Punishment Park

[Two Lane Blacktop]

I'm astounded that I'd never heard of this 1970 (some sources say 1971) film, nor its director: Punishment Park, by Peter Watkins, is a product of the explosive U.S. political situation of the Vietnam War era,  but it's also a scarily prescient fable about the present day.

The film takes the form of a documentary from a time "in the near future," where political dissidents are arrested by order of the president. They are given a choice of sentences: a lengthy prison term, or a three-day stay in Bear Mountain National Punishment Park, a stretch of desert where, if they can outrun the well-armed cops and military figures who chase them, they'll be allowed to go free.

The film caused such an uproar, and got such vicious reviews, on its initial release that it was withdrawn from theaters in less than a week. Loosely scripted, with lots of improvisation by the director and his cast, the film was shot under extremely uncomfortable conditions (both physical and emotional), leading to what is described as some very intense, hard-to-watch cinema.

Here's a page with a lot of great images from the film.

I just finished watching Punishment Park, and my head feels like I've had a Brillo pad scrubbing it for the last hour and a half.

The short review: Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Longer review: I am absolutely amazed at this movie... the acting (mostly by non-actors) was terrific. The editing was AMAZING, and the sound editing was really awesome as well- a carpet of gunshots, sirens, jet engines, etc. weaves through the whole movie and keeps your nerves jangling. Sometimes its almost hard to hear what the characters are saying for all the gunfire in the background, and the effect is just electric.

There are several amazing quotes from characters in the movie, both good and bad, that sound like they were improvised on the spot. Had this movie ever gotten a proper release in the U.S., I promise you these quotes would be part of the political landscape today.

The movie is only 88 minutes long, and that's good, because the last 25 minutes or so are so gruelling that I had to stop the movie twice just to take a breather. I can't IMAGINE what it would have been like to see this in a theater... no wonder the reviews back in '71 were so explosive. This is the kind of movie that could cause fistfights in the audience. Just watching it at home alone in the middle of the night, I found myself wanting to throw things at the TV, to make some of these heinous characters just SHUT UP. Ugh.

To the film's credit, though, there is some complexity in the characters... a few of the prisoners (the "good guys") come across as kinda shallow and confused, while there are a couple of the members of the tribunal (the "bad guys") who are genuinely sympathetic. I liked that the movie doesn't try to portray people as good or bad, only as right or wrong... the "bad" ones are mostly shown as misguided, but wow, are they misguided.

The fake-documentary style of the movie is absolutely flawless, BTW. My partner wandered through the living room on his way to bed while I was watching the movie, and stopped to watch it for about 15 minutes before asking, "What the hell IS this??" He thought it was something on TV, and was shocked to find out A) how old it is, and B) that it was fiction.

2LB