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'15' � Suitable only for 15 years and over.

Punishment Park

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Price:	£14.93	Buy Now Rent
RRP:	£19.79You Save: £4.86	Buy Now Rent

Format:	DVD

Starring:	Patrick Boland \| Kent Foreman

Director:	Peter Watkins

Series:	Masters Of Cinema Series, The

Screen:	Aspect Ratio 1.33:1

Languages:	English

Subtitles:	English for the deaf and hard of hearing

No. of Disks:	1

Region:	Region 0

Release Date:	03 October 2005

Availability:	Usually dispatched within 3 days

Both controversial and relentless in its depiction of suppression and brutality. Punishment Park was heavily attacked by the mainstream press and permitted only the barest of releases in 1971. However, like Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969) and Robert Kramer's Ice (1969). Peter Watkins' film has established itself as one of the key, yet rarely seen, radical films of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Giving voice to the disaffected youth of America that had lived through the campus riots at Berkeley, the trial of the Chicago Seven, and who were witnessing the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Set in a detention camp in an American of the near-future, Punishment Park's pseudo-documentary style (continuing Watkins' subversive innovations with Culloden and The War Game) places a British film crew amongst a group of young students and minor dissidents who have opted to spend three days in 'Bear Mountain Punishment Park'. The detainees, rather than accept lengthy jail sentences for their 'crimes', gamble their freedom on an attempt to reach an American flag - on foot and without water - through the searing heat of the desert. What follows is a lethal, one-sided game of cat-and-mouse with a squad of heavily armed police and National Guardsmen.

Unlike Easy Rider's mythologising of American counter-culture, Punishment Park's uncompromising stance, and its uneasy parallels with Guatanemo Bay, retain a powerful and prescient message in the post-9/11 present. Replete with an equally radical score by jazz drummer Paul Motian, the Masters of Cinema Series is proud to celebrate Punishment Park's 35th anniversary with its first British release on home video.

Special Features

30-minute video introduction by Peter Watkins
Full-length audio commentary by Dr. Joseph A. Gomez (author of the 1979 book Pet
32-page booklet: with an essay by Joseph Gomez, the original press kit, and a n