Cinema
Culloden
Peter Watkins · 1964
Synopsis
The moor of Culloden, near Inverness, 16 April 1746. A reporter's voice sets the scene and introduces the forces: a government army of about nine thousand men, well equipped, facing fewer than five thousand exhausted and poorly supplied Jacobites. A television crew goes from one camp to the other and interviews soldiers and their leaders to camera, as one would for a news report.
Context
The film was shot in August 1964 near Inverness and broadcast on 15 December. Its author has given his two motives. The first is Vietnam: the American army was then “pacifying” the highlands there, and he wanted people to see the same act on the mountains of Scotland two centuries earlier. The second was to do without professional actors and to have people reconstruct their own history: inhabitants of Inverness play the clans, amateurs from London and the Lowlands the royal army. The book from which the film comes, by John Prebble, dates from 1961, and its author served as adviser.
Who it is for
Sixty-nine minutes, in English; the film does not stop at the battle and follows the repression that comes after.
Prizes and reception
Its director said that it was, with perhaps one other, the only one of his films that his country had widely accepted.
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