The war Game is a dramatized documentary that relates to the story of a possible Russian missile attack and its aftermath in southeaster England, during a limited nuclear war. There were several different reasons given for the ban including graphic scenes, its apparent left-wing bias and its controversial fusion of journalistic fact ( Rolinson,___ ). This paper will discuss the ways in which Watkin’s Peter Watkins filmed this feature in such a realistic manner that it was banned from BBC for 20 years. The method in which this film has been shot
The War Game (1965) This documentary is one of the most controversial films ever to win the Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature. Produced in 1965 by BBC television, it relates the story of a possible Russian missile attack and its aftermath in southeastern England, during a limited nuclear war. This stark and powerful work continues to move audiences and incite debate some forty years after it was made

1. Is The War Game a documentary? Each of Peter Watkins 14 films (both shorts and features) operates in a vein that can be called staged documentary.” The method used in his films is to address historical and contemporary issues through recreations, using chiefly non-actors. In this case, the participants were selected through a series of public meetings in County Kent where the film is set and where it was primarily shot. His stated purpose, “was to involve ‘ordinary people’ in an extended study of their own history… the subject involved potentially imminent events, for the threat of full-scale nuclear was a very real one at that time.”
Recreations, improvised and scripted, have long been a part of the documentary tradition and have been accepted, if not entirely embraced, by both makers and audiences. Almost all such documentary recreations deal with events contemporary to the film or with events from the past—the recent past as in the works of Robert Flaherty, or the more distant past as in Charles Guggenheim’s Academy Award winning documentary short The Johnstown Flood. A major difference with The War Game is that the events portrayed remain only possibilities, not documented facts.

Among the reasons given for the ban were its brutally graphic scenes, its apparent left-wing bias and its controversial fusion of journalistic fact and hugely alarmist fiction, although there is now evidence that it fell victim to the political suppression of nuclear discussion that was happening at the time across all media. Its director, Peter Watkins, quit the BBC and fought to get it a cinema release abroad, resulting in critical acclaim and a Best Documentary Oscar. After its eventual transmission in 1985, critics agreed that the BBC had suppressed one of the greatest dramas ever made.