Gratis dobbelvisning
Culloden (1964) + The War Game (1966)
Søndag 23. februar 2020 - kl. 19:00
Culloden (1964) - Info:
Type: Dokudrama
Visningsformat: DCP (1.33:1)
Regissør: Peter Watkins
Manusforfatter: Peter Watkins
Produksjonsland: Storbritannia
Språk: Engelsk, gælisk
Undertekst: Engelsk
Lengde: 1 time 9 minutter
The War Game (1966) - Info:
Type: Dokudrama
Visningsformat: DCP (1.37:1)
Regissør: Peter Watkins
Manusforfatter: Peter Watkins
Produksjonsland: Storbritannia
Språk: Engelsk
Undertekst: Engelsk
Lengde: 48 minutter
Nor:
Culloden handler om det siste slaget som ble utkjempet på britisk jord. En hær av gælisktalende høyland-skotter ble massakrert av en hær med rødjakker og lavlendere ledet av Hertugen av Cumberland. Det som fulgte er kjent som «the rape of the highlands» og utryddelsen av den gæliske kulturen i Skottland. Motivasjonen bak filmen lå både i britenes ignoranse rundt denne delen av historien og i å dra en parallell til den pågående situasjonen i Vietnam.
The War Game er et forsøk på å gi det britiske folket et realistisk bilde på livet etter en atomkatastrofe og en forståelse for hvilket spill regjeringen deres var med på. BBC, som var produksjonsselskap, fikk panikk når de først fikk se filmen og nektet å vise den før 20 år senere. I begge filmene bruker Peter Watkins hovedsakelig amatørskuespillere. Sammen med sin varemerke du-er-der-stil, som var banebrytende i sin tid, gir dette filmene en smertelig følelse av realisme.
Eng:
Culloden tells the story of the last battle fought on British soil. The Gaelic Scottish clans were massacred by The Duke of Cumberland, and what followed is known as “the rape of the highlands”. Made as a parallel to the Vietnam war.
The War Game is a painfully realistic preview of the aftermath from an atomic bomb. When the BBC, who had financed the film, finally got to see it, they panicked and decided to hide it from the public for 20 years.
A brief introduction
Hello. I’m Peter Watkins, the director of the two films – Culloden and The War Game - which I produced for the BBC TV in 1964 and 1965 respectively. Before making a few introductory remarks, I would first like to send my greetings to the Bergen Film Club and to all of you who will be watching these films this evening!
I should begin by saying that when I joined the BBC in 1963 as an assistant producer of documentary films, I discovered that the BBC was in the process of formulating a programme code of so-called ‘objectivity’ in the name of ‘balance, ‘impartiality’and ‘fairness’, and within a few years after I had left the BBC, all the documentary staff were officially informed that any producer (her was never mentioned) who yielded to his subjective, personal feelings about a film he was producing, would have to leave the BBC and make his name in some other field. As I say, this ethos of so-called ‘impartiality’ and the environment of self-censorship which accompanied it was still in the process of being formalised at the BBC, and in the mid-1960s a brief window of opportunity still existed for people such as Ken Russell, Ken Loach, myself and a few other producers, to more or less work as we wished.
In this dwindling climate of opportunity, I produced Culloden and The War Game using a technique which I had already begun to develop in earlier amateur films I had produced in England. This technique involved staging an event with all the appearance of actually happening in front of the camera, as if it were a newsreel. Although to some degree this technique has subsequently entered the vocabulary of even the commercial cinema, at the time – in the mid-1960s – it was unheard off. Although we worked completely independently of each other, Ken Loach used more or less the same technique with his documentaries Up the Junction and Poor Cow, but the difference in my case was that I applied it to events that in no way could have been recorded by a documentary camera, such as the 1746 Battle of Culloden, or hypothetical future events, such as a nuclear attack on Britain.
