Punishment Park (1971)

How the fuck you gonna overrule the constitution, man?

The Internal Security Act of 1950, more commonly known as the McCarran Act, was established to monitor, detain, and prosecute those individuals suspected of engaging in subversive, anti-American activities. President Truman was not a fan, calling it a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and “the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798”, but his attempted veto was overwhelmingly overruled by both House and Senate. Over the next twenty years, the Act would lose much of its power, but not before it provided grim inspiration for one of the greatest films of the 1970s.

Enter Peter Watkins, as socially minded and ornery as ever. The director had already annoyed Britain with his pop star dystopia Privilege (1967) and pioneered a version of the future sports genre with The Gladiators (1969), in which twentysomething draftees worldwide engage in “Peace Games” as a means of reducing international aggression and preventing world war. The Gladiators was a Swedish production and, like Privilege, was filmed in 35mm, had a dark satirical streak, and was met with both hostile reviews and limited release. Undeterred, Watkins went to the United States, where he planned to make a trilogy of historical films about American wars for television (Independence, the Civil War, and the “Wars of Colonisation against the Native Americans”), using Culloden (1965) as a template.¹ But the political turmoil he witnessed – particularly the Chicago Seven case, protests against the bombing of Cambodia, and the Kent State shootings – drove him to ditch history for the present.

Punishment Park is deceptively simple. In an alternate present, the war in Vietnam has escalated into potential world war with China’s intervention. The United States is a country riven by political polarization, with a high number of young people protesting the war, evading the draft, and in some cases taking arms against the establishment. With prison populations at crisis point, Nixon invokes the McCarran Act to identify and detain those the government believes “probably will engage in future possible acts of sabotage.” Trial by jury is no longer feasible or necessary. Those suspected of subversion are presumed guilty, shipped out to the desert, and faced with a tribunal who will ascertain the severity of their punishment. On sentencing, the detainees are given two choices: accept a hefty prison sentence or submit to three days and two nights in a punishment park, where they will be tasked with traversing fifty-three miles of hostile, burning terrain to an American flag. They will be pursued by members of local law enforcement and the National Guard, who use the punishment park as a training exercise.² If the detainees make it to the flag, they are free to go; if they don’t, they will be sent to prison. The film, ostensibly the first time cameras have been allowed to document the process, follows two groups. Corrective Group 638 comprises seven suspected dissidents, including draft evaders and revolutionaries, who are about to be grilled by the sentencing tribunal. Their testimonies are intercut with Corrective Group 637, who are in the process of running the punishment park gauntlet. It will not end well for any of them.

The film began life as a verbatim dramatization of the Chicago Seven trial, and might appear to be a more speculative version of the kind of socially aware movies of the late ‘60s, typified by the likes of Medium Cool (1969), Getting Straight or The Strawberry Statement (both 1970). But while those movies presented audiences with a strictly partisan (and largely left-wing) view of contemporary political issues, Punishment Park uses its speculative premise to more metaphorical ends and refuses easy political point scoring. Yes, the tribunal are a seedy bunch of conservatives (most of whom also have places on the draft board), including a manufacturing executive (who also chairs), a university professor of sociology, a senator, a journalist, an officer of the American Legion, and a housewife who chairs an organisation chillingly called “The Silent Majority for a United America,” but it also includes a union steward, whose self-identification as a hardworking family man precludes any socialist politics he might once have had.³

As for the law enforcement and National Guard members, they largely blur into one, with a few notable exceptions. Officer Edwards is the only named cop, and is a villain for the ages, a tin-starred tyrant and gun-loving, balding shortarse whose lead role in the pursuit has turned him into a homicidal jobsworth. You’d be forgiven for thinking the other pursuers were the same – they do tend to speak as a group, parroting each other’s political opinions – but there are cracks in the façade of united power and flashes of humanity: witness the exhausted policeman at the end of the film who can no longer articulate his reasoning, exasperatedly receding into the background of the frame to let his gung-ho colleagues take the focus. And then there’s the eighteen-year-old National Guardsman, who tearily insists that his killing of one of the detainees was an accident as Watkins (behind the camera) mercilessly berates him.

Corrective Group 638 are loosely based on real-world figures like Bobby Seale (who was forcibly gagged during the Chicago Seven trial), Tom Hayden, Joan Baez (though Nancy’s songs are a tad more aggressive and not half as lyrical), and writer and activist Amiri Baraka, and their attitude to the tribunal is almost universally aggressive. Even those who aren’t actively trying to provoke the tribunal are confident in their political opinions, highly intelligent and articulate – when one tribunal member attempts high-brow debate with a Thomas Aquinas quote, the detainees counters with Saint Augustine – but they don’t seem to realise that intelligence, erudition, and logic are weak defences against those who have all the power and no obligation to listen. As a result, some of the detainees appear insufferable in their moral superiority, while others go out of their way to bait the committee with insults (“pig” is a popular one), apparently excited about their martyrdom in front of television cameras. Even their defence attorney, a law professor who clearly cares about the injustice of the situation, is rendered toothless. He may quote constitutional law and campaign for leniency and due process, but the die has already been cast: the concept of justice is irrelevant to a committee whose entire remit is punitive.

