The Director's Statement on Punishment Park
Editor's Note: The following excerpt is drawn from a 2005 self-interview by Peter Watkins on Punishment Park. In his introduction, Watkins reflects on how his long-standing critique of the media has led to decades of marginalisation by the mass media. He notes that his critical thoughts about politics and media are often omitted in coverage of his work, leaving only discussions of production matters. In response, Watkins has chosen not to take any interviews in any form and instead to articulate his ideas through self-prepared written responses to frequently asked questions.
Watkins also sets out clear principles for the use of this text in this article. Non-profit educational and academic use is agreed, provided the original meaning is preserved and properly credited. For media use, he emphasises that excerpts should not be taken out of context, should retain as much completeness as possible, and must not distort or omit his critical views on media and politics.
In accordance with these principles, the following passages focus on the political and social context of the United States at the time. Some sections have been lightly edited for clarity, with the aim of providing viewers with a framework for understanding the film.
The background to making Punishment Park
In the summer of 1969, I moved with my family to the United States, where I had been engaged to produce a trilogy on the American War of Independence, the American Civil War, and the Wars of Colonialisation against the Native Americans. These films were to be financed by an educational subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, and were intended to be films along the lines of my 1964 BBC documentary, Culloden, for educational use and possibly also for TV screening.
This was a very difficult time in America's history. President Johnson, a Democrat, was escalating the war in Vietnam. In 1968 the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army launched their massive Tet Offensive. There were 542,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. At home, the universities were in an uproar and the peace movement was growing rapidly. The militant branch of the Hippie movement, the Yippies, under the leadership of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others, were preparing to contest President Johnson's bid for re-election by having Pigasus, a pig, nominated for President. At the same time, African Americans were demanding their rights, and the militant Black Panther Party was formed.
In March 1968, U.S. troops massacred over 300 unarmed men, women and children in the village of My Lai in Vietnam. A month later Martin Luther King was assassinated. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Then came the critical Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago. In this period, Chicago was ruled like a medieval fiefdom by its reactionary mayor, Richard Daley, who was determined to prevent any manifestations of anti-war protest in his city; he brought in 12,000 police officers, 7,500 U.S. troops and 6,000 National Guardsmen (a larger force, it is said, than the one led by General George Washington). As the Democratic Convention opened, a 17-year-old Sioux Indian from South Dakota was shot on the street by the police. The following day, seven Yippies and Pigasus the pig were arrested. During that week, 308 Americans were killed in Vietnam, and over a thousand were wounded. Outside the Convention Centre, demonstrations against the war were savagely attacked by the police, who clubbed, kicked, maced and beat unconscious anyone in sight, including local residents. At a press conference, Mayor Daley stated: 'The policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.'
Eight activists, including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and Black Panther member Bobby Seale, were indicted for conspiring to cross state lines with intent to incite violence.
In November 1968, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States.
On 24 September 1969, the Chicago conspiracy trial opened, with Judge Julius Hoffman presiding. The defendants constantly ridiculed the court proceedings. In November, Judge Hoffman ordered Bobby Seale to be gagged and bound in the courtroom. The trial of Bobby Seale was separated from the main trial, which became known as the Trial of the Chicago Seven.
On 4 December, in an early morning raid, Chicago police fired nearly 100 rounds into a west side apartment. Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Party member Mark Clark were killed.
In the meantime, my educational film project was collapsing. In the winter of 1969, I spent several months completing the script of a long documentary on the Civil War battle of Antietam, The State of the Union, knowing already that the film would not be made.
By the spring of 1970, my family and I were preparing to leave the U.S. Then President Nixon launched his 'secret' bombing campaign on Cambodia, and the protests grew even stronger. On 4 May 1970, four white students were killed, and nine others were wounded at Kent State University in Ohio, when a contingent of the Ohio State National Guard opened fire during a noontime demonstration...
