Privilege

Peter Watkins is the only great satirist that also happens to be humorless and dealing with this contradiction explains a lot of his appeal even when he seems dead set in drive me unsane.

Filipe Furtado

You can feel it in the air: conservatism is the new punk! Watkins is unfortunately correct that mass culture tends to promote and uphold the dominant ideology. As a comedy, this is slightly funnier than The War Game. The pop remix of “Jerusalem” is an earworm. Do we know…

Will Sloan

An obnoxiously obvious gem of a satire that attacks every pop-cultural-institution in 1967 (the British Invasion, the Church, cinema-verité) with the precision of an out-of-control helicopter. The audaciousness of Peter Watkins's paranoiac images far exceeds the film's…

Carlos Valladares

Steven Shorter’s great “privilege” is to be a puppet for his various handlers. Call him the handled man, a vessel through which the collective revolutionary spirit and energy is sucked and converted to object fetishes; a vacuum that drains the populace of its political…

Ben

Steve's Priority Watchlist Project Sure enough, the predictions and warnings that Peter Watkins pushed forward in Privilege have proved to be eerily prophetic. Just as they would be in Punishment Park. So while it could be true to say that it doesn't offer anything in…

🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝

A dystopian satire of popular culture and the way it’s weaponised by the establishment to push their ideology. In the film’s alternate version of 70s Britain, a popstar named Steven Shorter has become a figurehead for the counterculture, though in reality he’s a puppet used…

Cameron W

"You worship me as if I were a sort of God. I'm someone, I'm a person... I am nothing, this is me. Nothing. And this is you.. because you have made me nothing." A rock idol who's less of an artist and more of a tool. They use him to control young people, sell everything…

Rocky🕵️🎞️

Privilege is one of those films from yesteryear that you watch back and find yourself baffled and frustrated that we learned nothing from it. Directed by Peter Watkins - the genius behind such BBC productions as the anachronistic Culloden, which featured a modern day…

Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸

The most memorable instance in which a communist took several drunken-admirable swipes at the pop-dopamine televisual nexus—certainly more memorable than this review, and bearing an intellectual seriousness Jacobin's Eileen Jones can only dream of—would be the Maoist…

treadyster