Universal Clock, The

Geoff Bowie
Canada, documentary, 2001
76 mins. (Beta)

With the proliferation of TV channels, documentaries are enjoying a boom, but this success has a downside: documentary filmmaking is being constrained more and more by the dictates of television, chiefly the 'universal clock'. This straitjacket imposes theme and running-time restrictions to meet the demands of the global market. The video introduces us to filmmaker Peter Watkins, whose work resists the trend to standardization.