Peter Watkins has held many different roles: the media critic and the collective filmmaker, the nuclear prophet and the patient pedagogue, the embittered outsider and the hopeful builder of alternative communities. The sixteen essays in this book paint this portrait, speaking to each other across contexts and methods: scholarly and personal, historical and urgently contemporary.
As the world enters a new historical epoch, questions of politics, power, and the imagination of the future have become increasingly unstable. The issues addressed by Watkins are not pasts that have been sealed off, but ongoing conditions. Watkins reminds us that history is not a closed book.