Bericht einer Schlacht

Brilliant. Uncompromising. Brutal. Seminal docudrama. Docudrama makes it sound pedestrian. It isn't.

I remember watching Culloden years ago on BBC2. The remorseless cannon fire, the savage battle and the immediacy of the action struck a cord. I picked up a copy of John Prebble's Culloden a couple of years after, in a second hand bookshop. Obtaining the book wasn't an automatic response to having watched the BBC film. I brought it without having the film in mind. That is what good film making is. Not a quick fix. More an experience.

A highly recommended watch.

Enjoying a revival on the art-house circuit, this reconstruction of the famous last battle fought on British soil uses modern documentary-style reporting to convey immediacy. An effective and bloodthirsty film, it covers a landmark period of Scots-Anglo history, showing not only the senseless waste of human life, the total incompetence of the Bonnie Prince Charles as a military leader, but the barbaric excesses of both Scots and English, and the iniquity and the Scottish ‘clan' system. The period opened the way for the ‘clearances' where indigenous people were shipped off and the land used for (more profitable and less troublesome) sheep farming.

It really doesn't have anything very good to say about anyone, English or Scots, but this won't stop many English feeling it is racist and one-sided (just as the English critics as a whole were the only ones in the world to lambaste the magnificently spectacular but historically inaccurate, Braveheart). Watkins may well have had a political agenda – the film was likened to a social commentary on the American involvement in Vietnam (as the gutting of the Gaelic Highlands by the Noble Army was said to parallel the ‘pacification' of the Vietnamese by the U.S. Army). Culloden, however, is not only a key historical massacre but almost part of Scottish folklore. Arguing the details of the battle is still a not uncommon pub conversation, especially to the north and west of the country. My favourite version is by an elderly lady who lives near Culloden (just outside of Inverness) who ‘tells it like she was there'. The movie, although originally made for television, is also a landmark, and riveting stuff, but whether it can justifiably be used to further a pro-Scottish Independence agenda is much shakier, given that it happened a long time ago.

This is one of the films (even though shown on TV, it absolutely qualifies as cinema) that shaped my childhood, my politics, and my love of film-making and its true potential. I remember being simply blown away, not merely by the intensity of the violence and aggression (I had never seen war filmed like this), but by the passion and the pain of the "ordinary people" - the Scots, especially the Scottish women - as they witnessed the English brutality around them. Totally extraordinary to me also, was the fact that the camera team felt so moved as to intercede in the violence - not merely breaking the boundaries of media "objectivity" in a way that had rarely, if ever, been done before in 1964, but also breaking the boundaries of time - remember, we are in a war here that is taking place in 1746, and yet it seems perfectly natural and believable to have a camera team pushing into frame, protesting the behavior of the English troops.

Peter Watkins went on to make many groundbreaking movies, but little can touch Culloden - the closest is Punishment Park, which uses much the same techniques to follow a group of students and protesters in a slightly fictionalized and rather fascist USA, where (as I recall - I haven't seen the movie in years), they are given a "choice" between internment or a (loaded) chance to "run", with the risk/likelihood of being shot and killed by their paramilitary pursuers.

A minor personal note: I saw Culloden on TV while I was very young and at school in Britain. It is a hard film to find - at least until the recent DVD - but I came across it again at the Sydney Public Library, of all places, during a trip to Australia in the 1990s, and sat watching it on 16mm, on a Moviola in the library - as stunned and moved as I had been the first time I saw it. It was reassuring to know that its power had not diminished.

One of the best war films I've ever seen, as powerful as Paths of Glory and Apocalypse Now. Watkins' black-and-white "documentary" looks like it came out of a time warp. "They made a desert and called it peace". I wept. Issued by Time-Life, may be available at your local cult video shop.

The framing in this movie is incredible. The tightness makes only 3 people look like a whole Scottish army. The acting also proves that big name stars don't just deliver academy award winning performances. This film is a must see for any low budget film makers.