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 - we presuppose in the film - activates the 1. Internal Security Act (the Mc. Carran Act), which authorizes Federal authorities, without reference to Congress, to detain persons judged to be “a risk to internal security”. Punishment Park 1971 Filmi . Other movies by Peter Watkins: Edvard Munch (1976). Director; Writer Punishment Park (1971). Documentarist; Director; Editing; Writer. In 'Punishment Park,' Watkins also plays the unseen director of a film crew. In a desert zone in southwestern California, not far from the tents where a civilian tribunal are passing sentence on Group 6. Group 6. 37 (mostly university students) find themselves in the Bear Mountain National Punishment Park, and discover the rules of the . Group 6. 37 have been promised liberty if they evade pursuing law enforcement officers and reach the American flag posted 5. Meanwhile, in the tribunal tent, Group 6. Vietnam. While they argue, amidst harassment by the members of the tribunal, the exhausted Group 6. 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 .. Punishment Park (1971) First published by EyeforFilm. Note: this was published in 2005, during the depths of the Bush era. After becoming bogged down in a foreign. Punishment Park Viooz Viooz Score: 6.4 / 10 from 14 votes Release Date: 1971-05-09 Status: Released Run time: 88 min / 1:28 Production Studio : Chartwell. Rent Punishment Park (1971) and other Movies & TV Shows on Blu-ray & DVD. Is Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Crackle, iTunes, etc. Find where to watch movies online now! Filming . The cast, as usual, was a mix of mainly non- professional and young professional actors, mostly from Los Angeles and environs. The members of the tribunal were all portrayed by citizens of Los Angeles - a trade union officer, a dentist, a housewife .. Producer - Susan Martin; principal camera operator - Joan Churchill; sound recordist - Mike Moore; set director - David Hancock; editors - Peter Watkins and Terry Hodel; percussion music by Paul Motian. Reaction. After a screening at the Cannes Film Festival, May 1. French critic for the American journal The Village Voice : . The considerable gut reactions Watkins’ films provoke may partially explain the extent to which they are despised and ignored .. But if the hopelessness of Watkins’ vision increases with each film, his technical brilliance has been sharpening to contain this rage, and the distance he has traveled since . Because all literature, including futuristic nonsense like this, represents someone’s wish- fulfilling dream, I can’t help but suspect that Watkins’ cautionary fable is really a wildly sincere desire to find his own ultimate punishment.’. Utilizing non- professional actors, only one camera, and an almost totally improvised script, he’s come up with one of the finest films about dissension in America that’s been made in a long time. It’s not perfect, though. The characters have a nasty habit of becoming caricatures of people we know. Shadows of Judge Julius Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Pat Nixon, Spiro (Agnew), Dick Gregory - all can be found in the film.’ (Rolling Stone - which voted . The British director .. His achievement, of course, is in making a 9. New York Magazine). Many critics dismiss him as a paranoid, which is rather irresponsible; a glance at any newspaper is enough to make anyone paranoid, and Watkins may in fact be our greatest realist. It is not his perception of dangers but his way of presenting them that is objectionable .. His films work as hysterical exploitation instead of serious exploration .. Interestingly, this critic goes on to end his review thus: .. Among many terrifying confrontations, I remember especially the one between a 1. During their moment of intense anger, as they shout at each across the room, the film expresses exactly what is happening in this country.’ (The Village Voice). It is unquestionably a polemic but I’m not at all sure that it is loaded .. Through the sounds .. Watkins has created a profoundly disturbing motion picture.’ (San Francisco Chronicle). Seldom has the cause of peace and freedom been served so mindlessly.’ (Playboy). It is the pornography of hate .. I wonder how much violence and bad fucking the screening generated that night .. As such, it becomes part of the problem.’ (The Staff)Aftermath: USA. It remains unclear whether the cinema owner (or the distributor) was affected by the hostile critics, or whether the Federal authorities issued threats. A representative of a main Hollywood studio which could have released . And so they haven’t. Aftermath: Britain. Reviews after . He is a real film- maker. I just think he ought to keep a cooler head, that’s all.’ (The Sunday Times). Its faults are exactly those which Watkins, in an open letter to the Press, denies. It is hysterical and obsessed, but faced with the way things are going, it would be odd, given his concerned and committed temperament, if it were not.’ (The Observer). What is so good here is that the filmmakers are strongly against the tribunal, but its characters are not caricatured .. In short, as I say, hypnotically gripping. Not even the most disapproving Establishment people could fail to find it so.’ (Punch). A few years ago we might have dismissed the film as the figment of a crazed imagination. Today its documentary overtones are all too horribly real.’ (Daily Mail). Propagandist Peter Watkins is left hopelessly adrift in his own hopeless mind.’ (The Sun). Watkins is a clever filmmaker. The events he describes are more than likely within our lifetime. But he is his own worst enemy. There is a hysterical stridency of tone that somehow, bafflingly, destroys all conviction.’ (The Listener). Directed by Peter Watkins, a man of great talent who is exhausting himself by continually imagining there exists a Media Mafia which is out to spite him and suppress his films, it exemplifies how the artist’s own sense of persecution sometimes rubs off fatally on his subject .. The film ends with the voice of the camera director .. I welcome unreservedly Peter Watkins’ bold and imaginative determination to present the most burning and far- reaching issues of today in dynamic screen form. It’s timely to remind those who sneered at his brilliant film . Watkins has discovered in present- day America an extreme situation which can carry on the paranoid, hysterical nature of his vision, where . It will not be; see it now.” (The Scotsman). Which is not to imply that Watkins’ film is itself paranoid - a charge that has been unjustly levelled at most of his work. Peter Watkins is becoming the nearest thing in cinema to Bob Dylan. If Watkins claims that his work is neither of the Left nor of the Right, it is because he is more concerned with the insanity of the games we are playing than with the side we wish to play on.’ (Frendz). It shouldn’t be allowed to encourage impressionable adolescents - who are convinced they are God’s gift to an ailing society.’ (Edinburgh Evening News). It is crucially important for the viability of any kind of filmmaking that has its base outside of mass consensus communications that films like this one survive financially in sufficient numbers to keep the door open for others. And when you look around at the kind of propaganda decorating your local (cinema), you can’t help believe that Watkins’ film can be effective and that it is easily the most subversive film to show for a long time. It is important that we think about it.’(Time Out). Watkins’ brand of documentary fiction seem to be quite the wrong medium for its message: intention, form and content are perpetually at odds with one another, so that - as so frequently happens in television - events and emotions appear to be not real but created and synthetic; which is, of course, what they are, but not, presumably, what they were intended to be .. There can be no doubting Peter Watkins’ energy, skill and sincerity, but because the problems that arise from his television- oriented method are never resolved, the product of his talents looks disturbingly like bread and circuses for the left.’ (BFI Monthly Film Bulletin)Aftermath: France. And I seem to recall that the critics were generally very positive. Here is a brief selection of articles which appeared in the French press on this occasion: 'To find tracks of Peter Watkins in a dictionary or an history of cinema you might as well hire a private detective. His works remain hidden, or forbidden, in most cases. Presumably, the only park that is worth a detour '. And this exploration of rhetorical polarization reveals the contradictions of an America in confrontation '. In 1. 97. 1, it was frightening. Scott Mac. Donald, an American film teacher and historian, who has specialized in documenting the work of major alternative American filmmakers, and has a number of important books to his credit, wrote about . Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park, Larry Gottheim's Horizons, J. Murphy's Print Generation, Anthony Mc. Call's Line Describing a Cone, and other films require new audiences made up of individuals who cannot be satisfied simply to sit quietly, who must develop and activate themselves before any meaningful response to the filmmakers' efforts is possible. I have seen a great many audiences respond to Watkins' Punishment Park, and few films of my acquaintance have provoked such emotional reactions in viewers with such consistency. Made in 1. 97. 0, Punishment Park attempted to dramatize the essential polarities underlying American political and social life which had been revealed by the events of the late sixties. The film takes place in the future in a hypothetical camp for radical political activists where the federal government is attempting to kill two birds with one stone: to eliminate political opposition to governmental policies and to train police and national guardsmen to handle future active resistance to these policies. During the film Watkins develops a complex strategy of intercutting in order to reveal events taking place in a tribunal where one group of radicals is . Throughout the film Watkins is unrelenting in his revelation of the hysterical charges and counter- charges being made in the tribunal (some of them directly inspired by the trial of the Chicago Seven) and of the brutality with which the police track down those in Punishment Park in order to kill them or return them to federal prison.
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