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The Tragedy of History: Peter Watkins's La Commune

In 1999, exiled British film director Peter Watkins completed La Commune, a 5 hour 45 minute epic reconstruction of the 1871 Paris Commune. In its mixture of steely radicalism and artistic experimentalism, La Commune is arguably the most important European film since the days of the great modernist cinematic provocateurs such as Eisenstein and Vertov. But undoubtedly the single most important figure from that era which informs the film is Bertolt Brecht, who made his only real Brechtian film, Kuhle Wampe, in 1931 with Slatan Dudow. The invocation of such distant modernists seems startling when even a Marxist critic like Fredric Jameson once declared that the kinds of cultural practices advocated by Brecht and Walter Benjamin, are no longer relevant to ‘the specific conditions of our time’. With La Commune, Watkins says that his aim was to show ‘that there are other ways to recount historical and current events, to relate to space and time, to show the connection between past and present and to give a voice to the public’. And while, as we shall see, Watkins has in mind here dominant and standardised film and television practices whose principles remain largely, if problematically, mimetic, those ‘other ways’ also challenge the theoretical paradigm of postmodernism. In order to fully understand La Commune we will need to locate it within a number of contexts: the immediate historical context of French politics and cinema from the mid-1990s; the history of the Paris Commune itself; Watkins’s pedagogy and – in the spirit of internationalism shown by the Commune itself – the theories and practices of Third Cinema.