Group 637 is more diverse, or at least they become so during their trek across the desert, splitting into three sub-groups as designated by the end credits. The “militants” see counter-violence as their own legitimate option, choosing to hide out and ambush one of the pursuing officers, which results in a dead cop (and increased antagonism from the rest of the pursuers) and a later hostage situation. The “semi-militants” attempt to run, but ultimately choose violence when the promised water at the halfway point turns out to be a lie; for them, violence becomes necessary to survive. The “pacifists” are perhaps the most tragic of the lot; unlike the other two sub-groups, they know they’re being provoked so the authorities can put them down, but their fatal flaw is their inherent belief in human decency – they believe that playing by the park rules will net them a reward, even if they’ve been presented with nothing but evidence to the contrary. When they finally make it to the American flag, it is blocked by a line of waiting policemen, who promptly beat them into submission, to the shock and outrage of Watkins and his crew. In this game, there is no winning, there are only degrees of failure, and it becomes obvious that the punishment park is little more than a training exercise for law enforcement with a firing squad at its core, a way of whittling down a potential prison population by playing Jack Palance.

Even with its relatively short runtime of around ninety minutes, Punishment Park is an oppressive watch. This is partly down to Watkins’ use of what he would later call the “monoform” – a combination of quick, contrasting edits, complex soundscapes, and dynamic camerawork that would eventually come to define modern filmmaking.⁴ Watkins had previously struggled with 35mm on both Privilege and The Gladiators; while it provided a more detailed image, the cameras were too cumbersome and the size of the frame denied Watkins the kind of claustrophobia that made The War Game and Culloden so powerful. With Punishment Park, he scaled down, using a skeleton crew and one 16mm camera operated by Joan Churchill.⁵ This allowed for increased mobility and immediacy, while also restricting the frame to allow for his signature close-ups: “I close the air off over the head to stop the strength of the scene going out. You can see more of the body. The whole thing is very much solid, and you are forced to look at the person – into their eyes.” In these shots, there is no escape from the individual; even group shots feel tight without ever losing their verisimilitude - you can feel yourself craning to get a better look - and there’s always a suggestion that something even worse is happening just off camera. Even seemingly inconsequential shots have power: the camera lingers on the handcuffs of the detainees, the American flag, the guns, even the pitcher of water provided for the committee and denied the accused.

Punishment Park’s soundscape is equally claustrophobic and relentless in its worldbuilding, with radio reports interjecting with weather updates – the desert is fatally hot – and international atrocities, while Watkins returns to his role as narrator, providing additional and apparently objective commentary. Adding to the cacophony are the improvised performances. Cast members were given a rough outline of events, but were encouraged to voice their own political opinions throughout, with the detainees and committee members kept separate until their shared scenes. Unlike many primarily improvised movies, Punishment Park is edited with clarity in mind – what could have been a ninety-minute shouting match skirts close to being a functional debate punctuated with outbursts, helicopters, and distant gunfire. There are also no bad performances – while the activists were all portrayed by young people living in and around Los Angeles, the authorities were a mix of true believers, former cops, and role-players. In his filmed introduction to Punishment Park, Watkins takes some dry pride in noting that it’s impossible to tell who’s real and who’s acting. This is a significant improvement on the likes of Privilege, where the non-actors struggled with their performances.

And unlike Privilege, there is really no suspension of disbelief required. One of the biggest realisations for me on this recent rewatch was that Punishment Park was also set in the near future; I had always assumed it was set in the contemporary present. This is entirely down to its parallels: there were rumours of anti-war internment camps in the late ‘60s, the gagging of Charles Robbins echoes that of Bobby Seale,⁶ and there are numerous references to Kent State. Even the idea that the authorities would allow film crews to document the process is plausible: Mayor Daley’s police had already beaten the hell out of protestors at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago in full view of the cameras, and this was the age of rough-minded deterrents. While some may question why the detainees would ever consider the park over a penal sentence, this assumes the detainees know what they’re in for. They are all young, fit and healthy: a three-day ordeal to avoid a double-digit prison sentence is an attractive proposition, which is of course precisely the point.

