La commune (Paris, 1871)

The spectator who takes up the challenge of 345 minutes of La commune will be richly rewarded with an impressive history lesson about Paris in 1871 during the latter days of the devastating FrancoPrussian war. In order to put down the people’s rebellion in the self appointed `state’ La commune, government troops forced their way into the area and murdered the rebels, almost 30,000 people, in one bloody week (la semaine sanglante). This black period from French history is hardly known and is still not included in school history books.Troublemaker Watkins, who didn’t want to work in England anymore after the BBC boycott of his controversial film The War Game (1965), himself wrote the script and filmed it in an old deserted factory. Long sequences in black and white are juxtaposed with extensive titles about the historic background to La commune. The cameras are emphatically present and no attempt is made to make the sets look real. The huge cast was largely made up of amateurs, who really seem to undergo the excitement and tension of the Commune inhabitants.Watkins mixes present and past (two television crews wander round 19thcentury Paris), documentary and fiction, confronts us with our idea of objective history and shows the power and potency of the medium.