FILM REVIEW WATKINS: PARK DESPAIR

Watkins' new film 'Punishment Park' makes one central point: any struggle against capitalism is hopeless and destined to inevitable failure. The whole situation is futile and one of despair and more despair.

In the end, the forces of order must win out. They are all-powerful. They have the fire power, the communications media, the politicians, the middle-class, the journalists etc. etc., to ›ack them up. Opposition will b nutied out in a brutal fashion Ahead lie • days of darkness, Watkins first became known to the public as a film maker in 1965 when the BBC, for whom he was working, banned any showing of his 'War Game'. The BBC claimed the film was too horrific in its dealing with the ravages of nuclear war and anyone watching it would be frightened to death.

More than that, however, the authorities objected to the political points Watkins showed, for example, how the good old British bobby turned ION Lassassin as he executed civilians during the pandemonium that followed the dropping bomb.

The film eventually got shown., though not on the BBC. 'War Game' was based on the nightmare of all-out nuclear war. The masses became pawns as the big powers move 1 towards a showdown.

Permeating the film was the sense of inevitability about the process. War was on the way and' the people would pay the price, as usual. • That was seven years ago and was one of Watkins' first major attempts to deal with serious political questions.

But 1972 seems to leave him where he was in his own political development when you look at 'Punishment Park'. . In those seven years he has made no real development in his own political outlook. The message is the same: futility, despair, inevitability of defeat.

President Nixon has declared a state of national emergency using his powers under an Act of 1950. Detention centres are introduced and police are given wide powers to apprehend anyone who, it is considered, will probal ly sabotage national 'Punishment Park' is an area of California set aside for the police and the national guard to train themselves in urban counter-insurgency. Those arrested under the repression are brought there for 'trial' by tribunal.

Those caught in the web consist of different elements from the US peace and protest movement-Black Panthers, pacifists, protest singers, students, Women's Lib and so on.

Of course they have no chance. The tribunal is made up of an American woman representing the silent majority, an FBI agent, manufacturing executive a journalist, a sociologist, and a southern Senator. The final member of the tribunal we shall come back to shortly.

In the fashion of the Chicago conspiracy trial, the defendants are at various times denied the right to speak, gagged and finally removed from court. The defence lawyer talks to the wall. The verdict: either long prison sentences or 'Punishment Park' for three days: all choose the latter.

Fifty miles away, across the desert is an American flag. If you can reach that without being stopped by security forces you are a free man. Of course, no one actually makes it. They are either gunned down or arrested. The whole thing was a game for the police and troops —one they always win.

The film closes with another set of defendants choosing, without knowing the consequences, 'Punishment Park' to prison.

The content of Watkins' new film is shallow and turgid. The declaration of a national state of emergency with sweeping powers of arrest, detention centres and eventual execution would not happen simply response to the development of a big protest movement among the middle class.

As the American bourgeoisie showed at Kent State university and in Chicago, they can deal adequately with an ill-organized section of society which has no real power. situation in which the bourgeoisie develops the apparatus of an open police state could only arise when the major forces in society, the working class and the bourgeoisie, are moving towards a major conflict But Watkins considers everything from the point of view of what is happening now. Taking impressions and glimpses of the situation you can only 'see authority, the state and its all-powerful machinery.

At no time can the working class be ascribed an independent role. In fact Watkins goes so far as to include them as villains to the piece. That is why, returning once more to the tribunal, we find its final member to be a shop steward from the local car factory.

That is not to say you couldn't find such workers. But Watkins strives in the film to make him enterely representative, in nxea, all-time way, of the US working class.

The situation leaves the worker untouched when precisely the opposite process is taking, place in America today. The crisis of US imperialism has come home from Vietnam. The dollar is devalued and Nixon has opened up a policy of trade war coupled wage-cutting, more unemThat is why we find yesterday's New York 'hardhat' construction workers suddenly turning on Mayor Lindsay in violent demonstrations demanding the right to work and a full programme of public expenditure in the city.

Even Watkins' direction cannot save the film. We learn about what is going on through the voice of a TV commentator who is with a crew making a documentary of 'Punishment Park'.

But because there is no development within the film, save for some pacifists who say it probably means violence will have to be used, the cutting from one scene to another, the background of radio news about the bombing of N Vietnam, the direction become meaningless.

In the end it drags. The old arguments are repeated over and over again in front of the tribunal. No amount of cutting can prevent that.

Watkins told a reporter other day that he felt hir iself and his films being crushed. Unless he makes a • decisive b reak from his subjectivism and pessimism he will undoubtedly fall victim to such a fate..