Peter Watkins’ The Journey: the longest film, the grassroots vision

The Doomsday Clock has been running since 1947. It marks how close unchecked science and technology have brought us to catastrophe, with midnight as the end. When Peter Watkins shot The Journey in the mid-1980s the clock stood at three minutes to midnight, pushed there by Cold War tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union. On 27 January this year it was moved to 85 seconds to, the closest it has ever been, citing wars between nuclear-armed states, climate inaction and the uncertainties of AI. This is the moment, in August 2026, that the film returns to the screen at BFI Southbank.

It is usually described in superlatives, epic or monumental, mostly because of its running time of 14.5 hours, and that is probably why it remains one of Watkins’ least seen works. Jacob Hovind has compared it to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), and not only for the length but for how both films share an unwillingness to hurry anyone. They let people speak, then make space for what has been said to land in slow, humanistic time.

An important part of the meaning of the film comes from the process of its making. In 1982, with money from Central Television, Watkins began a sequel to The War Game (1966), his controversial BBC vision of nuclear apocalypse, which he thought had dated badly. But budget problems quickly killed it. He then approached broadcasters around the world, each to fund a segment in their own territory with local people talking about what they knew of the arms race. Every one of them refused. 

What got it moving was the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, the oldest peace movement there is, which voted at its centenary congress in 1983 to raise money for the film. Everything after that Watkins built by hand, town by town, raising money with communities in each location and circling the globe three times before it was finished. Only the National Film Board of Canada came in late, with the free use of its post-production facilities. That history is the almost utopian part. It’s a film made in living rooms and church halls, paid for by fundraising dinners, after almost every institution that might have backed it said no; an internationalist grassroots project that put ordinary lived experience ahead of mass media to create what Watkins calls a “global peace film” reflecting on the impacts of the global arms race on the lives of everyday people.

And it does travel. The Outer Hebrides, Mozambique, Japan, Australia, France, Tahiti, the United States, Leningrad (now St Petersburg), and many places in between, to sit with families at kitchen tables and go through photographs of the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then ask whether they had ever seen anything like it. In the mid-80s many had not. The kitchen table becomes a counter-site for the exchange of information. The families, who in other documentaries would be subjects, take part in making the meaning, speaking back to the film about the effect of what they have been shown and about their own participation. And this is the radical heart of the project, that the camera waits while ordinary people work out, in real time, what the implications are. Sitting with them long enough to notice that at the height of the Cold War a family in Leningrad and a family in Portland are frightened of the same things.

At times it can be didactic. Watkins hands out facts, that a fortnight of arms spending by the powers of the global north would feed and house the world’s population for a year, and every so often he interrupts to tally what has been spent since he last interrupted, and keeps doing it for the whole runtime. Sometimes it feels like a lecture. It also produces the reflexive distance he uses across his many films, exposing the film’s own construction, drawing the viewer in and implicating them. 

While it repeats itself deliberately, few other films give so honest an account of the painstaking business of building solidarity. This is illustrated in the film when people living near the submarine base at Bangor in Washington State watch the trains carry warheads up from Amarillo through their valley, and start telephoning down the line, town by town, warning the next place along the track, and the next, until there is a chain of small communities holding vigils along the length of the railway. This is resistance at human scale, the slow wiring together of strangers into a movement, over months and years.

Towards the end of the film Watkins starts to make connections between the families who start learning about each other and communicating, and The Journey starts to actually build a movement within its own making. While the urgency of the project may have seemed to dissipate in the post-Cold War era, the hands of the doomsday clock speak to the increasing urgency and need for global solidarity movements, and perhaps there is something here we can still learn from. As Tricia Crippen, one of the participants in the film, says: “It’s gotta start with us, and it may end with us if we don’t all come to that kind of consciousness.”

The Journey screens as part of System Critical: The Radical Films of Peter Watkins at BFI Southbank in August.