By working in this way, I wanted to expose the classic myth – still held today by the majority of global TV stations - of ‘objective’ documentary films (or news programmes) showing the ‘truth’. I wanted to demonstrate that any documentary film (or news programme) is constructed (staged if you wish) according to a whole series of subjective decisions – where to place the camera, who to place in the viewfinder of the camera, who is allowed to say what, what is included and what is removed in the editing, the use of supplementary sound including narration, etc. etc. So the technique of Culloden and The War – and other films I have made since – was to expose the inherent contradictions within the documentary cinema and TV – and that what looks ‘real’ is actually not – or, put another way, is a subjective interpretation of what seems to be ‘reality’.
However, the myth of audiovisual objectivity was – and still is - used to establish the authority of the media professional, and to distance the professional from the public. To separate the producer of information from the receiver of information . It was for this reason also that in Culloden and The War Game I worked almost entirely with non-professional actors – the public if you like – those who normally are held-back by the media as passive ingesters of one-way message systems, and who – with few exceptions – are not allowed to be become active participants in the creation of the cinema and TV – and are not allowed to share the power of the direct gaze into the camera – a power which is normally only permitted to the media professional.
I have sent a full statement to the Bergen Film Club, detailing some of these issues in more detail and also describing the professional practice of standardised and repetitive language-forms which are routinely clamped down over almost all cinema films and TV programmes. This practice – which I refer to as the Monoform, includes the repetitive use of abbreviated, rapid, uniform time structures which are applied during the editing process no matter what subject or theme. This is probably one of the most powerful factors – of many – that account for the manipulative power of the cinema and TV over the public.
As I recount in the statement, the discovery of the Monoform by students and myself at Columbia University in New York did not take place until 1977, and is certainly a problem which also besets my own films which I produced before that date. It accounts for the fact, for example, that I am allowing the rapidity of the Monoform to seriously restrict the amount of time that any audience has to digest and reflect upon the information I am providing. And it wasn’t until after 1977 that I began to take this problem into account, and to experiment with alternative time structures in my work.
Well, I hope you will have an opportunity to read my statement – along with my apologies that it is not in Norwegian. You are very welcome to contact me via my website if you would like to make any comments on these films, or indeed in general on the impact of the mass audiovisual media on our lives and on the environment.
Thank you very much for watching, and for your participation in the discussion which will hopefully follow the screening of these films. I hope to hear from you!
Goodbye for now.
Peter Watkins,
France, Jan 2020
The Media Crisis
“The world must thrash out a new deal for nature in the next two years or humanity could be the first species to document our own extinction”, warns the United Nation’s biodiversity chief.” (Guardian UK, 3 Nov 2018)
I would like to begin by raising the following questions: Why is it that we human beings have allowed the environmental crisis to reach such disastrous proportions? What has led to the upsurge in populist thinking and the consequential crisis in democracy? Why have the global media done so little to query their own role in this crisis?
After some years as an amateur filmmaker working with an amateur drama group called Playcraft, in Canterbury, Kent, in the south of England, my professional film training began with my initiation into the traditional documentary form at the BBC, where I worked in the mid-1960s. We were informed by the BBC – I still have the document – that our principal obligations were to fulfill the principles of “truth, balance and fairness“ (i.e., ‘objectivity’) in any film that we produced, and were told that a producer who failed to do so (by yielding to his personal feelings about a particular film he was producing) ”... should leave the BBC and make his name in some other field”.
Early on, I understood the contradictions in the generally accepted professional tenets of ‘objectivity’ and ‘reality’, and decided that my function, as a filmmaker, was to try to subvert this notion, to clarify the subjective nature of my own views, and to expose the constructed and carefully planned nature of the traditional documentary form.
I set about this subversion essentially by using all the techniques and tricks of the standard form, in order to stage films that were patently constructed – and not the reality they appeared to represent. In 1964 I filmed a reconstruction of the 1746 Battle of Culloden in Scotland, in the form of a TV news broadcast - as though that battle was actually happening in front of the camera. I hoped that the fact that cameras were not invented in 1746 would enable people to understand the contradictions between the appearance of reality given by my quasi-documentary form, and the elaborately staged nature of that seeming filmic ‘reality’.
