Sunday, June 29, 2008

Privilege Resurfaced


In 1979 I went to the house of a friend who had connections to the Reed College film series. She had a 16mm projector and the company another friend who went on to be a noted cinematographer. We had in our possession a print of Peter Watkins' Privilege. I was pumped up to see it because its title song was a part of an album that was a pretty significant in my life at the time: Patti Smith's Easter. Since then, I have never seen a VHS copy available or a listing on a cable channel. But recently it has appeared on Sundance Channel. They have probably rotated it through there before but this is the first time I have had opportunity to see it since that Spring or Summer evening back almost thirty years ago. Watkins website also reports that there is a DVD release of the film coming out later this month.

This film is probably the only film of Peter Watkins that appears to be a studio release. The opening splash features the earth globe in space that was Universal studios but that this were the resemblance ends. There is no credits, only a slate with a emotionless pop star with a sound bite about returning from American tour. Watkins uses voice over "documentary man" narration throughout this film. Near the beginning of the film documentary man says: "The reason given for the extreme violence of the stage act you are about to see is that it provides the public release from all the nervous tension from the state of the world outside. Stephen Shorter, British pop singer (played by Paul Jones, former singer for Manfred Mann's Earth Band) is "the most desperately loved entertainer in the world" in a Britain
of the near future from the 1967 world the film was made. The theatrical act that follows show Shorter being locked in a cage and being beaten by police with billy clubs while he sings Privilege with the same spooky organ lines that are featured in the Patti Smith version. The reaction from the crowd is a kind of hysterical Beatlemania.

Shorter is seen manipulated by the his handlers, commercial enterprises (the Steve Dream Palace dedicated to keeping people happy and buying British), the government, and the church. He becomes a Shorter becomes a messianic tool of both Church and State. Privilege is a kind of forerunner for a lot of ground that Pete Townsend covered in Tommy a year later. But when Shorter breaks and can't take it anymore, he is swept away from the entire country's consciousness.

Watkins' film prior to Privilege was The War Game, a ground breaking documentary, still quite powerful, where he reenacts with complete trappings of BBC documentary the effects of a nuclear attack on England. It won the Academy Award but was the object of derision in its country of origin and was banned by the BBC for decades.

I have written about Watkins before in the Buffet. He has always been an iconoclast with projects and intentions never mainstream. Detailed passionate essays fill his website where he talks about the media crisis which he defines as "the increasingly irresponsible manner in which the mass audiovisual media (MAVM) function, and to their disastrous impact on society, human affairs, and the environment."

In 2005, Tom Supton wrote an essay exploring Watkins and his War Game/Privilege era with this conclusion of themes, explored by Watkins in 67 but still being expressed in his essays.


In Privilege — a genuinely radical film; a near masterpiece so lost in the ether that its own director cannot get a copy of it — Peter Watkins boldly advanced the proposition that, in the end, we exist as followers in a cult of commodity, creatures of the marketplace buying every manner of human phenomena (war, rage, dissent, revolution, love) the way we buy tube socks and teacups. But no one wanted to hear it; not from him, not from anybody. Then as now, everything has its price. The only thing you can't make a dime off of is the truth.


There is definitely a time capsule feel to this film. And for me I inevitably recall the filter of being fortunate to see it in 1979, but recent viewings of Watkins films such as his six hour version of the Paris Commune uprising or his lengthy documentary-styled biographies of August Strindberg of Peter Munch. But even forty years ago the wicked observations of media abuse and power are very present such as when his artist girlfriend watches him tune the radio unable to find any tunes on the radio other than the current hit "I'm a bad, bad boy..." Somehow this seen reminds me of the story of the Clear Channel memo that restricted the playing of John Lennon's Imagine and other tunes in the days that followed the 9/11 attacks. That memo seems to me the product of the same ilk of folks sheparding and manipulating a shell shocked in Privilege.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:09 PM
Comments: Post a Comment