The shootings at Kent State were certainly the turning point for my decision to stay in America and to try to make an independent film on what was happening there. At first, my idea was to make a dramatised reconstruction of the Chicago trial of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale and the other activists.
So we all moved to Los Angeles. But as soon as I began to meet people in the process of casting the film — a number of whom had already been arrested for protesting the Vietnam War — it quickly became obvious that their stories and experiences were even more vivid and relevant than a verbatim filming of the Chicago trial.
On the idea of punishment parks
During this time I came across the anti-Communist 'McCarran Act', or the '1950 Internal Security Act', as it was also known. This draconian U.S. legislation provided for the setting up of places of detention (in effect concentration camps) for those accused by the government of subversion, or even of considering subversion.
From this nightmarish piece of legislation I devised the idea of 'punishment parks' being set up by the U.S. government as a way of dealing with increased dissidence, overcrowded prisons, and the need to provide field training for law enforcement officers faced with having to put down growing public protest against the Vietnam War. This device gave me both a metaphor for the repression and polarisation which I saw happening in the United States at that time, and also a framework — a sort of psychodrama — within which the proponents could express themselves.
The cast were as amazing as the crew. With a few exceptions, none of them had ever acted before. In the film you have two categories of 'performance': those who were expressing their own opinions, and those who opposed their own personal convictions — who were role playing, if you like. The activists — whether in the desert or in the tent — were all portrayed by young people living in or around Los Angeles.
On how Punishment Park challenges the notion of 'documentary fact'
The film has an ambiguous narrator (me), who takes a variety of shifting positions which confront the role of the God-like narrator used in the news and in so-called informational films. Likewise, the film crew, which on the one hand fulfils the typical professional mandate to be 'objective' (by not helping the activists in the desert by offering them water and so on), but at the same time challenges the law officers at the end of the film in a highly subjective reaction to what is happening. In addition, of course, those of us making the film have yet another role — that of producing a film which challenges the traditional function of the mass audiovisual media.
If the audience is prepared, or ready, to consider such devices, they have to ask themselves: 'Just a minute, what is going on here?' And it is here that the first doubts about the inviolability of the seeming 'fact' emerging on the screen appear.
In a society where genuinely critical media education was allowed to flourish, the public would be more than ready to raise such questions. The audiovisual media would have much less of a hold on us, and a film such as Punishment Park would be seen for what it is — a complex, critical social metaphor. But we don't have such a society at present. Instead, much of media education has become highly complicitous over the past twenty years in disseminating the popular TV culture and commercial cinema, and in marginalising nearly all alternative and critical thinking about the role of the audiovisual media.
On being manipulative
All audiovisual acts, to one extent or another, are manipulative. The key question is the audience's awareness of how and why this is happening. As I stated earlier, in a society where critical thinking towards the mass media was not only tolerated but encouraged in the education system, it would be unlikely that Punishment Park would be seen as 'the truth'. The film is working with that problematic. We have to try to remove the arbitrary distinctions in the roles allocated to audiovisual 'fact' and 'fiction', 'reality' and 'metaphor', 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity'.
For example, if a filmic metaphor is used to depict a social injustice, then what is more 'real' to the people who are suffering that injustice — the contrived images given by the status quo mass media which ignore said problem, or an equally contrived filmic metaphor which draws attention to the injustice which those people are experiencing?
Punishment Park raises all these questions and many more. What remains most important about Punishment Park, in my own opinion, is that the film allows young people the possibility to express themselves freely and forcefully within the framework of an important social metaphor. I have no doubt that it is for these reasons that Punishment Park has been withheld for so long, especially on TV, and not only in the United States. Television remains very afraid of the public voice. The force of the young people in Punishment Park, who openly challenge the corruption and brutality of the existing system in which we still live, combined with the film's implicit critique of TV's self-assumed role to use its images to convey 'the truth', have undoubtedly led to the thirty-year marginalisation of this film.
