Punishment Park

I recall a friend telling me about this film within the last couple years - he had seen it somewhere and thought that the film was, in fact, "real". I remember thinking "Wow, that's incredible, I can't believe the kind of sh*t that happends in this country that you never hear about - it's unbelievable what our government can get away with". It's a relief to learn that this film is not, in fact, "real" - though there is so much in the film that feels authentic, and so much political turbulence in the contex/era in which it was made, I find it easy to stand behind my original reaction.
Watkins has a true gift for making comletely compelling, well-crafted, and important films out of seemingly little more than a moral imperative. Watkins is staunchly and unwaveringly ant-violence and anti-war and believeds it is his (and everyone's) responsiblity to promote world peace; for this film, he turned his eye to the U.S. While the fictional part of the film is "about" a federal tribunal that questions American radicals, rebels, and draft-dodgers and documents their choice to attempt to survive punishment park rather than serve a prison sentence, it functions on an allegorical level as well. Watkins cast non-actors in the film, choosing people with leftist values, political activists, "hippies" etc. to play the roles of "radicals" in the film, and chose people who were or had been police officers or were in the military or government to play the roles of officers and the federal tribunal. Some of the characters were based on members of the Chicago Seven, some of the non-improvised lines of the police officers were mimicking lines that various journalists had quoted from police officers in high-profile riots across the county, and the blatant abusive nature of the police in the film is reminiscent of actions of officers at the Kent State protests and in the 1968 democratic convention. Much of the dialogue and action were improvised - so people were largely "playing" themselves and the tension in the film was very real, and as good as any a gauge or record of the tension between, and among, these groups at the time - and even today. So, while the film serves as a specific allegory for the Nixon-era U.S. political climate and the atrocities of Vietnam, there is a larger allegory at work too. That is, abuse of power, the irrationality of violence, the plight of the political minority in the realm of an abusive and violent majority, the silencing and criminilization of dissent, and the struggle for true freedom - sound familiar, doesn't it?