The War Game
The War Game | |
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Directed by | Peter Watkins |
Written by | Peter Watkins |
Produced by | Peter Watkins |
Narrated by | Michael Aspel Peter Graham |
Cinematography | Peter Bartlett Peter Suschitzky (uncredited) |
Edited by | Michael Bradsell |
Production company | |
Distributed by | British Film Institute |
Release date |
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Running time | 47 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
The War Game is a 1966 British pseudo-documentary film that depicts a nuclear war and its aftermath.[1] Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC, it caused dismay within the BBC and within government, and was withdrawn before the provisional screening date of 6 October 1965.[2] The corporation said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences..."[3]
The film premiered at the National Film Theatre in London, on 13 April 1966, where it ran until 3 May.[4] It was then shown abroad at several film festivals, including Venice where it won the Special Prize. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.[5][6]
The film was eventually televised in Great Britain on 31 July 1985, during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the day before a repeat screening of Threads.[7]
Synopsis
[edit]The film begins by describing Britain's nuclear deterrence policy of threatening would-be aggressors with devastation from the Royal Air Force's nuclear-armed V bombers. Due to the number of V bomber bases (particularly in a crisis situation that would see them dispersed throughout Britain), as well as major civilian targets in cities, Britain is described as having more potential nuclear weapon targets per acre than any other country.
On 15 September, American forces in South Vietnam are authorised to use tactical nuclear weapons in response to an ongoing Chinese invasion. The Soviet Union and East Germany threaten to invade West Berlin if America does not change course. The next day, the British government declares a state of emergency and transfers responsibility for Britain's day-to-day running to a body of regional commissioners. The first task of newly established emergency committees is the mass evacuation of children, mothers, and the infirm to various safe areas including Kent. Under threat of imprisonment, homeowners billet the evacuees, while unoccupied properties are requisitioned. Rationing is implemented, booklets on how to prepare for nuclear attack are distributed, and emergency sirens are tested, with these being estimated to provide around three minutes' warning until impact, or under thirty seconds in the case of submarine attack. There are no government-built shelters, while efforts to build private ones are soon frustrated by a shortage of construction supplies.
On 18 September, the Soviets and East Germans invade West Berlin as previously threatened. With NATO's counterattack defeated, its commanders receive and then launch American nuclear weapons. The Soviets immediately launch their own nuclear weapons as many of them would otherwise be destroyed due to being liquid-fuelled and stored above ground.
Back in Kent, a one-megaton warhead airbursts six miles away from Canterbury. At one house, a defence worker and a boy in the yard are struck by the heat wave causing third-degree burns and molten eyeballs. Furniture inside the house is ignited and the building is then demolished by the shock front. At another house, another boy suffers flash blindness from an explosion 27 miles away; his father carries him inside and the family hides under a table as the house trembles from the blast waves of successive explosions. In Rochester, an airburst causes a firestorm in which the temperature rises to 800 °C, the wind is sucked in at speeds exceeding 100 mph, and oxygen in the air is replaced by methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. Meanwhile, British V bombers enter Soviet airspace to inflict similar devastation on that country.
The attack overwhelms Kent's emergency services, with each surviving doctor being faced with at least 350 casualties. The worst affected victims are either left to die alone or shot by police. PTSD-like disorders take their toll on civilians and the uniformed services alike. The dead are too numerous to bury and are instead burned where they lie; to prevent relatives from interfering, destroyed areas are sealed off and surviving policemen are now routinely armed. There is overwhelming radiation sickness, while essential supplies are nonexistent or severely limited. Many survivors soon become apathetic and lethargic, "living often in their own filth".
As hunger riots intensify, dwindling food supplies are reserved for those maintaining law and order. The riots soon turn into armed skirmishes between the authorities and those opposed to them; the latter are shown seizing a weapons truck and then a food depot. Elsewhere, individuals convicted of causing civil disturbance or obstructing government officers are executed by police firing squads, with the father of the blinded boy from earlier in the film being among those shot. Scurvy reemerges due to the lack of vitamin C.
On Christmas Day in a Dover refugee compound, children orphaned in the attack are asked what they want to be when they grow up; they either "don't want to be nothing" or simply remain silent. Another child is described as only having seven bedridden years to live before dying from his leukemia-like illness, while an expectant mother who was exposed to radiation is unsure if she will suffer stillbirth. In closing, the real-world press is described as saying nothing about the dangers of nuclear weaponry.
