Watkins: The War Game (1965)

Poised somewhere between Mass Observation and the neorealist fringe of Ealing Studios, The War Game is one of the most unusual films to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The most immediate reason for that is that it’s not really a documentary at all, but instead a step-by-step recreation – or anticipation – of how a nuclear attack on Britain would look and feel, from the first blast of light through the ensuing shock waves and firestorms and out into the radiated landscape beyond. Turning his low-budget cinematography to his advantage in quite an extraordinary way, Peter Watkins crafts a found footage drama half a century before its time, commanding what often feels like the last surviving camera with a frenzied, frenetic, kinetic energy that’s so bewildering and disarming that it’s not hard to see why it was pulled from the BBC’S Wednesday Play anthology series for fear it might be mistaken for a news broadcast, or the remains of an aborted news broadcast. Although a loose, satirical, dystopian narrative gradually emerges, in which food becomes “bonus” for maintaining law and order, the focus is squarely cenetred on this sublime encounter between camera and nuclear apocalypse, which seems to radiate, warp and melt the film stock as it goes. Shrouding his non-professional actors in the peculiar hush of post-mortem footage, and shooting them mainly in close-up or extreme close-up, Watkins not only nails the surreal claustrophobia of knowing that nuclear warheads are aimed at you all the time, but also the strangeness of a war in which a war zone of utterly apocalyptic proportions might coalesce around you at a moment’s notice, which is pretty much what happens over the course of the film, rendering its brevity – only thirty-five minutes – utterly crucial to its lingering horror. A war film for a world in which Kent might become the next Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki any second, Watkins leaves utterly no space or time to distinguish anticipating the worst from assuming the worst, which may not quite segue his story back into traditional documentary, but certainly makes it feel as if the only way to truly document the worst fears of the Cold War was to document them as if they had already happened, or were happening at the very moment of filming.