|
 Punishment
Park (1971)
R1 / NTSC DVD
New Yorker Video / 2005
Directed by Peter Watkins
Written by Peter Watkins
Cast: Carmen Argenziano, Scott Turner, Mary Ellen Kleinhall
& Patrick Boland
Review by James Garfield
At some time in the near-future, the United States
government begins detaining those citizens they believe to
be subversives, and giving them trials without witnesses or
the other accoutrements of a traditional fair trial.
Convicted offenders are offered, in place of a federal
prison sentence, the option of trying to win their freedom
at Punishment Park. At the park, based in the Southern
California desert, they can participate in a game where they
walk dozens of miles across the desert, eventually pursued
by police officers and military troops, to try to reach an
American flag where they expect to be released. A
documentary crew covers their bid for freedom, and it soon
becomes clear that the armed pursuing authorities have more
in mind than merely capturing the prisoners.
A bleak, angry political statement, made as a response to
the USA’s decline towards fascism in the LBJ/Nixon era,
Punishment Park will rivet viewers of any political
orientation, although director Peter Watkins’s sympathies
are clearly with the radicals (who do have a range of
differing philosophies, from “violent overthrow of the
government” to the equivalent of Rodney King’s “can’t we all
just get along?”) The film keeps moving briskly forward by
cutting between scenes of the dissidents’ trials and their
later trek through the desert, never staying too long with
either story thread. Having the prisoners get a “head start”
is a particularly effective device, as the viewer begins to
feel unnerved about what will happen once the authorities
get unleashed upon them. Viewers of an ultra-conservative
bent will likely feel angry and (not without justification)
complain of the “stereotyping” of their side; while viewers
in sympathy with the rebels will like the film more. (This
reviewer’s bias: I agree with much, but not all, of what the
rebels say.) Still, thanks to the film’s structure and a
pseudo-documentary format, with its combination of staged
brutality and a cinema-verite effect anticipating Cannibal
Holocaust, few are likely to be bored. |