My ideas, however, were not yet fully developed, for I also hoped that the staging of a film in this way would have more impact on the audience than a conventional film form. One could say that until 1977, I was caught between wanting to deconstruct and subvert the idea of film ‘reality’ on the one hand, and using that subversion to capture the audience on the other.
Along with this duality, I was caught in another, more serious trap - that of applying a standardised structural form to all my films. This form, referred to by the MAVM (mass audiovisual media) as “the grammar of film’’, emerged from the early films of Hollywood, and was deemed to be the best method to capture an audience. Without understanding the consequences, I used this form to underlay the ‘subversion’ in all my films from Culloden to Evening Land.
I was caught in that contradiction, because at that time, films were made with that form (indeed they still are), with no information or professional training to point the way to something different. Of course I saw the occasional alternative film, but I was never subjected to any professional debate about the heavily structured films of the mass audiovisual media.
Then, in 1977 and 1979, I was given the opportunity by the History Department at Columbia University, to run two summer courses, at which time the students and I studied and specified the characteristics of this standard Hollywood form. We made a detailed study of a number of archive copies of TV news broadcasts from the three principal American network stations, the ABC, NBC and CBS, and also analysed several ‘docudrama’ series, Roots and Holocaust, from the same stations. What we uncovered were the specific characteristics of the uniform, repetitive language form, which was (and still is) used by circa 90-95% of all commercial cinema films, virtually all TV programmes, and even by many documentary films. In a word, this language form frames almost the entire output of the MAVM. We called it the Monoform.
The Monoform can be seen as a time-and-space grid clamped tightly over all the different elements of any film or TV programme. This grid encompasses rapidly changing images or scenes, constant camera movement, a dense bombardment of sound including atmospheric music and narration, the up and down climactic curves of the narrative story line, etc. A principal characteristic of the Monoform is its high-speed editing. The uniform nature of this structure, no matter what the subject matter, blurs essential distinctions between subjects and themes (e.g., fictional and real death), and leaves no time for reflection by the audience.
This means that a standard documentary film (no matter how serious the subject) often uses the same form and narrative structure as a Netflix drama series. Which in turn means that many documentary films utilise the Hollywood ideology and methods to establish a hierarchical relationship with the audience.
As I have witnessed in over 30 years of research and attempts to draw attention to this phenomenon, many, if not most, film professionals, as well as media instructors in schools and universities, persist in teaching young people that the Monoform is the only correct way of reaching an audience. They simply do not want to hear or confront critical thinking on this issue.
The result is a deafening silence on the whole subject of the Monoform throughout the MAVM, and media education. And when confronted...? As one senior executive from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation proudly proclaimed at a film market, “I am not afraid of the grammar of the people”. The problem with this declaration is that “the people” have never been consulted about the nature and form of this ‘grammar’ (ergo the Monoform), or even about the fact that there are structures which hold mass audiovisual messages and their underlying ideologies in place.
I have often been told that there is no crisis regarding the form of the mass media, thanks to the work of independent filmmakers. I believe that this illusion needs to be strongly challenged.
First, we need to understand that the Monoform is only one language form amidst the immense possibilities of the filmic medium. Despite this fact, the Monoform has become de facto the officially used and propagated film grammar... hence the standard - including among quite a few of the films that are independently financed.
Of course there are examples of genuinely alternative or experimental films, including, over the years, works by Stan Brakhage (US), Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Trinh T. Minh-ha (Vietnam), Chris Marker, Robert Bresson, Agnès Varda (France), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), numerous Japanese filmmakers, and so on. The varied filmic processes and experiments by individual filmmakers have indeed helped people to escape the boundaries of the Monoform. [Whether complete ‘escape’ is either possible or desirable – given the nature of the filmic medium – is another question.]
