Peter Watkins’s The Journey
March 20–21, 2004
One of the most significant filmmakers of his generation, Peter
Watkins has made compassionate, uncompromising films and videos that
challenge not only conventional styles and techniques but also notions
of history and the media. The ever-timely The Journey: A Film
for Peace, made between 1984 and 1987, is a pioneering attempt at a fully
international cinema. Watkins worked with support groups around the
world to raise money and assemble crews while shooting the film in
the United States, Canada, Norway, Scotland, France, West Germany,
Mozambique, Japan, Australia, Tahiti, and Mexico. He spent eighteen
months editing the more than 100 hours of footage he compiled, weaving
together extended family interviews, documentation of the global
arms race, recollections of survivors of the bombings in Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, and Hamburg, community psychodramas of possible disaster
scenarios, and works by other artists. The film is monumental both
in its critique and analysis and in its effort to inspire and occasion
new ways of using information and the media.
Organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film and Media.
Grateful thanks to Peter Watkins, Canyon Cinema, San Francisco; and
Scott MacDonald.
. 1984–87. Directed by Peter
Watkins. Multilingual, English subtitles. Program fourteen and a
half hours. The film will be screened over two days, approximately
seven hours each day, with brief intervals. It can be experienced
as a whole or in sections: individual episodes—nineteen in
all—will start on the hour or the half hour. Courtesy Canyon
Cinema.
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