amelagar

In this age, the French movie studios produced a lot of low-budget biographical movies, most of which are very bad. La Symphonie Fantastique, about composer Hector Berlioz, is no exception: bad acting, sloppy backgrounds, pseudo-drama, and worst of all total inaccuracy. Persons that never existed play a lead role, and important people are never mentioned at all. You could argue that this isn't a documentary, but a historical drama, but the movie does announce itself as a biography and as far as 'drama' is concerned, there's more drama in a bucket of dying fish.

Which is a shame, not just for the fish but also for the drama: the life of Hector Berlioz, as he himself described it in his Memoirs, is very romantic and dramatic. A more modern approach could become a major success. Who bites?

Peter Watkins stands at the base of a form of historical documentaries known as 'documentary reconstruction'. Lightly based on battle re-enactments, Watkins hires amateur actors to play the roles of common people in the Paris of 1871. Famine and civil unrest cause a popular revolution, supported by followers of Karl Marx. The people take power and form a Commune, a communist government. After a few weeks, the official Versailles government regains the city by force, and tens of thousands of people are executed.

Watkins' historical drama is based on the common people, which are shown in their everyday life. To do this, he introduced an anachronism: in the 1871 context, the people form a tv station. The Versaillais also have their official tv station. This way, the documentary becomes both a social project and a media experiment.