A film by Peter Watkins

Punishment Park was, still is, criticised, held in contempt and derided for being 'hysterical', 'unrealistic' - "So, did any of that actually happen?" My God, I usually use 'righteous' as an insult, for those smugly confirmed in their own cause and enjoying the feeling it gives them, but this film is righteous like a prophet, its compassionate scream too piercing to be heard. Let's face it, most people identify with the 'tribunal'. Or no, but... To call this film 'hysterical' replicates exactly the charges made by members of the 'tribunal' against the young people before them. By polarising audiences so completely, Punishment Park draws out the same tensions among the viewing public that it portrays - when criticism of it is so vehement, how laughable to accuse this film of naive exageration and political crudity. The American flag flies at the beginning of the film reversed, as in a mirror. Why should righteous truth be sugar-coated every damn time for the idle consumer? The truth remains the truth, especially if it is the artistic truth, and it is not up some elitist mountain, but right there before us. Here's a stupid title for a book: Everything you know is wrong. And here's another one: You are being lied to. Goddamned commodified rebellion! The answer - as Punishment Park shouts over and over again while finding itself (to its visible distress and anger) almost completely inaudible - is, if you want to cut through the crap, look around you! - it's here, not somewhere hypothetical! And if anyone's telling lies around here, it's us telling lies to ourselves.

Punishment Park lasted four days on its release in the United States, before the distributors withdrew it. "Lack of customer interest". Too right! What self-respecting customer would want to sit through that for 88 minutes, and get harried, and mauled, and upset? Well, in Brighton, England, at any rate, it played for one 6 o'clock showing on one screen on one day; it raised its pitiful, sincere head, to the indifference which is the lot of every prophet. Who could blame Peter Watkins, the director, with all his immense technical fluency and facility, from giving up at this point, and starting to sweet-talk his audience? He never has. Because the audience never deserve to be sweet-talked, ever, by anything that aspires to be Art, not because the audience are unworthy of Art, but because real Art tries to convey the truth more than it thirsts for the next round of applause. "If Christ was on the earth today, people wouldn't even crucify him. They'd invite him to dinner-parties and laugh at him". I can't remember who wrote that.

But it's not apt. How sweet, how secure our lives are, if Punishment Park can be accused of 'hysteria', when young men are deported to Guantanamo Bay with less cause than brought the young people in this film before a fictional tribunal, and when the forces of liberation in Iraq have shown even less regard for the lives of their charges than that shown by some 'caricature' goons in a film.

Punishment Park is a bright flame of creative truth. I just wanted to say that.