Punishment Park (1971)
Few months back while I was looking through some IMDB lists then I first get to know about this film & it made me instantly pretty curious to give it a blind watch as early as possible. At that time I just found the title & the premise very interesting.
Now, after watching it very late last night without knowing much about the background or the content, Peter Watkins' Punishment Park just straight way made me think & feel I was watching something very real...a genuinely horrifying documentary that was probably banned or hidden all these years or people didn't like to talk about it for its shockingly true & appalling subject matter. Therefore, in this regard, this is surely turned out one of the best Shockumentary I have seen so far.
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Punishment Park is a politically subversive pseudo-documentary giving a voice to the disaffected youth of late sixties/early seventies America. Imagined as the footage of a British news crew it set in a detention camp in an unspecified near-future, detainees gamble their freedom on an attempt to cross the desert (bare footed with no water) whilst being chased down by a squad of heavily armed police and National Guardsmen. In the California desert, arrested dissidents are tried by an emergency tribunal aka kangaroo court and when found guilty (as all are) they're given the choice between unreasonably lengthy imprisonment or take a gamble on three days in the park. Once released into the park, the dissidents - grouped in bunches as numbered 'Corrective Groups' - are given three days to make it 50 miles through the scorching desert to an American flag. That is, if they can evade police capture; they have a two-hour head start.
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This is a troubling document from a time when the US seemed about to tip into chaos and the powers that be would have gone to unimaginable lengths to maintain their control. But what gives Punishment Park its quite substantial punch is the absolutely palpable air of paranoia that pass through in every scene. The film flips back and forth between one Corrective Group's miserable odyssey across the desert and the next Group's
tribunal hearings. One of the best aspects of the film is those heated tribunal sessions.
"I don't have to call you what you are, you know what you are...better than I do."
According to
Wikipedia, Mr. Watkins allowed his cast to mostly speak their minds to each other and the cameras, and that creates a fascinating time capsule from a time & gave birth to a tale of a generation when average citizens actually cared passionately about their country and were willing to go to extreme lengths for those beliefs & doesn't care about the consequences.
Of course, now, some 40 years on, it might be supposed that the political context of Punishment Park is out of date - but Watkins' film still has its relevance, as the US again & again caught in endless foreign conflicts resulted the untold horrors of US detention compounds in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Looking back on history reminds us of the differences and similarities between then and now, but still Punishment Park shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Punishment Park is an extraordinary film, very much thought provoking and deeply depressing. A must see for everyone.
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