Style
[edit]The story is told in the style of a news magazine programme. It wavers between a pseudo-documentary and a drama film, with characters acknowledging the presence of the camera crew in some segments and others (in particular the nuclear attack) filmed as if the camera was not present. The combination of elements also qualifies it as a mondo film. It features several different strands that alternate throughout, including a documentary-style chronology of the main events,[8] featuring reportage-like images of the war, the nuclear strikes, and their effects on civilians; brief contemporary interviews, in which passers-by are interviewed about what turns out to be their general lack of knowledge of nuclear war issues; optimistic commentary from public figures that clashes with the other images in the film; and fictional interviews with key figures as the war unfolds.
The film features a voice-over narration[9] that describes the events depicted as plausible occurrences during and after a nuclear war. The narrator seeks to convince the viewing audience that the civil defence policies of 1965 have not realistically prepared the public for such events, particularly suggesting that the policies neglected the possibility of panic buying that would occur for building materials to construct improvised fallout shelters.
The public are generally depicted as lacking all understanding of nuclear matters with the exception of a character with a double-barrelled shotgun who successfully implemented the contemporary civil defence advice, and heavily sandbagged his home. The film does not focus on individual experiences, but rather the collective British population, who rely on government preparations and are not fully convinced of the dangers of nuclear war until the final hours before the attack.
The film often invokes historical mass casualty situations in relation to its portrayal of a post-attack situation; for example, the collection of wedding rings from dead bodies to aid their later identification is explicitly linked to a similar practice seen after the 1945 bombing of Dresden, while the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are regularly cited when discussing the physical and mental decline of survivors.
Of his intent, Watkins said:[10]
... Interwoven among scenes of "reality" were stylized interviews with a series of "establishment figures" – an Anglican Bishop, a nuclear strategist, etc. The outrageous statements by some of these people (including the Bishop) – in favour of nuclear weapons, even nuclear war – were actually based on genuine quotations. Other interviews with a doctor, a psychiatrist, etc. were more sober, and gave details of the effects of nuclear weapons on the human body and mind. In this film I was interested in breaking the illusion of media-produced "reality". My question was – "Where is 'reality'? ... in the madness of statements by these artificially-lit establishment figures quoting the official doctrine of the day, or in the madness of the staged and fictional scenes from the rest of my film, which presented the consequences of their utterances?
To this end, the docudrama employs juxtaposition by, for example, quickly cutting from the scenes of horror after an immediate escalation from military to city nuclear attacks to a snippet of a recording of a calm lecture by a person resembling Herman Kahn, a renowned RAND strategist, hypothesising that a third world war would not necessarily escalate to a stage involving "the ultimate destruction of cities" and, indeed, that stopping the conflict before then would give the belligerents around ten years of post-war recovery in which to prepare for the next five world wars. The effect of this juxtaposition is to make the speaker appear out of touch with the "reality" of rapid escalation and of the likelihood of cities being utterly destroyed as depicted immediately before his contribution. Similarly, the film briefly cuts away from the destruction inflicted on Canterbury to show a textual statement by two bishops from the Vatican's ecumenical council who argue that the faithful "should learn to live with, though need not love, the nuclear bomb, provided that it is 'clean' and of a good family", before then cutting back to Canterbury's fate, while a spoken statement by an Anglican bishop about his continued belief in "a system of necessary law and order [and] in the war of the just" is immediately followed by a scene of a family burning to death in their car during the Rochester firestorm.
Production
[edit]The film was shot in the Kent towns of Tonbridge, Gravesend, Chatham and Dover. The cast was almost entirely made up of amateur and non-actors, as was Watkins' preference,[11] casting having taken place via a series of public meetings several months earlier; over 350 actors would ultimately take part in the production.[12] Much of the filming of the post-strike devastation was shot at the Grand Shaft Barracks, Dover. The narration was provided by Peter Graham with Michael Aspel reading the quotations from source material.
Release
[edit]The War Game itself finally saw television broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC2 on 31 July 1985, as part of a special season of programming entitled After the Bomb (which had been Watkins's original working title for The War Game).[13] After the Bomb commemorated the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[14] The broadcast was preceded by an introduction from Ludovic Kennedy.[15]
On 27 August 1968, nearly 250 people at a peace rally in the Edwin Lewis Quadrangle in Philadelphia, attended the screening of the film sponsored by the Pennsylvania Coalition.[16] Like the United Kingdom, the film was also banned from National Educational Television in the United States due to its theme.
