The Cinematheque

Punishment Park is the only project British filmmaker Peter Watkins made in the United States. It is a pseudo-documentary that imagines President Richard Nixon employing an actual state of emergency bill (the McCarran Internal Security Act, 1950) to extrajudicially interrogate and detain dissidents. Detained hippies, activists, and conscientious objectors are given the choice of prolonged sentences in overcrowded prisons, or three days in ​“Punishment Park,” a desert survival course doubling as a training ground for the National Guard. Building on the faux verité methods Watkins previously developed in 1964’s Culloden (a reenactment of the 1746 battle) and 1965’s The War Game (an alternate history of a nuclear attack on the UK that was banned after initial screenings), Punishment Park borrows from the forms and semantics of television and the nascent embedded war-reporting forms associated with the Vietnam War, and was effectively banned in the US for decades. Working with non-actors who are ideologically aligned with the characters they depict, the film walks a tightrope between fiction and reality, and is exemplary of Watkins’s situational filmmaking. —Althea Thauberger

Punishment Park will be introduced by artist Althea Thauberger.