Avis des critiques

The actual method by which Punishment Park was made is far more compelling than the premise... Shot during the post–Kent State “law and order” election of 1970, Punishment Park can seem so outrageous as to verge on camp, but few other movies capture so painfully the rhetoric and desperation of the times.

Finding it increasingly difficult to get financial backing, Watkins worked on a shoestring to make his one and only film in the US. Punishment Park (1971) is a hysteria-filled protest against American imperialism... Punishment Park is the work of a director so marginalized, so beleaguered by criticism, you almost wonder if he’s deliberately trying to scare off the backers.

It would be a stretch to say that Watkins is in any way even-handed - his is a bitter and a furious film of denunciation... And yet the film does allow for some ambiguity.

Peter Watkins’ 1971 docudrama boasts an intriguing and provocative idea, but is eventually undermined by its earnest execution... Still, while the dramatic tone has dated badly, the policy issues raised remain chillingly relevant.

The discomforting notion that American society has caught up with Watkins’s dystopic vision is evidenced by the complete turnaround of critical response to Punishment Park. When the film played at the New York Film Festival in 1971, critics responded with irritation and contempt... Nearly thirty-five years later, however, as critics who heaped unqualified praise on the DVD release noted, Watkins’s projections are with us in the form of Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act, the power grab by the executive branch through the War Powers Act, and, of course, Survivor.

There's no winking or distancing irony on display in Punishment Park, which plays its apocalyptic scenario so straight that other countries mistook it for a genuine documentary.

Looking back on history reminds us of the differences and similarities between then and now, and Watkins serves up a time capsule from 1971 that, in a historical context, shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same. It is not a documentary serving up fact... it is an extreme, incendiary allegory stirring up deeper truths.

Punishment Park is an extraordinary film - provocative, incendiary and deeply depressing. Go out of your way to see it and spread the word, while you still can without being arrested.

Every cinematic choice that Watkins makes is a radically political one, his inter-cutting between the ideological debates in the tribunal and the fight for survival in the park serving as the backbone for forming intelligent arguments and allowing the audience a beautiful balance between emotional identification and crude critical analysis.

Like Watkins's classic The War Game, this is satire of the most intimately powerful sort.

A masterpiece of a kind, Punishment Park belongs to that small group of cherishable US indie film polemics from the 1970s, like Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool and Robert Kramer's Ice... Punishment Park is seminal political cinema of the highest order.

Firstly, it’s a prime example of Watkins’ innovative, radical approach to filmmaking... Finally, and more problematically, there’s the question of whether Watkins’ film succeeds as pure, tensely-structured, drama... But this is fascinating, gut-wrenching and thought-provoking filmmaking all the same.