The Cinematheque

“[A] magnum opus … La Commune isn’t so much a realistic re-creation as it is a dialogue between past and present, with each time frame used to shape and define the other … This Commune exists now, around the corner, and Watkins dares us to step in.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

The films of British iconoclast Peter Watkins (Punishment Park) are like nothing else. The components of La Commune, his final masterwork, are easy to describe: epic theatre, historical recreation, and media mimicry. But the experience of the film—exhaustive, exciting, and an education in what happens between actors and cameras and the interpretive space they open up—is something overwhelming yet distilled, a sprawling portrait of ​“pre-revolutionary atmosphere” unfurled in the space of a warehouse among a cast of over 200 actors. The film tracks the history of the Paris Commune, in which a mass of citizens, of different affiliations and classes, argue, strategize, and take action together. Arms are seized, hostages are taken, and a radical form of self-government is installed. Watkins defamiliarizes the events by covering them in a blanket of anachronistic TV journalism, to model the problems—and chronicle the euphoric voices and sights—germane to representing and waging a revolution.

In French with English subtitles

“A monumental, stunningly ambitious, Brechtian historical epic … Remains one of the supreme achievements of 21st century cinema.”

Anthology Film Archives

“The fact remains that the story of the Paris Commune, which Karl Marx once described as ​‘the glorious harbinger of a new society,’ remains a little-known historical event … More than just representing its flurries and bloodshed, Watkins’s film encapsulates an educational project in itself.”

Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, Screen Slate