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“Punishment Park” is a pseudo-documentary purporting to be a film crews’s news coverage of the team of soldiers escorting a group of hippies, draft dodgers, and anti-establishment types across the desert in a type of capture the flag game. The soldiers vow not to interfere with the rebels’ progress and merely shepherd them along to their destination. At that point, having obtained their goal, they will be released. The film crew’s coverage is meant to insure that the military’s intentions are honorable. As the representatives of the 60’s counter-culture get nearer to passing this arbitrary test, the soldiers become increasingly hostile, attempting to force the hippies out of their pacifist behavior. A lot of this film appears improvised and in several scenes real tempers seem to flare as some of the “acting” got overaggressive. This is a interesting exercise in situational ethics. The cinéma vérité style, hand-held camera, and ambiguous demands of the director - would the actors be able to maintain their roles given the hazing they were taking - pushed some to the brink. The cast’s emotions are clearly on the surface. Unfortunately this film has gone completely underground and is next to impossible to find. It would offer a captivating document of the distrust that existed between soldiers willfully serving in the military and those persons who opposed the war peacefully.
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Given the current state of affairs in America right now, Punishment Park is in many ways as relevant now as it was five decades ago, if not more so. Taking its starting point as the actual Continuity of Government style laws on the statute books about the rounding up and detention of civilians in the event of a large scale breakdown of the rule of law, the director Peter Watkins imagines a dystopian future where the constitution is suspended and left wing radicals are given what amounts to a show trial with the guilty outcome a simple formality.
After the trial, the punishment is simple: lifetime imprisonment in an internment camp or a gruelling race across the desert as you pit your wits against the national guard who are hell bent on capture by any means necessary.
Along the way, questions about violence versus non-violence are raised along with a look at how a functioning police state would treat its dissidents while maintaining a veneer of law.
Peter Watkins was one of the early developers of what has become to be known as the pseudo-documentary or mockumentary with his 1965 banned for decades UK television film The War Game about the consequences of a nuclear war in Britain which caused uproar when it was broadcast.
Many of Watkins films contain parts which are totally unscripted and are ad-libbed by the actors as well as using non-actors in scenes. Punishment Park is no exception and the ‘court’ scenes in particular use these methods to spellbinding effect.
Given the possibility of civil war in America, no matter how unlikely, films like this are particularly important as they remind us about the consequences of real fascism, which at its heart is about turning people into objects and dehumanising the Other both politically , culturally and ultimately, spiritually.