Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The War Game
1966 · Peter Watkins · The War Game on Sightlines
A bucket of sand in a hallway in Kent. Someone has been told this is what you do: fill it, keep it by the stairs, throw the sand on the incendiaries when they come.
Then Watkins shows what comes. The screen whites out. A face flinches away from it. Wind, smoke, debris, people running in a street that is a real street. The bucket is still a bucket.
That gap is the film. Not the horror. The gap.
Watkins had built the machine a year earlier. Culloden embedded a modern television news crew in the 1746 battle: vox-pop with Highlanders, a reporter's questions, direct-address commentary laid over a two-hundred-year-old slaughter. The War Game takes that exact method and turns it to face the other way. A news crew embedded in a future. Forty-seven minutes of footage of an event that has not happened, shot as though somebody had been standing there with a camera when it did. Nobody had done that. It is Watkins's invention, and it cost him his career inside the BBC.
Deleuze splits cinema in two. In the first regime, the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, the action lands, the situation resolves, and the cutting serves that chain. It is the grammar of most films ever made. It is also, and this is not a coincidence, the grammar of civil defence. A Home Office pamphlet is a sensory-motor circuit written as policy: here is the situation, here is what you do, doing it will help. Watkins spent months inside that literature alongside the medical record of Hiroshima, Hamburg and Dresden, and his film is an argument that the wire between perception and action has been cut. Everything past the cut is the bucket.
Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: people who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. He found it in postwar Italy, in figures wandering ruins. The War Game reaches the same place from the opposite end, before the catastrophe rather than after it, in a country still rehearsing the drill. Which is why the procedural scenes are the worst ones. Families being billeted. Improvised firefighting. Rows of the dying in requisitioned buildings while police and soldiers administer an order that has stopped existing.
When action goes, what is left is what Deleuze names a pure optical and sound situation, an opsign: the image is no longer a link in a chain, it is something you can only look at and endure. Survivors give vacant testimony straight to camera. The children's faces at the close are held in tight, unflattering close-up and give nothing back. Deleuze calls the close-up the affection-image because a face is precisely where a feeling registers without yet discharging into an act. Usually that "not yet" is a promise; he will do something about it in a minute. Watkins's non-professionals, directed toward states rather than characterizations, hold the not-yet open until it becomes never. That is why the amateurism is load-bearing. A trained face resolves. These do not.
Peter Bartlett's camera never pretends to be absent. It is jostled, it searches, it arrives late, it zooms and refocuses like a crew improvising under duress. Deleuze has a term for an image in which we perceive a perception being had, the dicisign, the camera felt as a body with limits. The film's realism runs entirely on it. We believe this not because the frames are composed but because they are struggling.
Documentary rests on a contract older than documentary. Bazin argued that the photographic image carries the being of its model: the camera was there, light off that thing touched this emulsion, and that debt to the real is the source of cinema's strange authority. Watkins preserves every visible sign of the debt. Monochrome that rhymes with the newsreel record of the last war, grain, handheld, real Kent streets and Kent residents, no models and no optical effects, the flash rendered as overexposure and the firestorm as wind and smoke and panic. Then he hangs the whole apparatus on an event that does not exist.
Deleuze calls this the powers of the false. Not lying, which still concedes truth's authority, but making true and false undecidable and then working inside that undecidability as a creative principle. More exactly it is crystalline description: a description so complete that it composes its object and then replaces it. Real Kent stands in front of the lens at the start. By the end it has been overwritten by the Kent that has not happened, and you cannot get the first one back.
You should not simply grant the lens, so here is the argument for it. A true image of nuclear war requires a nuclear war. In this one case truthful reportage is structurally unavailable. The false is not mischief here, it is the only road to the thing, which is exactly Deleuze's claim: falsity as productive rather than deficient.
Michael Bradsell's editing organizes the film as an argument instead of a story. Statistics and citations are layered over the images so that each atrocity arrives pre-annotated with its source. Captions. Text on screen. Deleuze's lectosign is the image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and has to be deciphered rather than followed, and this one hands you the footnote while you are still looking at the body. The soundtrack does something harder. Official statements are read aloud against images they fail to match, and the narration delivers escalating horror in the flat professional cadence of a weather report. Deleuze calls that audiovisual disjunction: sound and image telling two stories, the interval between them carrying the meaning. Watkins took the trick from Listen to Britain, which collided institutional and everyday sound with no narration at all, and added a newsreader to make it an indictment.
