Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park was at its time a deeply divisive, urgent work of speculative fiction, set in an alternate timeline in which the 1950 McCarran Act has been invoked to quell the civil unrest of the late-1960s. It is a dystopian vision of Nixon’s America that eerily mirrors our current political moment, replete with made-for-TV tribunals, alliterative detention camps, invocation of obscure presidential powers, and National Guardsmen rounding up dissidents and others deemed to be “a risk to internal security.”
To avoid outrageously long prison sentences, those detained by federal forces can elect to play a grueling game of capture-the-flag across fifty-three miles of California desert in Punishment Park. If participants can avoid apprehension and make it to the American flag within three days, they will be set free—at least according to the rules of the game.
Of the many speculative left turns the film makes to arrive at its gruesome conclusion, perhaps the least believable today is the idea that the US government would allow the BBC documentary crew access to the camp at all. Screening from Watkins’ personal 35mm print. (Peter Watkins, USA, 1971, 91 minutes, 35mm)
Presented as part of the Year of Games. This event is free and open to the public. Doors open thirty minutes prior to the screening.
- The University of Chicago Film Studies Center