To accompany "V for Vendetta", rent "Punishment Park"

It's a 1971 film by the British director Peter Watkins (The War Game). Filmed as a documentary, using mostly non-actors who improvised heavily, it was (and remains) a disturbing vision of America.



With the Vietnam war spiralling out of control and increasingly unpopular with the American public, President Nixon declares a state of national emergency and Federal authorities are given the power to detain persons judged to be a "risk to national security".

In a desert region in California, a civilian tribunal passes penal sentences on groups of dissidents but offers the alternative of 3 days in 'Punishment Park'. Peter Watkins' film vividly imagines a world where political dissidents are hunted down by the forces of law and order in a deadly game of cat and mouse.



It was shown at the New York Film Festival and the mainstream press almost universally (with some noteable exceptions - Rolling Stone placed in its 10 best films of 1971) attacked it:

"Peter Watkins' Punishment Park is a movie of such blunt, wrong-headed sincerity that you're likely to sit through the first 10 hysterical minutes of it before realizing that it is, essentially, the wish-fulfilling dream of a masochist." (The New York Times)

"the most offensive of the recent festival films I have seen to date... The British director... undoubtedly doesn't realize ... that he is permitted to make and show here (a film) that declares the United States a totally fascist state... His achievement, of course, is in making a 90-minute film in the course of which no one voices an original or positive thought." (The New Yorker)



The film lasted four days at a single cinema in New York before it was pulled and pretty much never seen again in America until last year. Watkins notes that a rep for a main Hollywood studio was quoted as saying something along the lines of: "We could never show this film, we would have the Sheriff's office on our necks in five minutes." It's also never aired on US TV - (and - again from Watkins - participants at a seminar for PBS producers swore they could not and would not air Punishment Park).




Official Site - http://www.punishmentpark.co.uk/ (Watkins refuses to engage with the media any more; the section "Directors Notes" is a Q&A with himself and well worth a read)

Peter Watkins' website - http://www.mnsi.net/~pwatkins/index.htm

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067633/
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007UQ2BY/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005UWQ3/

Another "terrorist under every rock" story set in Britain.

:thumbsup:

I'll try to find it.

It's a powerful and intensely political film.

What amazed me most is that the heated left vs. right debates during the kangaroo tribunals were largely improvised by the participants.

Watkins' Privilege sounds interesting -- I hope someone will publish it on DVD. It's a shame that his films are so hard to find.

:kick: