Punishment Park

Punishment Park is a film being made by a West German film crew, narrated by an Englishman. We are shown, in a line of military trucks, a group of people, identified as Group 637 (the 637th group of prisoners), men and women, white and black, being transported to a remote desert location in California where they are charged by a tribunal inside a tent and sentenced to prison or what is called “punishment park,” which is nothing but a desolate obstacle course, a natural gauntlet, through which the prisoners who choose such an option – and every one of them do – are given a two-hour head start. Their objective, fifty-three miles distant, is an American flag. They are pursued by cops and national guardsmen. If they reach the flag by 10 PM on the third day they are free to go. If they fail to reach it, they are sent to prison. The temperature at 10 AM when the prisoners set out in Punishment Park is 91 degrees. They are told that water has been left at the course’s halfway point. 

The amount of advance publicity lavished on Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (q.v.) was out of all proportion to the film’s worth. Its critical reception was almost unanimously negative. Fifty years later, it seems unaccountably devoid of a reason for being. It seems to support the perspective of two young people, one ideologically involved in “the Movement” (anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-status quo), the other sexually involved with a wealthy corporate executive, and shows us America the way they see it: billboards that boast of plenitude, but also desert landscapes – a spacious vacancy. But all Antonioni saw were photogenic surfaces, which explains the film’s lack of any real substance. 

Filmed the same year – 1970 – of Zabriskie Point’s release, Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park is everything Zabriskie Point is not. The immediate and most noticeable difference is the absence in Watkins’s film of stately compositions. In their place are cinema verité, handheld camerawork that takes up the vantage point of an engaged witness. In his six films prior to Punishment Park, Watkins approached history as a living, ongoing event, whether it was raw news reportage from the Battle of Culloden (Culloden) or the moment to moment reality of the city of London after an atomic bomb attack (The War Game). 

Not satisfied with pretty images, Watkins uses his camera (a single 16mm Eclair) to record a drama as close to actuality as he can get. He also eschews many of the favorite devices of motion pictures – devices designed to increase the potential for sheer spectacle. So when he films a scene of battle, as in Culloden, he purposely avoided many of the traps that have attracted filmmakers since D. W. Griffith: the choreographed movement of a “cast of thousands” of combatants engaged in violence against one another. Instead Watkins exploited his own budget strictures by using close-in, handheld shots that relate the true brutality of warfare. 

Most of the objections to the film, that it is an expression of the filmmaker’s “paranoia,” miss the point of the film entirely. A critic in the New York Times called it "an extravagantly paranoid view of what might happen in America within the next five years ... Because all literature, including futuristic nonsense like this, represents someone’s wish-fulfilling dream, I can’t help but suspect that Watkins’ cautionary fable is really a wildly sincere desire to find his own ultimate punishment." 

Watkins wasn’t proposing that it was likely that Richard Nixon was going to sign an executive order invoking the 1950 “McCarran Act,” setting in motion the events of which his film is a record. Watkins was merely responding to the demonstrations that were taking place in America in 1970 as well as the police and government responses to the demonstrations and proposing a “what if?” The film might look to some viewers rather like the recent HBO dramatization of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America in which an American fascist movement changed the course of history. But Roth was proposing an alternate history lesson that was all the more chilling simply because it was perilously close to being the actual course of history. Watkins was prognosticating – proposing possible events that might come to pass. The plausibility of the film’s narrative isn’t relevant. There is no burden of proof. What makes any film convincing is the conviction of the filmmaker and the actors. Does it work on its own terms and are its proposals, that a makeshift tribunal would give people convicted of insurrection the choice between doing hard time and four days in Punishment Park, which is nothing but a kind of correctional obstacle course? 

Watkins cast the film mostly with people who had never acted, professionally or otherwise, before. He evidently had no problem recruiting people from all walks of life to appear in the film, taking part in his exercise in imaginative prediction. It wasn’t enough to propose that such events were possible. Watkins had to, on a small but not inconsequential scale, make it happen. 

The camera’s presence is frequently acknowledged by the film’s participants. At some points, the camera is addressed directly, its objectivity appealed to. It gives the film a strong documentary feel, which in itself provides a layer of authenticity to the incredible proceedings. 

In his review of the 2000 film Steal This Movie, about Abbie Hoffman, Stanley Kauffmann wrote: 

The will to public action is certainly not dead in this country: witness last year's WTO protests in Seattle and the protests at the recent political conventions. Nonetheless, the giant wave of young people's disgust and anger, of insulted patriotism, that flooded this country in the '60s and early '70s--a wave so huge that it must have had a part in Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run again in 1968--seems very far from a country that is, in great part, so happily drunk on hedonism. The obvious catalyst back then was Vietnam, a horrendous war that, as Hoffman often said, had been distortedly presented by the government from the start. (Ten years afterward, Senator J. William Fulbright said that "the biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust government statements.") We surely should not long for such another catalyst, but public responses to current issues make the heat of this film seem distant. (1)

Punishment Park was made in the heat of the very moment of protest in America, in the midst of Richard Nixon’s first term, with the war in Vietnam metastasizing into Cambodia. Last year’s BLM protests were certainly loud enough to get most people’s attention, no matter what their political stripe. And Watkins certainly confronts the racial aspect of the protest movements of the time. Audiences in 1970 were certainly more accustomed to seeing protests in the news. The satirical qualities of Punishment Park are easier to detect today than 50 years ago, but only because protest itself has become more of an abstraction to us. The film was a direct provocation to the people who managed to see it at the time, which was not very many. American distributors refused to exhibit it, for reasons of liability if nothing else. It was an indictment of a reactionary atmosphere overtaking the country that has by now become a kind of norm. 

(1) “So Near and Yet… “ The New Republic, September 11, 2000.