But the fact remains that most of these films that are outside the confines of the Monoform are ‘ghetto-ized’ into specialised screenings at art houses or film festivals, confined to the arcane grip of academic ‘experts’, or screened on TV at 1:30 am. Essentially, they are withheld by the MAVM from the broader public, for they do not figure as a component of the so-called ‘popular culture’, nor do they represent any significant challenge to the Monoform media. I believe that this position best serves the interests of the status-quo MAVM, which strive to strictly compartmentalize – and suppress if necessary – anything that threatens their professional power base. Whether this is conjecture or certainty, what is true is the fact that the mass media and most education systems make no effort to research the Monoform, or to debate the possible effects on the public.
I often refer to the public, for here lies the crux of the problem: The public has always been defined as the receptors of media output, never as participants in a pluralistic process. Indeed, this one-sided relationship between media and public may even, by default, be legitimised in various national Constitutions, which guarantee “freedom of the press”, but never guarantee the right of the public to a choice between Monoform and non-Monoform media, or equal rights to non-Monoform and Monoform filmmakers for access to funding and distribution.
The conventional attitude towards the public as shown in national Constitutions is also written in stone in the literature of the audiovisual media, and goes back to the early days of Hollywood. For example, endless teachings of the stages of film production – especially editing – refer to time-tested techniques for having an ”impact” on the audience. There is seldom, if ever, any mention of the process of a democratic interchange with the audience.
One of the most insidious aspects of this crisis is the relationship fostered between the media and the public by most media educators. Not only do they not acknowledge the problems of the Monoform, on the contrary, they teach students that it is the one and only valid language form in the production of ‘successful and professional’ films and TV programmes.
The websites of many universities promise students entry into the media industry after they learn the standard ‘professional’ practices. Students are usually trained (‘bullied’ would not be an inappropriate term) to accept the Monoform method of film and journalism production (which is designed to format the products of the MAVM into a uniform code), as the sine qua non of entry into the mass media. “We allow our students to make their alternative films, but we know that these are the ones who will never find work in the professional media,” states a professor of media studies at a French university. This being the case, it’s obvious that the whole area of media, cinema and journalism studies is strongly tilted in favour of the Monoform media, instead of encouraging – and supporting vis-à-vis the industry – media students who want to work in alternative ways.
In this way, the MAVM and educational systems are increasingly shifting cinema and TV production away from anything resembling more liberal forms of creative art and communication, such as the theatre, plastic arts, literature, music, etc. For all the commercial problems that these other creative forms certainly face, they still acknowledge the importance of individual creativity, and the validity of the ‘alternative’ - unlike the audiovisual media, which are reeling under an unprecedented pressure to keep the Monoform in place, and the public ever more tightly controlled. This one-sided relationship between the media and the public also manifests itself in the concentration by the MAVM on telling ‘stories’ via endless streams of popular culture feature films and ‘serial box-sets’. The cynicism behind this phenomenon is illustrated in a statement by actor Kevin Spacey to an enthusiastic audience of media professionals at the 2013 Edinburgh TV Festival: "Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in... If they want to binge then we should let them binge.” There is not enough space on these pages to speculate on the multiple levels of damage to the global social climate because of this situation. Certainly, even if we focus only on the visible agendas of the MAVM - including the themes and values espoused by Spacey’s bingeing - we can speculate on the immense damage to the planet that has been directly caused by the overwhelming media emphasis on consumerism and consumerist values.
The effects of the lesser visible, more subterranean aspects of the mass audiovisual media have mostly gone unremarked. Even one of the most obvious – the way that the rapid structures of the Monoform have caused a widespread drop in attention span - has gone largely undebated. And that in itself is an extraordinary indication of the power of the Monoform to render invisible its effects upon us.
