Like a Centre Pompidou of cinema, Watkins is forever laying bare the arti­fice. Fiction and nonfiction merge: non-actors improvise roles in fictional accounts of factual events (the effect is very reality-TV); and the contrivance inherent in any media narrative is exposed as Watkins shows the cameras, the sets, his directorial technique. His endlessly recursive gambits serve as a metatextual critique of how fact and fiction are just different ways to impose narrative—and yet they never seem like academic posing; indeed, they carry an amazing emotional wallop.

It helps that he’s able to extract remarkable performances from nonprofessionals. In La Commune, the actors, many residents of working-class neighborhoods not dissimilar from the ones that bred the Communards, break character to discuss their roles. In Punishment Park, a 1970 faux-documentary loosely inspired by the trial of the Chicago Seven, young activists who bear more than a passing similarity to the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale improvise their way through a story that’s chillingly apposite to the age of Guantánamo and other black-box prisons. Shot in the style of much of the Vietnam War coverage of the time (shaky handheld cameras rushing through the underbrush, de-centered framing, panting newsmen), the movie follows two groups of prisoners who are allowed to race through the California desert in the hope of reaching an American flag 53 miles away, shadowed by county troopers and other uniformed goons. Ostensibly a “National Network” TV-news account of an alternative-sentencing program for political dissidents, Park gets great mileage out of the way the vacant, macho police types and government officials emasculate the media observers, who are left sputtering at an injustice they can do nothing to stop. (Hilariously, the officials have set up a catering tent in the desert—a poor man’s Doha.)

But Park also helps clarify why Watkins isn’t more widely known. His Village Voice–circa 1975 politics, which make parts of the film seem as dated as the most pretentious Lina Wertmüller, are at once sentimental and punitively moralistic—as if continuing in your bourgeois existence after watching one of his films is a form of ethical suicide. Nobody likes a didact. Or a martyr: Watkins reacted to his travails with the BBC like a delicate flower, too sensitive for this world. The director, now 72, repeatedly pursued self-exile: to Sweden, Lithuania, and Canada. Featured in a major retrospective in Toronto in 2004, he refused to attend after a Globe and Mail essay that called him a “genius” also took issue with his politics. Stunts like these, and his allegedly shirty interactions with potential financial backers, have made it easy for the industry to find excuses not to support his work.

But the world his early films anticipated is the world we inhabit now. Like no filmmaker before or since, Watkins captures the constant manipulation and counter­manipulation of the modern media, the push-pull of image projection and message management that has blurred the line between news and propaganda. His films are testaments to central truths of the current media environment: that mere logic is powerless against a brilliant projection of personality, that self-conscious “objectivity” and truth-telling are very different things, and that compelling narrative is impervious to facts. From the selling of the Iraq War to the selling of Sarah Palin, Watkins, like Orwell before him, shows how we are lied to, and how we lie to ourselves.