Punishment Park (1971)

reviewed by
Shane Burridge


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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