La Commune (Paris, 1871)

Spring 1871, Paris. After the Prussian siege the city rises and the people set up their own government: the Paris Commune. The film tells those two months through the eyes of a television crew. They move through the streets, hold microphones out to people at the barricades and broadcast the arguments live. At the same time an official channel, Versailles Television, broadcasts against them. Peter Watkins directs. It runs over six hours. The method is to put present day media inside a historical event. The anachronism is deliberate; the aim is not to reconstruct a period but to show how news is made. When the two channels describe the same event, two different truths appear. Almost none of the cast are professionals. The crew worked with more than two hundred people; the participants researched the subject beforehand and spoke their own views in the scenes. In some passages the actors step out of character to talk about France today. It was shot in a single warehouse; the sets are minimal and the camera is handheld. Watkins took aim at television narration throughout his career and this is the widest instance of that criticism; French television was reluctant to broadcast it and the film circulated narrowly for a long time. Who it is for: anyone interested in political cinema, media criticism and the history of the Commune. Who it is not for: it is very long, the form is deliberately exhausting, and the narrative does not advance at all in the conventional sense.