On a recent visit to London I went with my brother to the cinema. Before the feature film we had to endure over 20 minutes of trailers and promotions for upcoming films. Each shot must have been a second or less in length, with cameras whirling, diving and whip-panning, and with the sound loud enough to shake the walls of the cinema. This was the Monoform in full aggressive action (to be repeated, in a somewhat modified format, in the Spike Lee film that followed). Obviously the Monoform has become a sort of code, whose purpose is identical to that of the secret digital algorithms taking charge of every decision we make each time that we use a computer. The purpose of this audiovisual code is to pin us to our seats, and to ensure that we do not take our eyes away from the screen for a split second.
It is crucially important that we identify this entire process not only in terms of the authoritarian control that the mass media exert over our viewing experience, but also that we understand that this trauma relates in many complex ways to the troubled state of society today – in our passive acceptance of the global environmental crisis, in our fear of collectivity and our withdrawal into ‘safe’ privatised comfort zones, and in our participation in the process of ‘populism’, into which we have been indoctrinated, and to which we have become accustomed via the so-called media ‘popular culture’. I do not regard the public support for Donald Trump or the populist ideology of Brexit, or the actions of the president in Brazil who is destroying the Amazonian rain-forest, etc., as a series of unhappy accidents. I think that these tragedies, and the lack of wide-spread opposition, are the result of decades of MAVM-induced trauma, which has fragmented our human sympathy and our holistic awareness of what is happening to us and around us, and in so many ways contributed to our acquiescence and fear of speaking out.
What is needed in order to confront these problems is an escalating series of critical debates in public, and in the classrooms of schools and universities, on the role of the mass media (not only audiovisual) in the entire social process. Unfortunately, decades of Monoform supremacy – and its hierarchical habits and practices – have brought about the reverse process. Even most film festivals limit public debate to a 20-minute ‘Q and A’ [question and answer] session, during which the filmmakers invariably occupy the time by talking, instead of engaging in a dialogue with the audience - let alone discussing the Monoform. The same process happens at film conferences, or ‘hommage’ screenings at cinematheques: panels of film scholars talk to (or at) the audience, instead of engaging in an interchange about the crucial role of the cinema in contemporary society. Will we ever see genuinely critical debates between the media and the public (between the public and the public) – especially in non-hierarchical, non-curated forms?
What does ‘alternative’ film mean? Is there such a thing as a non-hierarchical Monoform film? How might the public participate in shaping the mass media, or alternatively, a ‘non-mass’, local media? or take part in a non-media, community discussion? There is no single answer to these and other questions, and unfortunately the environment at present does not encourage their debate.
In an article in September 2018 in the international art magazine Frieze, Evan Moffitt writes, “Borders are a violent political construct that defy nature’s logic of cohabitation” ... and that, “though borders shape the lives of so many”, we are reminded “how little they tell us about the way the earth operates”. Thus also with the Monoform, which produces and enforces borders of the mind to exactly the same effect.
Hopefully, sometime this year, I will be expanding the articles on my website pwatkins.mnsi.net to detail more of the standard Monoform practices, such as ‘pitching’, and ‘The Universal Clock’, as well as give an account of media analysis projects that I have initiated, which have been suppressed. I will also deal with the marginalization of my filmwork by the status-quo MAVM, as representative of the general repression that is also affecting many other filmmakers.
In conclusion, I want to extend my sincere thanks to the organizers of the Bergen Film Club for their presentation of Culloden and The War Game. I want to thank everyone present for the possibility to discuss – in public – the issues raised on these pages. If anyone would like to contact me with comments or ideas for the future, they are very welcome to do so via the formmail on my website.
Best wishes,
Peter Watkins, France 2020
Edited by Vida Urbonavičius
Culloden - Extended info
Background
THIS WAS the first of my two films made for the BBC. Late in 1962 I was engaged as an assistant producer for its newly established Channel 2, and some eighteen months later, after I had worked as an assistant to the producer Stephen Hearst on several of his documentaries, Huw Wheldon, then Head of the Documentary Film Department, gave me the opportunity and a small budget to produce a film on the Battle of Culloden. The idea for this project had its genesis with friends from ‘Playcraft’ (the amateur film and theatre group in Canterbury to which I had earlier belonged) suggesting that I read the excellent study by John Prebble, entitled ‘Culloden’ - which was to become the main foundation for my film.
