The Most Anarchic Film Ever Made... And They Didn't Need To Ban It

OK, so this one's clearly very political, but stick with it, please. It's a bloody great film. In 1971, Peter Watkins made a film so dangerous that nobody had to censor it. It was cultural kryptonite. Punishment Park played four days in New York, ten in San Francisco, and then vanished for thirty years. Which is a complete travesty. See, there was no government intervention. No public outcry. It wasn't even discussed. It was simply ignored... and it still is, really. In this video I argue that what happened to Punishment Park is the most prophetic thing about it. And it says a lot about our modern media. Watkins didn't just predict the police violence, the show trials, or the current militarisation of domestic politics. He predicted the mechanism that would erase his own film. The mechanism we now live inside. The mechanism that turned Covid into a memory before it was even processed. Because we don't suppress uncomfortable things anymore. We just move on. #PunishmentPark #iranwar #PoliticalCinema #PeterWatkins #FilmEssay #1970sCinema #ForgottenFilms #MoviedromeRedux #FilmAnalysis #VideoEssay #LostFilms #PseudoDocumentary #AmericanCinema #VietnamWar #FilmHistory