned by the BBC, later screened in cinemas, won the 1967 Oscar for best documentary feature, and was finally broadcast decades afterward.
- Watkins developed a pseudo-documentary style that centered ordinary people and used authoritative narration to confront state power and institutional failure.
- Culloden (1964) framed the 1746 battle as if covered by a modern camera crew, extending its realism to the brutal aftermath.
- His later work ranged from Punishment Park (1971) to the 14-hour anti-nuclear project The Journey (1987) and La Commune (2000), with The War Game’s influence evident in Barry Hines’s Threads (1984).