Filmmaker Peter Watkins’s career represents something of a “perfect storm” for critical approbation. His films are formally risky, politically unimpeachable, based on an actual manifesto abut the problems of media-making which can be read on his website, and best of all, are near completely unavailable. Before I get too far off on the wrong foot though, let me just say that I do quite like the first two films of his I was able to see: Edvard Munch and his Academy Award® winning The War Game. Both of those works are striking for the freshness of their approach to the (ostensible) documentary form, their intensity of focus, and even something approaching humor, all the more surprising for the grimness of the ground they cover (Munch’s madness, a vision of post nuclear fallout Britain). Not quite so, Punishment Park, now available on DVD for the very first time.

A vision of an American police state only a few steps removed from the dire early ‘70s milieu which informed its making, Park is built around intercut sequences of a desert-bound ad hoc military tribunal charged with interrogating “dissidents” of a variety of stripes, and a group of convicts struggling through the titular “Punishment Park” a sort of 3-day 53-mile survival course/police chase presented as an alternative to serving lengthy prison sentences. The tribunal is a kangaroo court in the most obvious sense: constitutional rights are consistently abrogated; counsel for the defense is accorded little respect by the members of the tribunal; and all are found guilty after cursory questioning/ideological shouting matches. Also obvious is the typing Watkins engages in to reinforce his critique: all the interrogators feel cut from the same mold of Nixonian clean-cut conformism, the defendants a motley bunch of students, post-hippies, idealists, and pseudo-radicals. That, in reality, Watkins has shuffled the deck somewhat and cast his non-actors in and against type is near imperceptible (this is noted with pride in his 25-minute videotaped director’s introduction and might have represented a productive space in which to complicate his investigation.

Not unlike the Zimbardo Prison experiment at Stanford (also from 1971), as the proceedings wear on Punishment Park grows increasingly shrill and violent, with Watkins himself interjecting loudly from behind the camera (he and his crew represent some unnamed foreign television source) as the police pursuit of the convicts in Punishment Park grows deadly. This not unexpected finale manages to wring the film’s most earned notes of despair in the face on an increasingly monolithic set of state apparatuses, and the film’s best image: a handful of still-standing convicts stumbling towards the American flag that represents the finish, blocked by a line of police. Overall, I like the project’s central metaphor, and feel that it’s only grown more valuable for its predictive powers. If things were bad under Nixon, they may well be worse now (Watkins also acknowledges this in his introduction). My objections to Punishment Park stem largely from its execution—Watkins has flawlessly constructed his vision (and the 16mm transfer to DVD looks quite lovely), where perhaps it could’ve been a bit less structured which in turn might have masked somewhat the fact that he’s making all the obvious points about the hypocrisies of American society in the least productive of ways: by rubbing our noses in it.
—JEFF REICHERT