The Battle of Culloden, which took place on April 16, 1746, was the last battle fought on British soil. Some months earlier Prince Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonne Prince Charlie’), son of James Edward, the Catholic Pretender to the British throne, had landed in Scotland, raised a ragged but tough-spirited Jacobite army from amongst the Gaelic-speaking Highland clans, and marched as far south as Derby before having to retreat back to the Highlands. He was pursued into Scotland by a powerful force of 9,000 redcoats under the command of William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, strengthened by Protestant Scot Lowlanders and several Highland clans loyal to King George II. Outside Inverness, on the bleak, rain-swept Culloden Moor, nearly 1,000 of Charlie’s army, made up of 5,000 weak and starving Highlanders, were slaughtered by the Royal Army, who lost 50 men. The Highlanders finally broke and fled, along with Prince Charles. Approximately 1,000 more Highlanders were killed in subsequent weeks of hounding by British troops, during what became known as the “rape” of the Highlands, and which led to the destruction of the Gaelic clan culture and to the deportations, known as the ‘Highland Clearances’, during the following century.
Motivation
The period of the film’s production was during the 1960s, at a time when images from the war in Vietnam were daily broadcast on TV, 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, including because our knowledge of what took place after ‘Culloden’ was basically limited to an exotic image of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ on the label of a Drambuie whiskey bottle.
Secondly, I wanted to break through the conventional use of professional actors in theatrical TV reconstructions, and substitute this traditional TV experience with that of ordinary people restaging their own history. Many of the people portraying the Highland army in our film were direct descendants of those who had been killed on the Culloden Moor.
Filming
‘Culloden’ was filmed in August 1964, near Inverness, with an all-amateur cast from London and the Scottish Lowlands playing the royalist forces, and people from Inverness portraying the clan army. With photographer Dick Bush, recordists John Gatland and Hou Hanks, make-up artist Ann Brodie, battle co-ordinator Derek Ware, film editor Michael Bradsell, and with the help of friends and actors from ‘Playcraft’ and other local drama groups from Kent, we made and edited our film as though it was actually happening in front of news cameras, and deliberately reminiscent of scenes from Vietnam which were appearing on TV at that time.
During my early professional training, I had become aware of the contradictions in the generally accepted professional tenets of ‘objectivity’ and ‘reality’, as rigourously promulgated by the BBC in order to give ‘authority’ to their programmes, and decided that my function, as a filmmaker, was to try to subvert this notion, to clarify the subjective nature of my own views, and to expose the constructed and carefully planned nature of the traditional documentary form.
I hoped that the fact that cameras were not invented in 1746 would enable people to understand the contradictions between the appearance of reality given by my quasidocumentary form, and the elaborately staged nature of that seeming filmic ‘reality’.
Press reaction in the U.K
‘Culloden’ was first screened by the BBC on December 15, 1964, and - with the possible exception of ‘Edvard Munch’ (1973) - remains the only film I have produced which has been professionally accepted in the UK. Its use of amateurs, mobile camera, “you-are-there” style, were seen as a breakthrough for TV documentary, paralleling advances being made at the BBC by Ken Loach, and by Ken Russell and other filmmakers.
