Subject: Retrospective: Punishment Park (1971)

From: "Shane R. Burridge" <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Jun 1998 05:07:17 GMT

Punishment Park (1971) 89m. 

You'll have to be persistent to catch a screening of this political SF
from Peter Watkins - it's presently unavailable on video and (due to
its high profanity content) unlikely to be screened on TV.  Film
employs the usual quasi-documentary style favored by Watkins to depict
an ultra-conservative America bent on rounding up (mostly young)
dissidents and subjecting them to grueling tribunals that end either
in imprisonment or a three-day ordeal in the desert known as
Punishment Park.  At no stage is the purpose of the park is
satisfactorily explained: we are to believe that it is a training
ground for police officers and the National Guard, whose task it is to
track down and recapture the dissidents who have been turned loose in
the desert.  But I can't see how any such exercise involves useful
skills on behalf of the pursuers - their quarry, who are a pretty
fragile bunch, have to follow a predetermined route and don't pose
much of a challenge for the armed and mobilized forces on their trail.
 Is the park nothing more than an excuse for organized sadism?  The
purpose behind the park - or at least the film's strategy of using the
park - makes itself apparent when the activists argue amongst
themselves about whether or not the whole thing is a set-up to shoot
them all dead.  Is the state just messing with their heads?  It's an
uneasiness we share with the characters because Watkins' convincing
cinema-verite style contradicts what we know is an historical untruth.

The scenes in the desert become tense and genuinely scary: they are
intercut with businesslike discussions among the assault forces and
heated confrontations at the tribunal.  Towards the film's finale,
Watkins loses the dispassionate voice he uses in his better-known
films CULLODEN and THE WAR GAME, and becomes increasingly upset. 
Eventually his anger makes us question the point behind his film. 
It's undeniably well made, realistically acted, and arresting, but its
agenda is unclear.  At first he is condemning the Vietnam war, the
brutal suppression of student protests, and possible dangerous trends
in right-wing politics, but then abruptly switches to an out-and-out
condemnation of the law enforcement mentality that such governments
breed.  These are, however, just the kinds of discussion points that
Watkins wants to prompt.  He wrote part of the story and improvised
others with his non-professional cast, but most notably, quoted much
of the tribunal statements from actual transcripts.  It's a last grim
touch that lifts this film out of the ordinary.