Punishment Park / Ice
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Reel Politik: Seizing the Means of Projection With Nathan Gelgud. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
In-person: cartoonist and illustrator Nathan Gelgud.
Punishment Park (1971)
Long before reality TV and the current right-wing vogue for alliterative concentration camps (Alligator Alcatraz, et al.), English filmmaker Peter Watkins envisaged the end point of the American right’s demonization of its political enemies in this still disturbing mockumentary. After Nixon declares a national emergency, convicted thought criminals — anti-war activists, conscientious objectors, civil rights leaders — are given a choice: go to prison or take their chances in Punishment Park, an inhospitable desert expanse where, if they can survive three days while being hunted by cops, they can win their freedom. As a European TV crew documents their tribunals and tribulations, a band of leftists struggle across the wasteland rallying around the shared humanity the authorities try to deny them.
35mm, color, 88 min. Director/Peter Watkins. With: Patrick Boland, Carmen Argenziano, Kent Foreman.
Ice (1970)
Of all the films in this series, Robert Kramer’s Ice unfolds with the least sense of irony in its rough-hewn, hand-held depiction of an earnest revolutionary network organizing against a fascist takeover of the American government. Kramer himself was co-founder of the radical New York-based collective Newsreel, which produced documentaries in support of leftist causes that would hopefully, in his words, “explode like a grenade in people’s faces.” Kramer’s experience with the era’s revolutionary underground informs Ice’s realism, from the furtive strategy sessions to internal ideological debates, punctuated by sudden bursts of violence.
DCP, b&w, 128 min. Director/Screenwriter: Robert Kramer. With: Leo Braudy, Robert Kramer, Paul McIsaac.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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