Reception and legacy
[edit]The film holds a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 93% based on 14 reviews, with an average score of 8.46/10.[17]
Roger Ebert gave the film a perfect score, calling it "[o]ne of the most skillful documentary films ever made." He praised the "remarkable authenticity" of the firestorm sequence and describes its portrayal of bombing's aftermath as "certainly the most horrifying ever put on film (although, to be sure, greater suffering has taken place in real life, and is taking place today)." "They should string up bedsheets between the trees and show "The War Game" in every public park" he concludes, "It should be shown on television, perhaps right after one of those half-witted war series in which none of the stars ever gets killed."[18] David Cornelius of DVD Talk called it "one of the most disturbing, overwhelming, and downright important films ever produced." He writes that the film finds Watkins "at his very best, angry and provocative and desperate to tell the truth, yet not once dipping below anything but sheer greatness from a filmmaking perspective [...] an unquestionable masterpiece of raw journalism, political commentary, and unrestrained terror."[19]
Accolades
[edit]The film won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.[20]
In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, The War Game was placed 27th. The War Game was also voted 74th in Channel Four's 100 Greatest Scary Moments.[21]
See also
[edit]- List of nuclear holocaust fiction
- Nuclear weapons and the United Kingdom
- Nuclear weapons in popular culture
- Survival film, about the film genre, with a list of related films
- Threads, a 1984 British docudrama about nuclear war which, like The War Game, was produced by the BBC
- The Day After, a 1983 US film about nuclear war and its aftermath
- When the Wind Blows, a 1986 British animated film about nuclear war
Notes
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ MUBI
- ^ Chapman, James (2006). "The BBC and the Censorship of The War Game". Journal of Contemporary History. 41 (1): 84. doi:10.1177/0022009406058675. S2CID 159498499.
- ^ "BBC film censored? (Parliamentary question asked in the House of Commons by William Hamilton MP about the TV film 'The War Game')". The National Archives (CAB 21/5808). 2 December 1965.
- ^ The Guardian, 1–3 April 1966
- ^ 1967|Oscars.org
- ^ Sean O'Sullivan, "No Such Thing as Society: Television and the Apocalypse" in Lester D. Friedman Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, p,224
- ^ Heroes By John Pilger pg 532, 1986, ISBN 9781407086293
- ^ Film Festival: Two Tours de Force: 'The War Game' Catalogues Lists of Horrors – The New York Times
- ^ The War Game (1967) – Turner Classic Movies
- ^ "The War Game". Peter Watkins. 24 September 1965. Retrieved 6 November 2018.
- ^ The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film – Google Books (pgs.973-75)
- ^ "The War Game's actors reassembled for first time". BBC News. 24 February 2013. Retrieved 21 July 2024.
- ^ "BBC – The War Game". BBC.
- ^ "The War Game Part 2". Peter Watkins. 24 September 1965. Retrieved 6 November 2018.
- ^ "wed play season nine". Startrader.co.uk. 2004. Retrieved 8 January 2012.
- ^ ""The War Game" shown to 250 persons in Philadelphia". newspapers.com. 28 August 1968. Retrieved 13 April 2022.
- ^ The War Game (1966), retrieved 26 February 2019
- ^ Ebert, Roger. "The War Game Movie Review & Film Summary (1967)". rogerebert.com. Retrieved 26 February 2019.
- ^ "The War Game / Culloden". DVD Talk. Retrieved 26 February 2019.
- ^ Documentary Winners: 1967 Oscars
- ^ "100 Greatest Scary Moments: Channel 4 Film". Channel 4. Archived from the original on 16 December 2009. Retrieved 8 January 2012.
External links
[edit]- The War Game at IMDb
- The War Game at AllMovie
- The War Game is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive
- The War Game at the BBC
- BBC contemporary "censorship" from John Cook's article in The Conversation
- Encyclopedia of Television Archived 3 May 2009 at the Wayback Machine
- British Film Institute Screen Online UK only
- The War Game – The Controversy by Patrick Murphy in Film International, May 2003.
- A transcript of the film
- 1966 films
- 1966 television films
- BBC controversies
- BBC television dramas
- Black-and-white British television shows
- Best Documentary Feature Academy Award winners
- British black-and-white films
- Films directed by Peter Watkins
- Apocalyptic films
- Cold War films
- British science fiction television films
- Films about nuclear war and weapons
- Films about World War III
- Films set in Kent
- Anti-nuclear films
- 1960s English-language films
- 1960s British films
- Films set in 1966
- British dystopian films