Every man a critic......

I have recently had the joy of being introduced to the films of Peter Watkins, a British renegade of the highest order. His films are stark and confronting affairs about power, its exercise and its victims. The most notable of his works are "La Commune" (a mammoth recreation of the Paris Commune of 1871 as if covered by 24 hour news cycle) and "Edvard Munch" (touted by many as the greatest film ever made about an artist.)

I recently saw Punishment Park (in the rather safe surrounds of my cousins flat in Thessaloniki) which I can liken to firm punch in the stomach. Set in a time of perpetual and indefinite crisis, the Internal Subversion Act of 1950 is being used to bring dissidents and counter-culturalists before special tribunals. Upon sentencing, defendants are offered the choice of a jail sentence or time in Punishment Park (a stretch of desert where prisoners are asked to walk a huge distance to reach an American flag and avoid police and National Guardsmen.) We follow two groups of defendants: one facing the tribunal and the other being sent into Punishment Park.

The tribunal and police engage in a violence that is at first steeped in procedure. But it is clear that this is a procedure heavily rigged against the dissidents. During the first moments of the trial, we are shown the defence lawyer trying to pass motions on points of law only to be instantly denied by the head of the tribunal. Despite this bias, tribunal members seem unwilling to address issues of guilt or innocence... that has seemingly been decided. Instead they use the proceedings to vent the resentments of their class/proffession/statuses against the handcuffed and shackled dissidents brought before them. There is the Senator who cant understand black militant rage when many black people own colour tvs. The union shop steward whose patriotism and faith in "upward mobility" precludes him from finding common cause with people who probably have more in common with him than the other panel members (and who probably would have marched side by side a generation or two earlier.) The housewife/moral activist denouncing the immorality of love ins and revolutionaries.

This depiction of power and its procedures as farce mirrors the way the impartiality of the film crew is treated. The premise of the film is that a European camera crew is filming the events to show on television. In the beginning, the narrator (Watkins himself) maintains a objective distance from the events being filmed, reading out the desert temperature and distance travelled by the dissidents in Punishment Park. As police chase and capture the dissidents, the film crew maintain this distance from events. Over time, this objectivity is eroded.
A group of dissidents take one of the crew hostage before the dissidents are both killed, the crews status as pure observers is ended. The other dissidents, thirsty and desperate, attack police lines with rocks and whatever they can find and police open fire. The narrators passive voice is replaced by a desperate and passionate tone, accusing the police of cold blooded murder and threatening to use the images against the police. In the face of seemingly intractable social conflict, distance is impossible. There are no spectators.