‘... an artistic triumph for its maker’ (The Scotsman)
‘One of the bravest documentaries I can remember’ (The Sun)
‘An unforgettable experiment ... new and adventurous in technique’ (The Guardian)
‘... a breakthrough ...’ (The Observer)
‘Almost compulsively viewable’ (The Times)
‘... it worked brilliantly ...’ (Daily Mail)
‘... a sadistic and revolting programme’ (Birmingham Evening Mail)
‘The result was so unexpectedly convincing it gave me quite a shock. I have no hesitation in raving about it, even to the extent of muttering: breakthrough.’ (Observer Weekend Review)
Aftermath
The generally positive press positive reaction in the U.K (and in the BBC) to ‘Culloden’ changed overnight with my next film ‘The War Game’.and my ‘error’ in using the same pseudo-documentary technique to portray a contemporary event, as opposed to one which had happened with the apparent safety of being distant by several hundred years.
Update to the banning of The War Game
The Herald, Scotland June 1, 2015
A SCOTS academic has uncovered previously secret government files which show how the BBC collaborated with Whitehall officials in the 1960s to block a controversial film about a nuclear attack on Britain .
BBC drama documentary The War Game, directed by Peter Watkins, which shows shocking scenes of radiation sickness, firestorms and widespread panic following a nuclear attack on Britain , was infamously pulled from broadcast at the 11th hour in 1965.
The corporation insisted it was its own decision to implement the ban as the footage was "too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting".
However the move has been mired in controversy ever since, as it was known the drama had been viewed by Whitehall officials in the weeks beforehand.
Now fifty years on, John Cook, professor of media at Glasgow Caledonian University , has uncovered previously secret Cabinet Office files which show how civil servants influenced the banning of the film. His findings will be discussed as part of a BBC Radio 4 programme `The War Game Files´, which will be broadcast on Saturday 6th June at 8pm.
In an interview with the Sunday Herald Cook said: "This has been a 50 year mystery - I wouldn´t say I have solved it, but it is probably the closest we have got to figuring out what happened.
"The BBC put out a press release in November 1965 saying they had decided not to show the film to the public as it was too horrific for the medium of broadcasting - and stressed it was a decision the BBC had taken alone.
"But there has been much suspicion over the years that the British Government was involved in the censorship in one form or another."
Sir Norman Brook, who was chair of the BBC Board of Governors at the time - and whose previous job as secretary of the Cabinet Office included drawing up civil defence planning in case of a nuclear war - had written to Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend to alert him to the film ahead of its planned broadcast.
Cook said one key memo he uncovered revealed Brook and Trend subsequently had a meeting with then director of the BBC Sir Hugh Carleton Greene.
He said: "In the memo Sir Hugh Carleton Greene said if it was decided by the government the film should not be shown, then the BBC would put out a press release saying they had taken the decision independently. It is pretty clear."
The Whitehall officials who were invited to view the film on September 24 1965 before it was due to be broadcast included Trend, the head of the Home Office Sir Charles Cunningham,and senior representatives from the British Armed Forces, the Ministry of Defence and the Post Office, which at that time was responsible for granting the BBC its licence to broadcast.
Cook said an internal memo was then put together by the officials for ministers and civil servants about the reaction to the film, which was labelled top secret and sent to Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
But he added: " Wilson is astute enough to realise that he cannot be seen to be explicitly censoring a film because the BBC publicly is an independent body.
"So he writes to his cabinet secretary advising that the government doesn´t want to be involved in this - but adds you may wish to communicate your views along with the other civil servants privately to Brook, the BBC chair.
"And that is essentially what happens - ministers don´t want publicly to get involved, but they give civil servants the nod that they should communicate their views that the film was unbalanced."
The War Game was not screened by the BBC until twenty years later, in July 1985. The film´s director Watkins left Britain to work abroad in protest following the ban.
Cook added: "Essentially the BBC´s charter of independence was violated in 1965 ... The key thing is the censorship was entirely consensual."
Among those interviewed for the BBC Radio 4 programme is Sir Christopher Bland, who was BBC chairman of governors between 1996 to 2001.
He said he was "astonished" that the BBC would have agreed to show a film to politicians before transmission.
A BBC spokesman said “Fifty years on it’s difficult for us to comment on the background to the broadcast of this film.”
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