Frightening the Public: Evening Land
Thursday May 6th - 8PM
92Y-Tribeca
200 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10013
$10
Red Channels will present a preview screening of the latest Peter Watkins film to be revived, digitally transferred, and released on DVD by Project X, Evening Land (1977).
Peter Watkins (born 1935) is best known for his Academy Award-winning film The War Game (1965), produced (but later banned) by the BBC. His film loosely based on the trial of the Chicago 8, Punishment Park (1971), proved to be just as divisive, and will also receive a revival this May (14-16) at the Anthology Film Archives*. His epic films on Edvard Munch (1974, 210 minutes) and the La Commune (Paris, 1971) (2000, 345 minutes) are genre-defining classics.
In a piece in The Atlantic from November 2008 titled "He Saw It Coming," Michael Hirschorn laments the obscurity of Watkins' body of work, and praises its prophetic tone and scope. In a piece in The Nation from October 2006 titled "The Best Intentions," Stuart Klawans writes, in reference to Punishment Park, "It took thirty-four years, but the near future of Watkins' movie has now become our present."
Watkins' films, and he himself, have often been accused of hysterical paranoia, his subjects a masochistic obsession with a dystopic present. But what happens when the iconoclast is right?
Like Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1967) anticipating May 1968 ten years earlier, Evening Land, made with 192 non-professional Danish actors, anticipated the events of the German Autumn of 1977, with a plot based around the kidnapping of a government official by an underground guerrilla ("terrorist") organization. The opposition in the film to the EEC (European Economic Community) predicts Seattle 1999 and the anti-globalization movement. And the relationship between economic crises and the military-industrial complex, and the news media's spin on presenting opposition, feel today less like empty provocations and more like ignored analyses.
--Evening Land - Peter Watkins, 1977, 105 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes | Digital Projection [Preview of new DVD transfer]
$10
Discussion with:
--Leo Goldsmith - film critic; editor of Not Coming to a Theater Near You
--A.S. Hamrah - film critic for n+1
--Ann Suellentrop, of Physicians for Social Responsibility and PeaceWorks, in town from Kansas City
Co-presented by The Cinema Guild
Co-sponsored by Not Coming to a Theater Near You and Scandinavia House
Special thanks to Oliver Groom.
92Y-Tribeca
Project X
Peter Watkins
(This is the third program we have presented at the 92nd Street Y-Tribeca, following February 17th's "The Savage Eye" and April 8th's "Against Mystification".)
*Peter Watkins' film Punishment Park serves as the basis for the recent M.I.A. music video, "Born Free," directed by Romain Gavras. This video premiered April 26th. Gavras is the son of filmmaker Costa-Gavras (b. 1933).