Peter Watkins (1935-2025)

British filmmaker Peter Watkins passed away last week near Felletin, France, where he had lived for more than twenty-five years. He had just turned ninety. Born in Surrey in 1935, Watkins was an uncompromising and singular artist whose work relentlessly questioned the relationship between media, politics, and power. From Culloden and The War Game to Punishment Park, Edvard Munch, The Journey and La commune (Paris, 1871), he developed a radical hybrid form between fiction and documentary to expose the “Monoform” – the dominant audiovisual style of mainstream media, which he argued imposes a uniform, passive, and hierarchical experience on viewers. Often censored or marginalised, his films remain touchstones of political cinema – inviting viewers to resist passivity and reclaim critical engagement. Also the author of The Media Crisis, Watkins sought, in his words, “to add a dimension and a process to television, which it still lacks today: that of the public directly, seriously, and in depth participating in the expressive use of the medium to examine history - past, present and future.”

On Sabzian, we have published his text ‘The Dark Side of the Moon. The Global Media Crisis’ and a Passage, as well as a Prisma by Rastko Novaković on his work.