Death of Peter Watkins, pioneer director of docufiction and slayer of monoform – Libération

The term “docufiction” is so misused these days, since everything is docufiction — from a prime-time show about dinosaurs on France 2 to Thierry Ardisson interviewing Dalida resurrected by AI in the Hotel du temps. We would forget less the reconstitution effect than its real political disturbance, like that of the films of Peter Watkins, pioneer of the genre, who died at the age of 90 near Felletin, in the Creuse, where he had resided for more than twenty-five years. A cinema of reality, ironically crowned by the Oscar for best documentary awarded to a fiction film (the Bombin 1967), showing a future or an alternative world so close, as if it were five minutes from ours, to better echo the present and point out that history could only repeat itself. Of this film, Watkins said, by way of a discourse on the method, that his “The question was — where is the ‘reality’?… In the madness of artificially lit statements by establishment figures quoting the doctrine of the day, or in the madness of real and recreated fictional scenes that presented the consequences of their statements?”

Punishment Park (1971), his most famous film, fake reportage with detailed voiceover