Culloden

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this film, both in the moment - and afterwards. I had put this in my netflix cue, thinking for some reason that it was a friday screening that I could not attend. When it arrived a day after our class, I found myself watching it again, and excitedly telling a friend all about it. I was able to recall many details, both of the film, and of the history of the battle itself, and it was in that moment that I felt the full impact of the effectiveness of this docu-drama. To have such recall, the film must have had a personal impact. I found myself researching the battle, the jacobite uprisings, and the film itself. In reading, I found that alot of the choices Watkins made in the film had to do with a very tight budget (he was not a well-known director at the time). He didn't have many extras, or horses, or canons, or cameras - so he was almost forced to use very careful, controlled tight shots and close-ups. In doing so, he showed the impact and brutality of war through intimacy - since he didn't have the resources to literally show us the big picture (1,500 men charging into battle and rows upon rows of canons firing..) he showed us everything he could about, and in, the details. The fact that Watkins didnt want to use professional actors, but instead chose to focus more on ethnographic continuity between the cast and history - using amature and non-actors from London, the Scottish Lowlands, and the city of Iverness (Scottish Highlands) to represent the warring factions. I wonder if Watkins made this decision due to budget constraints, to further himself from the trend of over-acted, voiced-over documentaries, or to balance out the leap of faith (or suspension of disbelief, as we discussed it in class) that occurs when we, the viewer, accepts the presence of a tv crew at the battle in 1746. It turns out the narrator with the proper British accent is actually Watkins. I think this gives alot of insight into his position on the battle, and on war in general. It seems clear that he is anti-war no matter who is involved - and according to Watkins on his website, he did deliberately construct the film to look like the TV footage of the Vietnam War that everyone at the time was exposed to. Watkins says, "This was the 1960s, and the US army was ‘pacifying’ the Vietnam highlands. I wanted to draw a parallel between these events and what had happened in our own UK Highlands two centuries earlier". All in all, I found this unconventional docu-drama/pseudo-documentary to be a very effective means of constructing a filmic visual record of that which could not be photographed or filmed.