Part of Midnight Movies
1970. The war in Vietnam is escalating. President Nixon has decided on a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia. There is massive public protest in the United States and elsewhere. Nixon declares a state of national emergency and activates the 1950 Internal Security Act (the McCarran Act) — which authorizes Federal authorities, without reference to Congress, to detain persons judged to be “a risk to internal security.”
In a desert zone in southwestern California, not far from the tents where a civilian tribunal are passing sentence on Group 638, Group 637 (mostly university students) find themselves in the Bear Mountain National Punishment Park — and discover the rules of the ‘game’ they are forced to undergo as part of the alternative they have chosen in lieu of confinement in a penitentiary. Group 637 has been promised liberty if they evade pursuing law enforcement officers and reach the American flag posted 53 miles away across the mountains, within three days. Meanwhile, in the tribunal tent, Group 638 — assumed guilty before tried — endeavors in vain to argue their case for resisting the war in Vietnam. While they argue, amidst harassment by the members of the tribunal, the exhausted Group 637 — dehydrated by exposure to temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit — have voted to split into three subgroups: those for a forced escape out of the Park, those who have given up, and those who are determined to reach the flag.
Controversial and inventive British director Peter Watkins casts an unflinching eye on an American dystopia in the making in this harrowing and disturbingly prescient response to authoritarian crackdowns on protesters and the counterculture. For a lighter and more optimistic treatise on discipline and punishment, don’t miss the heartwarming PADDINGTON 2.
“Satire of the most intimately powerful sort.” —Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian “Shot during the post-Kent State "law and order" election of 1970, PUNISHMENT PARK can seem so outrageous as to verge on camp, but few other movies capture so painfully the rhetoric and desperation of the times.” —J. Hoberman, Village Voice “PUNISHMENT PARK remains a breath of chilling fresh air. Looking back on history reminds us of the differences and similarities between then and now, and Watkins serves up a time capsule from 1971 that, in a historical context, shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same… an extreme, incendiary allegory stirring up deeper truths.” —Jeremiah Kipp, Slant