Deleuze's modern political cinema turns on a phrase he borrows from Klee: the people are missing. The work is not to represent a people but to register that one does not exist yet and has to be invented. The War Game stops in the middle of itself to ask ordinary Britons what strontium-90 is, and they cannot say. The public that would be required to make a democratic decision about this is not there. So Watkins casts the missing people as themselves, local residents in their own streets testifying to a condition that has not arrived, which is what Deleuze means by fabulation: subjects caught in the act of legending themselves. Then the BBC, having financed it, refused to transmit it. Too horrifying for the medium. Twenty years. Whether anyone leaned on the Corporation from outside is still argued over and honest accounts leave the question open; what is not in dispute is that a film built to constitute a public was withheld from that public until 1985, while cinemas showed it and it won an Academy Award, and Watkins left and never had an institution again.
Its debts are visible and it pays them. Night Mail and the GPO school supplied dramatized process-reportage performed by ordinary workers. Fires Were Started supplied real firemen re-enacting their own Blitz, actuality restaged by the people who lived it. The Battle of San Pietro supplied the war documentary's claim to captured combat truth, partly staged and passed off as frontline record; Watkins borrows that claim and then demonstrates in public that it is constructible. The Battle of Algiers reached the same "this footage exists" illusion the same year, independently, which tells you something was already in the air. What the film seeded is a whole mode: British drama-documentary, the nuclear-holocaust docudramas that kept returning through the 1980s, and the research-heavy campaigning essay film. Underneath all of that sits the demonstration itself. The documentary look is a style. It is detachable from its referent and can be lent to anything, including a future. Most news-grammar fiction since works in the room Watkins opened, usually without his conscience about it.
What the film will not do is think on your behalf. Deleuze kept returning, through Artaud, to images that block thought rather than deliver it, that stage a meeting with something thought cannot hold. Megadeath is that object. The number will not go into a head. Watkins's answer is to shrink it to parish scale: one hallway, one bucket, one child's face. Watch it again and count how often he gives you a figure and then immediately gives you a body, as though testing which of the two you can actually see. Fifty years on the arithmetic has not improved, and the open question is whether any film since has found a better way to make a number hurt.
Concepts in play
- powers of the false (puissances du faux) — Every marker of documentary's truth-contract is preserved — monochrome that rhymes with WWII newsreel, grain, handheld, real Kent locations, local non-professionals, cited statistics — and hung on a Soviet strike that never happened; truth and falsity become undecidable as the film's working principle.
- crystalline description — The film shoots real Kent streets, homes and civic spaces in 1965 and progressively overwrites them with the imagined post-strike Kent; the description composes its object and then replaces it.
- crisis of the action-image — Civil-defence procedure — buckets and improvised firefighting, families being billeted, fallout guidance drawn from Home Office literature — is staged against the firestorm it cannot answer; the sensory-motor circuit between perceiving the situation and acting on it is visibly severed.
- pure optical and sound situations (opsigns) — After the detonation the film fragments into episodic aftermath: rows of the dying in requisitioned buildings, vacant testimony from survivors, nothing anyone does advancing or resolving anything.
- affection-image — Faces shot in tight, unflattering close-up, and the dazed children's faces in the closing passages — non-professionals directed toward states rather than characterizations, so the feeling registers and never discharges into an act.
- dicisign — Peter Bartlett's camera behaves like a reporter's: jostled, searching, caught off guard, zooming and refocusing as if improvising under duress, so we perceive the camera's own perception rather than a composed view.
- lectosign (the readable image) — Bradsell's editing layers statistics, citations and on-screen text over the images so that each atrocity arrives pre-annotated with its documentary source; the image must be read rather than followed.
- audiovisual disjunction — Official statements and reassurances are read aloud against images they fail to match, and the newsreader-cadence narration delivers escalating horror in the even tone used for weather or cricket.
- the people are missing — The film pauses to ask ordinary Britons what strontium-90 or carbon-14 is and exposes that they cannot say — the public capable of deciding about this does not yet exist — and the BBC then withheld the film from that public for twenty years.
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — Non-professional Kent residents play themselves in their own streets, giving direct-address testimony about a catastrophe that has not happened to them; actor and witness become indistinguishable.
- the unthought / the outside — The film's object is an abstraction no one can hold — hence the vox-pop ignorance and the BBC's verdict that it was "too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting" — and Watkins answers by reducing megadeath to the scale of the parish, the household, the bucket of sand.