Peter Watkins

Some time in the future, East and West have stopped maintaining standing armies and nuclear weapons. Instead, to settle their differences they pit different teams of crack combat specialists against each other.

Two powerful BBC-produced films by Peter Watkins about war and their consequences are collected here. Commissioned by the BBC in the mid-1960s to dramatize the effects of a nuclear attack on Great Britain, THE WAR GAME is a film of monumental devastation, which so shocked the heads of the agency that it was initially withheld from broadcast. CULLODEN is an intriguing restaging of the 1746 battle of Culloden–the last battle fought on British ground, in which "Bonnie Prince Charles" was defeated by the Royal Army of King George II–using amateur actors, and capturing how the bloody struggle might have looked to the nation if television had existed at the time.

The War Game is a 1965 television film on nuclear war. Written, directed, and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC's The Wednesday Play strand, its depiction of the impact of Soviet nuclear attack on Britain caused dismay within the BBC and in government. It was scheduled for transmission on 6 August 1966 (the anniversary of the Hiroshima attack) but was not transmitted until 1985, the corporation publicly stating that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting". It was widely viewed before its BBC debut on video and in art-house cinemas, often using prints provided by Watkins, and the film won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1966.

Edvard Munch is a 1974 biographical film about the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch, written and directed by Peter Watkins. It was originally created as a three-part miniseries co-produced by the Norwegian and Swedish state television networks NRK and SVT, but subsequently gained an American theatrical release in a three-hour version in 1976. The film covers about thirty years of Munch's life, focusing on the influences that shaped his art, particularly the prevalence of disease and death in his family and his youthful affair with a married woman. The film was screened at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, but wasn't entered into the main competition.

Some time in the future, East and West have stopped maintaining standing armies and nuclear weapons. Instead, to settle their differences they pit different teams of crack combat specialists against each other.