Something as rigorous and incendiary as Punishment Park was never going to find a mass audience, but its release and reception still feels scandalous. After a four-day run in New York and ten days in San Francisco, the film disappeared and despite Watkins’ best efforts, failed to find another distributor. It was savaged by critics, especially on the East Coast (with the notable exception of The Village Voice), with Vincent Canby calling it “the wish-fulfulling dream of a masochist” and Judith Crist denouncing it as “the most offensive of the NY Festival films I have seen to date.” British reviews were no better, with Margaret Hinxman of the Sunday Telegraph fretting about “the morality of filming a fake situation (however possible or imminent) not as realistic fiction but as instant newsreel documentary,” and downright disgust from the Edinburgh Evening News: “Watkins, carried away hopelessly by his own bigotry, will find this film, like his others, kept from the public’s gaze in most countries, including the States and Britain, and this is a bit of repression I am for. It shouldn’t be allowed to encourage impressionable adolescents – who are convinced they are God’s gift to an ailing society.”

The unifying reaction to Punishment Park was righteous indignation. When Watkins showed the film to various groups including college students and United States marshals, he noted the same extreme reactions shown in the film. As Joseph Gomez notes: “Various claims are then made that Watkins is uninformed or unfair, and the film’s depiction of political and social repression is conveniently dismissed as simplistic, untrue, and dangerously manipulative.” Punishment Park is nothing of the sort; Watkins’ own agenda mirrors that of the young detainee asked about his poetry – “it’s not committed to the revolution; it’s committed to sanity.” While the film is inarguably a provocation, it eschews the polemic of Privilege and demands an audience interrogate their reaction, just as its realist-expressionist aesthetic ultimately precludes it from widespread appreciation. Watkins himself compared it to Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), in which the style allowed for some breathing space: “A film like Punishment Park, I think, by nature of the earthiness or crudeness or the roughness of the directness in which it was made, circumvents that first [aesthetic] level completely: you just can’t handle it, and thus you are only forced to deal with it on the second level – which is why it’s so unpopular, often.”

After his American trip, Watkins would return to Europe to start work on his other masterpiece, a biopic about Edvard Munch. He would continue to struggle against the restrictions of various studios and broadcasters, before his (to date) final work, the epic historical drama La Commune (2000), which eventually brought him the universal acclaim he so richly deserved, even if it remains quite difficult to see. In 2004, he published Media Crisis, a treatise on the monoform and media hegemony, which naturally never had an English language release. While The War Game and Culloden have a solid BFI release, Punishment Park is slightly harder to get hold of – the Eureka! Masters of Cinema dual format is now out of print – but as usual, I’m sure some bright spark has uploaded it to YouTube. Now eighty-nine, Watkins appears to have retired,⁷ but his ideas remain as vitally relevant as ever. His most vociferous critics may call him paranoid and simplistic; anyone with a hint of media literacy knows better - that Peter Watkins remains one of the most important filmmakers of the 20^th century.

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Next Up: “Get a Lift!”

1. Watkins stated that the deal collapsed for these films, but there’s little information around why. I can only assume that someone didn’t understand how uncompromising he is, and how potentially inflammatory his take on American warfare would be. That said, I’d still love to see all three of the proposed films - Culloden is magnificent.

2. They are described in the film (by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Law and Order, no less) as “a necessary training for the law officers and National Guard of the country in control of these elements which seek the violent overthrow of the United States Government and the means of providing a punitive deterrent for said subversive elements.”

3. Of all the characters in Punishment Park, the union steward is the one that made me - a former union rep myself - incandescent with rage. Don’t get me wrong, Officer Edwards is a blue-ribbon piece of shit, but Paul Reynolds (Paul Rosenstein) represents a particularly aggravating type: the ultraconservative workingman whose desire for social mobility ultimately aligns him with the establishment against the people he’s supposed to represent.

4. It’s a dark irony that he pioneered a form that he would later berate, but his technique here is unimpeachable. We should think ourselves lucky that Watkins didn’t turn to the dark side.

5. Watkins gets most of the credit for Punishment Park, but he’s careful to recognise the contribution of Churchill, who had previously toted a camera for the Maysles Brothers on Gimme Shelter (1970) and who would go on to work closely with (and marry) Nick Broomfield, not to mention handling the camera on a couple of episodes of The Larry Sanders Show.

6. An obligatory fact, mentioned at the end of the film: Stan Armstead, who plays Charles Robbins, was indicted shortly after the shoot on a charge of conspiracy to bomb and assault on a police officer and received a three-year prison sentence. This may seem exploitative to some; to others, it’s confirmation of the realistic casting.

7. And I wish him a very happy one. Few filmmakers have worked so hard and so well for such little reward.