Synopsis
A global odyssey for peace
Peter Watkins' global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it, as well as a meditation on the inherent bias of the media, and documentaries themselves.
1987 ‘Resan’ Directed by Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins' global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it, as well as a meditation on the inherent bias of the media, and documentaries themselves.
A viagem, Le Voyage, Путешествие
A manifesto of sorts, with Watkins' grievances only exacerbated in the 30 years since he made it. Global militarization is an engine of capital, in turn a colonialist oppressor of women and minorities via deliberate economic inequality, all cheerfully shepherded by a fully complicit media that ignores dissent in favor of approved narratives. Hardly new news, but this sprawling 14 1/2 hour document extends so many tendrils into so many lives and points of view that the full extent of these allegedly obvious issues becomes suffocatingly all-encompassing. Extremely dry (it was ostensibly meant to be shown in Swedish schools, hence the 19 lesson-plan-friendly 45-minute episodes, complete with on-screen discussion questions) but constructed of intercut components intended to be as unmediated…
Watkins’s monumental plea for humanity, and his furious condemnation of all those in power, and their systems in which we’re all enmeshed, actively invested in making us think humanity isn’t a shared enterprise. “Two of our principal concerns in this film are to do with time and money, and the ways in which we use them on this planet.” And both, of course, are being disastrously, apocalyptically misspent (“During this time,” he calmly notes just over an hour in, “we have spent on the world’s arms race at least twelve million dollars”). A film of such dense repetitions and interplays, the dominant motif that of ordinary families around the world sitting together at their kitchen tables and pondering photographs of…
This is essential cinema. Basically what Shoah is to the holocaust, The Journey is to nuclear war.
nem találom már azt a tweetet, amiben az állt, hogy ha valakinek hiányzik az Oppenheimerből a szénné égett ártatlan emberek széleskörű bemutatása, akkor az ne pampogjon, hanem okosítsa magát, és kezdje el nézni Peter Watkins majdnem 15 órás dokumentumfilmjét, fenn van Youtube-on az egész. nekem nem hiányzott egyáltalán, mégis elkezdtem, egy percét sem bántam meg, példátlan fejtágítás arról, hogy mik a lehetőségek egy dokumentumfilmben, még egy olyanban is, aminek bevallottan az a szándéka, hogy az atomtechnológia és hidegháború hatását akarja felképezni a bolygó társadalmán, és ezért semmi kompromisszumot sem hajlandó tenni, sőt, mások kompromisszumaira hívja fel a figyelmet azzal, hogy minden egyes híradórészletben puttyog egy hangosat, amikor vágással, grafikával, vagy bármilyen más megoldással manipulálnak minket.
elképesztő, hogy Watkins bement hétköznapi…
A political education and a realization of the ideal that closes Here and Elsewhere (1976). The Journey contains the world and the human circle (or pyramid) through newsreel, found footage, and staged footage. Dziga Vertov would be proud.
"The others, the elsewhere of our here."
An exhaustive, and quite frankly, exhausting film experience, Peter Watkins's The Journey flattens geopolitical borders and physical space in its attempt to create a shared consciousness. To form a linkage of like-minded concerns over the nuclear arms race and the sense of helplessness it conjured up in all those that understood its power to eradicate everything. An attempt to give shape to the Cold War paranoia of its time. The industrialization of mass destruction and fear-mongering. To bridge information-gathering between the vigilant and ignorant, years before the internet would expedite—and for the better—truncate similar content for easier accessibility.
The most terrifying aspect of this film is the feeling of totality showcased by the direction of governing bodies and the media's…
“First of all, thank you, Peter.”
Peter Watkins wants to save the world. He is a humanist empiristic guy thus he performs a survey film not by showing its results but by reporting all the data, combining everything in a breathing whale of a movie. “Perform” is not a casual word, interviews have never been this near to a communal performance, shared at 360 degrees between people and crew, in the n-th occasion Watkins tells us documentary forms can do miracles. Living as a political being in the world is really a performance, and that’s so true Watkins does not need to do his usual mockumentary thing, because being ourselves is a piece of artistic expression. The explicit tips about…
"I had to walk on the dead bodies, because the ground was too hot. I kept saying "Sorry" to them". - Hiroshima survivor
يتناول الوثائقي رؤية مواطنين من عشرة دول مختلفة تتوزع على أربع قارات حول قضية استخدام السلاح النووي في الحروب وإنفاق الأموال على الجيوش بينما يعصف الفقر بحياة البشر في مناطق مختلفة من العالم. وثائقي عن كابوس الحرب النووية، الحرب الباردة، السياسة، التعليم، تحريف وسائل الإعلام لبعض الحقائق أو عدم عرضها بمصداقية و أكثر شيء مؤثر فيه هو شهادات حية لناجيين أو من عايش واحد من أبشع الجرائم الغير إنسانية و هي تفجير كل من هيروشيما و وناجازاكي.
رغم أن الوثائقي طويل و تم صدوره منذ أكثر من 3 عقود لكن يجب تفكير في المخطط الذي أراده المخرج وهو إدراج عمله هذا في المؤسسات التعليمية، لأنه غني جدا و قوي المحتوى بمعلومات و رؤية يمكنها أن تجعل العالم أفضل
Collapsing all distance. Stretching time to its fullest. An extraordinary gesture towards a truly international peoples’ cinema. A film designed to generate a new consciousness, whose ambitions outstrip anything as straightforward as activist filmmaking or agitprop. But despite the seemingly empowering pedagogical effect that The Journey has on its participants (a category which has to include the viewer), the cumulative radiological impact of the thing is just kind of nauseating. It fulfills the ambitions of The War Game on a twenty year half-life. The imminent possibility of “the unlikely event” remains.
By the mid-80s of the film’s production, at least three decades since the emergence of any real self-articulated anti-nuclear movement, violent reconquest and sustained processes of entropic dispersal keep…
Simply monumental and overwhelming, deftly constructed and intricately detailed with deeply sincere human interaction and an endless, sobering list of research / statistics. It's horrifying trying to comprehend what these statistics would comparatively look like nowadays, how much more irrelevant and obscene, and how much more we could do for the world.
Can we progress? What else can we achieve when we spend most of our money on weapons? What have you been made to think from the media? How much do you know about the media, about TV, about images and sounds? Where is the money going? What are we learning from others? What are the children learning? What is our plea to the big power? Do you want change? What do you think should be the ultimate national interest? Do you feel the inevitability of nuclear mass destruction? Where and with whom does responsibility begin? Why the silence? Why isn’t there an outcry?
“I was convinced that what was said was pretty much reality and the worst part about it is it didn’t seem to frighten me as much as it just made me give up”