Subject: Retrospective: Punishment Park (1971)

From: "Shane R. Burridge" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Jul 1998 03:55:45 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.

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